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Susan Sarandon playing ping pong
Susan Sarandon playing ping pong at the club she helped set up in LA's Standard hotel. Photograph: Steve Schofield for the Observer
Susan Sarandon playing ping pong at the club she helped set up in LA's Standard hotel. Photograph: Steve Schofield for the Observer

Susan Sarandon: ping-pong queen

This article is more than 11 years old
Ping-pong tables are popping up on every corner and there is no bigger advocate for the game than Hollywood star and radical Susan Sarandon. Lawrence Donegan faces her across the table
 Watch Ping Pong, a documentary about the sport, on this site

The hardest thing about playing ping pong against Susan Sarandon is playing against Susan Sarandon. It's distracting to look across the table and see your defensive block being swiped at by a Hollywood icon, a woman who by the compartmentalised standards of modern celebrity life has "done it all" – actor, activist, lover, mother, model, feminist, fearless campaigner on behalf of the dispossessed, easy target for America's right-wing bullies.

Alas, Sarandon was marked absent when the gods handed out the gift of hand-eye co-ordination. It would be fair to say she misses as many shots as she hits. In her defence she is wearing a royal-blue trouser suit, high-collared white shirt and studded winklepickers, the kind of outfit Jerry Lee Lewis might have taken to the stage in. She is not dressed for bouncing around in pursuit of a ping-pong ball. But let us not pretend these sartorial constraints mask a potential Olympic champion. "I'm not a competitive person, so I'm not one of those people who gets hooked on something and plays it constantly,'' she says. "So I'm just not very good."

Sarandon laughs as she makes this confession. In fact, she laughs at a lot of things, which rather gives the lie to those who would dismiss her as a leftie sourpuss, the Queen Mother of Hollywood's liberal elite. To be dismissed as po-faced and shrill by misogynists is the fate of many strong, opinionated women in show business (Whoopi Goldberg, Jane Fonda), but in Sarandon's case the caricature is beyond unfair. She wants to change the world. But spend time in her company and it's clear she also wants to have fun.

All of which brings us to the rather startling news that Susan Sarandon is now the most famous ping-pong player in America.

This surreal designation has been bestowed by virtue of her part-ownership in a chain of bars which started with SPiN New York, a  basement joint in midtown Manhattan that opened in 2009. "I was doing Exit the King on Broadway with Geoffrey Rush at the time. I had some movies coming out as well, and I would be doing interviews and at the end of the chat people would ask: 'So what's up next?' I would say: 'Well, we have this ping-pong bar that's going to open.' All of a sudden that's all people wanted to talk about, I guess because it is the most unexpected pairing of a person and a sport."

SPiN has since opened up in Milwaukee, Toronto and Los Angeles. Expansion, even on this modest scale, ranks as an achievement in an austere economic climate, and Sarandon can take a lot of the credit. She is SPiN's pitch person, a breathless, and obviously sincere, proselytiser for one of the sporting world's most frivolous pursuits.

Ask her to explain this late-career diversion and she'll pitch you the movie rights. "Ping pong cuts across all body types and gender – everything, really – because little girls can beat big muscley guys. You don't get hurt; it is not expensive; it is really good for your mind. It is one of the few sports that you can play until you die."

Today she has travelled from her home in New York to Los Angeles – a city for which she has little love – for the opening night of SPiN's newest outpost, at the Standard Hotel in downtown LA. There are meetings to attend and a party to host. There is noise, there is dust. It's a scene. Some people in Hollywood might think all of this is a little beneath an Oscar winner, but then they don't have Sarandon's talent for self-deprecation or sense of perspective. "Is it all ironic, this ping-pong life of mine?" she says. "I wish it was. I love irony."

s sarandon arbitrage
'Hollywood forgave me': with Richard Gere in the forthcoming thriller Arbitrage. Photograph: Myles Aronowitz

Such absence of ego has killed many an acting career, but not Sarandon's. At 66, and 40 years after appearing in her first film, Joe (1970), she has never been busier, with half-a-dozen films either just released, in production or on the cusp of release, including (not coincidentally) Ping-Pong Summer – a Karate Kid with paddles, apparently. She has two films about to be released in the UK: Cloud Atlas and Arbitrage. Meanwhile, every few months she is garlanded with a lifetime achievement award in some corner of the independent film festival world. "It's hard to take any kind of acclaim seriously, because you know there are great woman actors out there who can't get good parts,'' she says, brushing aside the subject of longevity. "I know that I am talented and smart and funny. I have a lot of things going for me, but I'm not that extraordinary. I have no idea how or why I have been allowed to keep doing what I'm doing."

But she's never been busier, right? "I get offered a lot of supporting parts these days, the kind of thing where I'm only away for two or three weeks rather than two or three months – the parts I was offered when my kids were younger and I didn't want to be away for such a long time."

There is a pattern to such deflections, a clear sense that after 40 years in the business she has had just about enough of talking about her acting career. She would much rather talk about other people, such as the school teacher from North Carolina who sent her a letter about a pupil suffering problems with migraines. "By playing ping pong with him for 15 minutes every day, not only did his migraines go away he became less stressed and more social,'' she says. "So we sent her a ping-pong table. The next thing she knew she had 25 kids begging to play ping pong."

