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By Robert Philpot When actors and filmmakers come to Dallas on publicity tours for films, it's common for their hosts to take them by Dealey Plaza, the site of John F. Kennedy's assassination. Some are fascinated; some find it morbid. For Bruce Greenwood, who plays JFK in the new movie 13 Days, it was eerie.
"We got about halfway through it, and I just pressed myself into the back of the car, and looked at the whole thing sideways," Greenwood says, then goes on to relay an anecdote about the Cuban Missile Crisis drama: "The first day of shooting, we were doing a parade sequence. ... I was sitting in that car, on top of the trunk, waving at hundreds of people, extras that had been lined up onto the street. I just could not believe it. It was really disquieting. I just felt like a huge target. I felt like my head was about 4 feet across."
At 43, Greenwood is the right age to play Kennedy in 13 Days, which opens today in Fort Worth-Dallas. The movie is a straightforward retelling of the Kennedy White House's reaction when the Soviet Union placed nuclear missiles in Cuba, and it provides the veteran Greenwood with his highest-profile role to date. Some critics have suggested that he has a shot at an Oscar nomination, but that may get lost in whether the motion-picture academy considers him a lead or supporting actor. Along with his co-stars - Kevin Costner, who plays Kennedy aide Kenny O'Donnell, and Steven Culp, who plays Robert Kennedy - Greenwood more or less is at the center of a trio of lead actors.
Although the Quebec native doesn't bear a strong resemblance to Kennedy (unlike co-star Culp, who's a ringer for Bobby Kennedy), he brings off the role not so much through his appearance or his accent as he does by the looks of anxiety and conflict that cross his face as he wrestles with whether to respond to the Soviets aggressively or through peaceful negotiation.
Says Greenwood: "What I tried to do for myself was any time a question was asked of (Kennedy), even though in the script there was one answer, I would have half a dozen different answers and think about those and their implications carefully before choosing the ones in the script."
An actor who has had a series of breakthroughs, Greenwood first came to notice in 1986, when he began a two-year stint on the medical drama St. Elsewhere. After the show was canceled in 1988, Greenwood guest-starred on TV series and played small roles in several movies before turning in an acclaimed performance in fellow Canadian Atom Egoyan's Exotica, in which he played a grieving father obsessed with a young stripper. He re-teamed with Egoyan for The Sweet Hereafter.
Lately, he has had other breakthroughs: As Ashley Judd's nefarious husband in Double Jeopardy, and as a scheming government official in Rules of Engagement.
As Greenwood says, his career wasn't exactly an overnight thing, and in fact it was something of an accident, inspired by a couple of events from when he was younger.
"I saw Brad Dourif's portrayal of Billy Bibbit in (One Flew Over the) Cuckoo's Nest," he says, referring to the stuttering character who finally stands up to a domineering mental-home nurse. "And it just reached out of the screen and shook me. It really got to me, and I thought, 'I bet I can do that.' Then I kind of forgot about it, and I went to university, and I needed three easy credits because I was taking a pretty heavy course load. And I thought, well, acting is completely subjective. If I go to the classes, I can't be failed."
Greenwood may have intended to cruise through his college drama class, but with 13 Days, he turned into quite the student, doing extensive research on Kennedy for his role.
"You don't become a Kennedy scholar in six weeks, or six months, so I spent a couple of weeks researching through the Internet and finding things about his background, then focused in on this (missile-crisis) period, just this distilled fortnight."
Speaking of the Internet, fan sites have made it easy to do research on Greenwood - though he finds the amount of information available about him to be a little unsettling.
"Fortunately, the woman who runs the major (fan) Web site is really a nice woman and is interested that things are accurate," he says. "I only go to the site a couple of times a year. It feels funny to do it ... but occasionally I'll scroll through it, and find something that's horrendously wrong and I'll (tell her) this is not entirely correct, why don't you remove it? And she does."
Not that the incorrect stuff is always the problem:
"The stuff that has offended me the most is my own fault, and it's pulling up ancient, ancient interviews with me as a 27-year-old, when I didn't know anything," he says. "Even if you have the day of the interview beside the quote, if the quote is inane and ill-informed and appallingly arrogant or all of the above, it feels as if you just said it yesterday. It sort of misrepresents who I am now."
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