Martin Lawrence: ‘All I Wanted Was to Right the Ship’

 

The comedian and actor talks to Dave Itzkoff about returning to television and good health — and letting his daughters in on his past. 

Your new FX series, “Partners,” stars you and Kelsey Grammer as mismatched lawyers working together. Had you ever met him before this project? I first met Kelsey at a Christmas dinner over at Tim Allen’s house. We just met in passing and said hello. I had no idea we would ever work together, because we’re more of an odd couple. I never saw us together. 

Have you found that television has changed since the ’90s, when you were making “Martin”? Well, yeah, the demands are greater now. It’s not as easy to get on TV. Just to get ratings, it’s very hard. The paychecks are not the same anymore. 

Do you think that “Martin” helped create opportunities for other black performers to get shows? Maybe. I don’t know that it’s gotten better. I think we’re in a hole right now, and so whoever is working — black or white or whatever — there are many more people that ain’t working, that just don’t have a job, that are struggling, that are just trying to get their hustle on. 

And even at your level, you’re feeling that? Can’t you just go take your fortune and live in the Hills? I mean, if I had to just live in an apartment and, you know, drive a dune buggy, that would get me by. I don’t have to live in the Hills. 

Given your history — you’ve been hospitalized for exhaustion and dehydration, you were in a three-day coma in 1999 — did FX want a clean bill of health before hiring you? They didn’t require that. They see me in every meeting. I was a standing bill of health. I run on a treadmill. I do weights. I get exercise at least three times a week. I play basketball at least two times a week. 

 When do you find time to make a show? When they call, I’m there. 

In your stand-up comedy film “Runteldat,” you tell a story of being confronted by the police while under the influence of a powerful substance you call “ooh-wee.” Do you ever regret being that candid about your life? No, I don’t. I want my daughters to hear that story. I want every kid in the world to hear that story, so they know they have choices and not to make the same choices that I made. I have no problem with telling the truth. 

There’s a lot of very blunt sex talk in your stand-up as well. Are you comfortable letting your daughters see that too? I let my oldest watch it. I don’t let my two other daughters watch it. My oldest just watched my first stand-up film, “You So Crazy,” the other night. 

What did she think? She loved it. She said: “Daddy, I couldn’t believe it. Wow.” I told her, “I wanted you to see it because you have a boyfriend now, you’re getting ready to start college and these are things that you need to arm yourself for this world.” Daddy tells it like it is: rough and raw. 

Have you made an effort to take it easier in recent years? It was good for me to pull back and just not be so hard on myself and not think the world is out to get me. To grow up from that, it’s like a weight off my shoulder. 

Did you really feel that the world was opposed to you, even when you were that successful? You do, when things don’t go your way, when you see the stress of the world, the hatefulness of the world, the meanness. To see it from that level, I was like, Man, this is not what I thought it was. 

What helped you reach a more positive frame of mind? Going through the coma and getting arrested and things like that. Troubles that I had never gotten in before. That changed my life. All I wanted was to right the ship. But when you’re young growing up, you think you got it all figured out. 

 In “Runteldat,” you say, in effect, that people should ride life until the wheels fall off. Do you still feel that way today? Yes, I do. Live life to its fullest, to its grandest, and ride it until the wheels fall off, man. You only get one. 

Even in spite of everything you’ve been through? I feel that way even more now after what I’ve been through.

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Martin Margiela

ON Monday night at Martin Margiela’s runway show, an event that marked the 20th anniversary of one of the most influential and enigmatic designers on the global fashion stage with a collection based on the highlights of his career, Mr. Margiela, as is his custom, was nowhere to be seen.

An anomaly in an industry that places enormous value on the image and accessibility of its personalities, Mr. Margiela has maintained an astonishing elusiveness. He refuses to grant face-to-face interviews and has rarely been photographed, a provocative stance intended to emphasize two dogmatic principles: first, that Mr. Margiela’s designs, as confounding as they may be, should speak for themselves; and, second, that the work he shows is inherently the product of a collaborative team, not one person. 

Hence, he does not take a bow at his shows, and all correspondence from his atelier here is traditionally written in the plural form with the signature “Maison Martin Margiela.”

This policy has led Mr. Margiela to be called fashion’s invisible man. His influence, perhaps as great as that of any living designer, is less often questioned than is his very existence.

Over the last year, however, the significance of Mr. Margiela as a living, breathing person — albeit ultimately unknowable — has taken on a new dimension. He has told colleagues that he wants to stop designing and that he has begun a search for his successor at the house.

Early this year, Mr. Margiela, 51, approached Raf Simons, another well-regarded Belgian designer who at the time was renegotiating his contract with Jil Sander, proposing that Mr. Simons take over the collection, according to associates of the designers. But nothing came of the conversation, and this fall Mr. Simons agreed to a three-year contract renewal with Jil Sander.

On Monday, Renzo Rosso, the chief executive of Diesel Group, which acquired Margiela’s business in 2002, added to the speculation that Mr. Margiela had not been involved in recent collections when The International Herald Tribune published this quotation from him: “We are very happy with Martin, but for a long time he has a strong team and does not work on the collection, just special projects.”

After the show on Monday, Mr. Rosso would not clarify Mr. Margiela’s role, but said that the company was working with a headhunter to find a designer “to complete our team.” Asked if Mr. Margiela was leaving, he said: “Never say never, but I cannot imagine. I love him.”

Mr. Margiela’s importance was obvious at the anniversary show, which included renditions of his great and witty conceptual designs: coats made of synthetic wigs, bodysuits that fused parts of trench coats and tuxedo jackets, and mirrored tights made to look like disco balls. But his impact is even more obvious on the designers he has influenced, including Marc Jacobs, Alexander McQueen and everyone else who showed pointed shoulders this season. Azzedine Alaïa recently called Mr. Margiela the last individual vision. 

A graduate of Belgium’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts and a former assistant to Jean Paul Gaultier in Paris, Mr. Margiela was among a group of designers from Antwerp who caused a shift in fashion in the late ’80s by tearing apart and reassembling garments at the seams, introducing techniques that would have a lasting impact on everything from streetwear to haute couture. The acceptability of shredded jeans, for example, owes a debt to Mr. Margiela. But he has worked with such anonymity that only dedicated fashion consumers instantly recognize his name.

“Martin’s influence in fashion has been quite vast,” said Kaat Debo, the artistic director of the ModeMuseum, or MoMu, in Antwerp, where a retrospective of Mr. Margiela’s work opened this month. “Often what you see in the mainstream today is something that Martin introduced 20 years ago, and in a shocking way. For example, the showing of unfinished clothes with frayed hems or seams on the outside, which he did years ago, are things today that are seen as quite normal.”

Mr. Margiela’s runway shows have been alternately electrifying or humorous or sexy or just plain weird, as when he introduced a hooflike shoe in 1992 that has since become a Margiela signature. More recently, he presented a pair of $600 sunglasses that look like a censor bar. He has shown coats reconstructed with a sock at the elbow or sleeves protruding from the front and back; jackets with the sleeves turned inside out into capes; and, in 1994, an entire collection based on what Barbie’s wardrobe would look like if it were blown up to life size. (click)