The cynics will be rolling their eyes at this point. Sarandon has that effect on some people, usually the sinister Dick Cheney acolytes who fill the airwaves of Fox News, belching their malcontent about the world in general and "Hollywood liberals" in particular. She can't do anything to please such people and it would be fair to say she has never tried. Instead she just does her thing.

Recently she and SPiN established a programme in New York which supplies ping-pong tables to schools in underprivileged parts of the city. School districts agreed to provide coaching. A league has been established. Sarandon donated $95,000 of her own money to help fund the whole thing. "It's so much fun to be able to give ping-pong tables and instruction to kids in schools – most of them are black – that don't have gymnasiums," she says.

Hearing Sarandon proselytise in this way, and reading into her history of backing her political enthusiasms with money, you have to wonder if she is in some way addicted to "do-gooding".

She doesn't take offence at this notion. "Well, I am one of nine kids, and not all of them are like me. Even as a kid I had a need for justice. Also, I just find I am so close to the dark side– I could so easily be depressed or have a hard life. I am so sensitive. Even here [at the Standard Hotel] I see all the homeless people on the street around this hotel and it affects me. The only way to combat those feelings is to do something. When you do something – this is the most hippy thing – or in some way be generous or give, you get so much love and generosity back.

"I am such a lucky person to be born into a lower middle-class family and to have had an education and access to information. If I was Madonna, I would be gifting people left, right and centre. Same if I was Oprah. Your money could go so far in so many places. It's just so much fun to spread it around, although I admit it is a totally selfish thing for me. It saves me from the precipice"

Susan Sarandon
Susan Sarandon. Photograph: Steve Schofield for the Observer

Not always. Ping- pong might be neutral territory, but Sarandon over the years has never knowingly walked away from controversy, some of it potentially career threatening. In 1993 she and her then partner Tim Robbins used the platform given to them as presenters of the Oscar for best film editing to highlight the plight of HIV-positive Haitians being denied entry to the United States. For their troubles they were both banned from future ceremonial duties at Hollywood's biggest night.

"The actual act of saying anything at all was traumatic, especially for a Catholic girl who was taught to keep the peace and not break the rules. But we both felt we had to say something,'' she says with a shrug. "Afterwards, when the shit hit the fan and we were banned, I didn't care at all. I got all these really racist letters talking about 'you and your nigger friends' and I thought: 'Good – I am glad I said something.'"

She was reunited with the Oscars "family" in 1996, when she won the best actress award for her part in Dead Man Walking. Still, it would be fair to say her role in the family is akin to that of the unembarrassable sibling with an appetite for speaking uncomfortable truths. She doesn't appear to care what the Hollywood community thinks about her. In return she doesn't appear to think much of them. "Apparently, I'm supposed to be some sort of 'downer'." She rolls her eyes. "But in reality I'm happy and jolly, and so are most of the activists I know, especially in Central and South America. Sister Prejean [the nun she played in Dead Man Walking] doesn't stop laughing."

At the 2004 Oscars she asked her fellow stars to wear a "peace" dove badge which campaigners would then be able to auction off with the money raised to be used for medical relief. "Someone said to me: I can't wear it [the dove] because it will mess up my dress,'' she recalls. "There was another gal I know, a very famous person, who pulled out of a fundraiser in New York recently because she couldn't get money to pay for her hair and make-up people. Who is advising these people?"

For all the mutual antipathy and antagonism, Sarandon has never been ostracised by the film industry – a curiosity, perhaps, given that some people have been run out of town for far less serious crimes than pointing out the shallowness and hypocrisy of Hollywood.

"Around the time of the war in Iraq, the LA Times did a piece about this, and it turns out that the two people they forgave for their lefty views were me and George Clooney. They didn't forgive Barbra Streisand, but they forgave me, apparently, because the right-wing people in Hollywood thought I was sincere and that I had been saying what I was saying for a very long time," she says, though the gratitude she feels is modified by a recognition of Hollywood's colder realities. "As long as your movies make some kind of money they will give you a chance."

Los Angeles is littered with those who will speak to the truth of that. Outspoken political activism and Hollywood longevity is some kind of conjuring trick for any mainstream actor, one that perhaps only Sean Penn, Clooney, Julie Christie and Sarandon herself in modern times have pulled off. That very select group and her inclusion in it, along with her 1996 Oscar, might once have been judged as the most significant landmarks of her career. Until now.

Type Sarandon's name into Google and the search engine's predictive function steers you towards stories about her ping-pong activities – a measurement perhaps of what is now judged as her greatest contribution to modern American culture. She giggles when she hears this. "Does it really? Does it really? Oh, wouldn't it be hilarious if that turned out to be my legacy, and all I was remembered for was ping pong,'' she says, thinking it over for a moment or two. "You know what, I wouldn't mind if that's what happened. I wouldn't mind at all." ■

Lawrence Donegan met Susan Sarandon at SPiN Standard at the Standard, Downtown LA (losangeles.spingalactic.com). Cloud Atlas opens on 22 February and Arbitrage opens on 1 March

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