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	Printed Articles & Interviews Edmonton Journal January 10, 2001

Canadian Actor Sheds Villain's
Image to Portray JFK

Back in the 1980s, when Canadian born Bruce Greenwood was a mainstay of the hit TV medical series St. Elsewhere, he had no illusions about the kind of character he was portraying. In his own words, he was the program's "No. 1 scumball".... a self-absorbed young doctor who was ruthlessly ambitious, arrogant, uncaring and homophobic. He was the sort of character that audiences loved to hate.

Greenwood lived up to that early image again this year with his performance as a sleazy White House official in Rules of Engagement. And last year, in Double Jeopardy, audiences were booing him in movie houses throughout North America thanks to his portrayal of the diabolical millionaire husband who fabricates his own murder and then frames wife Ashley Judd for the crime.

But come Friday, the 44-year old ex-Vancouverite will re-emerge as one of the 20th century's most fabled knights in shining armor. He's playing U.S. president John F. Kennedy in Thirteen Days, New Line Cinema's new movie about the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The film opens here Friday.

"It was a gift", Greenwood says of the role. "This was the kind of thing you daren't hope for, really. When it came my way, I was thrilled and terrified."

Greenwood has done more than his share of nice-guy roles - for example, his critically acclaimed performance as a bereaved father in Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter. But movies like Double Jeopardy and Rules of Engagement, which have far greater exposure, have threatened to implant him in the moviegoer's consciousness as the quintessential bad guy. That's why he's so grateful to Thirteen Days director Roger Donaldson for giving him the chance to play JFK on the screen.

With Kevin Costner playing presidential aide Kenny O'Donnell in the film, Donaldson knew he would be setting himself up for big problems if he cast major stars in the roles of John F. Kennedy and his brother, Robert Kennedy, because their own powerful personas would be distracting. He needed somebody less recognizable and capable of slipping more easily into the Kennedy mold. "We needed somebody in whom the audience could believe in as quickly as possible. When Bruce finally did read, it just knocked my socks off."

Producer Peter Almond was similarly enthused. "He gave us a remarkable reading of John Kennedy," Almond says now. The role of Robert Kennedy went to Steven Culp. The film is a meticulously detailed account of the momentous events that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war following the discovery by U.S. spy planes that the Soviet Union was stockpiling nuclear missiles in Cuba.

Greenwood was only a young child at the time.... his family was living in Maryland before returning to Canada - but he remembers the climate of fear in the household as the confrontation between Washington and Moscow intensified. "It's the memory of a five-year-old but it's acute for all that," he says now. In preparing for the film, Greenwood went far beyond a close study of David Self's screenplay. He immersed himself in every aspect of that period: Kennedy's historic speech to the nation announcing the missile discovery, the standoff on the high seas between Soviet military vessels and U.S. ships; the furious debates within the White House over which course to follow.

"I read a stack of accounts up to my belt, and when I was too tired to read, I watched the television and film footage. Then, when I was too tired to watch footage, I would lie in bed with the earphones on and listen to audio tape." What emerged both from his research and from the filming process was a world of all too human, all to fallible people. He sees John F. Kennedy as a fallible human being in a terrifying quandry as he agonizes over what course to pursue in his standoff with Khrushchev, a man uncertain of who he can trust even within the inner precincts of government, a president prepared to operate on a mere hunch.

"It doesn't happen by magic", Greenwood says of the workings of the White House. "The Oval Office isn't peopled by magicians who can stand there with their feet apart and make decisions correctly every time. These are intellectual guys who are informed and have their country's best interests at heart - but they're still people. We tried to focus on that human aspect."

There were clear challenges in portraying a modern legend, and says Greenwood, "It would be presumptuous of me to say that I ever sensed what made him tick. My sense of him is coloured by what little I knew before I did the research - that he was this magic king of Camelot who ruled with grace and ease. So really, for the film, I was looking more at the challenges this man faced during this period."

Greenwood's love for acting goes back to a single year in the mid-1970's when he attended the University of British Columbia as an arts student. The only reason he registered for a theatre course was that he thought it would give him some "easy credits". Instead, he was bitten by the acting bug, so much so that he left university and began working professionally. By 1976, he ws one of Vancouver's busiest actors, working with both the Tamahnous and Arts Club theatres and also touring with the pop group Humphrey and the Dumptrucks in the rock musical Cruel Tears. He's married and has lived in the U.S. since 1983 when he was hired to do a movie for Home Box Office, although he frequently returns home to Canada to work.

Although he knows that Thirteen Days could have a dramatic effect on his career - already he's being mentioned as a potential Oscar nominee - Greenwood says he doesn't necessarily see it as a stepping stone. "I do it a role at a time", he says. "I don't really think of this as part of a professional trajectory because I'm not really as much in charge of that as some people seem to think. It might be if I was the kind of guy who would now sit back for a year and only take something that deeply moved me and was appropriate to the way I think, but I'm not like that. I love to work and I love to do all kinds of different things, so in terms of seeing it as a stepping stone in a particular direction, let's just say it's been a highlight."

Next summer, for example, Greenwood will abandon the bright lights of tinseltown and do his third project for Egoyan, this time a movie about an Armenian genocide. Greenwood is proud of Thirteen Days. "I think this is a good movie. I also think it's a fun movie to watch even for people who don't know anything about this period. I think they can fasten their shoulder straps, go on this ride for two and a half hours and be excited purely on a film experience level while also being introduced to a historical moment unlike anything the world has ever seen."