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	Printed Articles & Interviews Calgary Herald October 21, 1999

Greenwood Happy Playing Baddy by Jamie Portman

Canadian actor Bruce Greenwood is the first to admit it: he plays an absolutely loathsome specimen of humanity in the current hit film, Double Jeopardy. Furthermore, he's delighted that audience members boo and hiss his character - a double-dealing millionaire husband who frames wife Ashley Judd for murder.

"Let's face it. It's more fun to play the bad guys because that's where the real conflicts are," he says. "The good guys are there for more simple reason - to advance the plot or to help with exposition. But if you're a bad guy you have more to work with."

But the 42-year-old Quebec native has no fear of being trapped in a villain image - not when his next film assignment sees him tackling the role of U.S. President John F. Kennedy in Thirteen Days.

The political thriller tells the inside story of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis when Kennedy and Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev engaged in a battle of wills over the presence of nuclear warheads in Cuba.

Greenwood says research for the film has been "brutal. I've been reading books and documents every day, trying to examine accounts of the incidents from different perspectives." But he says he's determined to understand every aspect of a crisis which - according to some historians - brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. In the film, which started rehearsing in late September, Greenwood co-stars with Kevin Costner who has the role of a key White House adviser.

Greenwood says his role in Double Jeopardy was a piece of cake to play because the movie is essentially escapist entertainment. But other roles can take their toll. He finds Thirteen Days frightening because of what it says about power politics, and he recently completed another film, The Lost Son, which continues to upset him whenever he thinks about it.

"It's a horrifying story in which I play a guy who 'farms' children for profit. He's another scuzzball, but far worse than my character in Double Jeopardy because he thinks of children as a commodity to be sold. To play him I had to go deeply into his character - as deeply as I ever want to go with any role. I was really disturbed by it."

He also had difficulty with Exotica for Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan. Here, he played a lonely male obsessed with strippers, and the longer filming continued the more depressed he got and the more remote he became from those about him. "My wife told me later I was completely different for about six weeks."

Greenwood has long been an established actor in Hollywood where he first made his mark as a self-absorbed young doctor in the hit TV series, St. Elsewhere. But he returns to Canada whenever he can to work. In the case of Egoyan he can't imagine himself turning down a role from this director. "It's tremendous working with him," says Greenwood who won critical raves for his performance as a grief-stricken father in Egoyan's Oscar-nominated the Sweet Hereafter.