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	Printed Articles & Interviews Halifax Herald October 3, 1999

[photo] Bruce Greenwood and Ashley Judd star in Double Jeopardy, now playing in theaters across the province."

There's hardly any similarity between the sleek commercial thriller Double Jeopardy, starring Ashley Judd and Tommy Lee Jones, and the soon-to-be-filmed Newfoundland drama The Shipping News, but Canadian actor Bruce Greenwood is man of many interests.

He plays Judd's two-faced husband in the Bruce Beresford-directed suspense flick, but he's got a connection to The Shipping News author Annie Proulx, and he's curious to know about the status of the film.

"I read a book of hers on tape, At Close Range, a bunch of her short stories," says Greenwood by phone from Toronto. "I was talking to the producer about Annie Proulx, and if she'd write the script for The Shipping News, and she said she couldn't be less interested. And for obvious reasons: how could a film be as deep and enjoyable as a book?"

With actor/director Billy Bob Thornton at the helm and playing the main character, Quoyle, there's a good chance The Shipping News will be deep and enjoyable; although in a strange twist, Double Jeopardy director Beresford was initially slated to guide John Travolta through the role. Although many felt Travolta would have been an unusual choice for the role, Greenwood thinks the familiar film icon would have done a good job.

"He's a wonderful actor, it would have been interesting. Quoyle can go any number of ways. Beresford would have been a good choice to direct that. But it depends on the script."

Oh well, The Shipping News's loss is Greenwood's gain. He's probably best known for playing frustrated fathers in Atom Egoyan's features Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter, and has been earning favourable notices for his Double Jeopardy turn as slippery Nick Parsons.

Greenwood makes the most of a role that has him framing his wife, Libby (Judd), for murder and then taking their child and adopting a new identity as a well-to-do hotel owner in New Orleans.

A resident of Los Angeles for the last 15 years, and soon to be seen as John F. Kennedy in the Kevin Costner Cuban Missile Crisis flick Thirteen Days, Greenwood at first auditioned for a smaller part in Double Jeopardy. But he managed to convince the Australian-born director that he was right for the role of the villain.

"He thought, 'Maybe you could pull it off, if you got the job,' but they still had to go through a bunch more names," explains Greenwood. "They kept narrowing it down, and I was just the last guy not to fall through the screen.

"But it took a long time, many callbacks and screen tests and all that business."

Greenwood can play heroes, such as the title role in the cult suspense TV series Nowhere Man, but he's equally comfortable in the skin of a villain, especially a chameleon like Nick Parsons, who must be evil if he'd leave the lovely Judd hanging out to dry in jail.

"I based Nick on some of my closest friends," he laughs. "Actually, I based it on a couple of guys that I did some business with a few years ago who were utterly without conscience. They'd look you straight in the eye and promise you the straight-up thing, then burn you. Hard to believe you'd run into anyone like that in Los Angeles."

Greenwood's screen appearances in Double Jeopardy bookend the film; at first he's the loving husband who disappears mysteriously from a sailboat borrowed for the weekend, leaving his wife onboard smeared with blood and holding the supposed murder weapon, which leads to her conviction. When Libby tracks him down in New Orleans, he's the height of Crescent City hospitality, complete with a thick N'awlins accent. Or at least one that's convincingly approximated.

"Well, that's the saving grace, right?" Greenwood chuckles. "That's what Tommy Lee said to me the first day, 'I tell you what, it doesn't matter if you suck, you're supposed to be fakin' it anyway.' I talked to a guy in New Orleans a few times, and checked with him throughout the shoot. It wasn't supposed to be a perfect New Orleans accent, just a generic Southern accent with a bit of that flavour in it.

"Another thing about New Orleans is, it depends who you talk to down there. They're very, very different from one guy to the next. A classic Cajun accent would have been absurd, but there's a lot of latitude to mess around with it and still sound reasonably authentic."

The bulk of Double Jeopardy was shot around British Columbia, with the West Coast province filling in for Washington state, Colorado, San Francisco and the American prairie. For New Orleans however, only the real thing would do.

"We'd shoot there all night long," he recalls, "and with an hour between set-ups we'd wander out into the French Quarter, grab a beer and listen to a band on a street corner. We had a riot. And I was dressed in a tuxedo half the time. Actually, towards the end of the shoot, when I have blood cascading out of my chest, I'd walk down the street with fake blood all over me and no one gave me a second look."

The fact that Nick isn't really dead, and is, in fact, living in New Orleans, should be a plot twist that only becomes known to those watching the film in the theatre. Sadly, the advertising campaign for Double Jeopardy makes most of the storyline common knowledge, a fact that's been a sore point with both film reviewers and the director himself. Greenwood says he has mixed feelings about how movies get marketed these days.

"Bruce was asked his opinion about what the trailer should be, but then they chose to do what they chose to do," he explains. "But if you want to see this kind of movie, they show you what kind of movie it is. I think that's happening a lot more now, where you see the preview and think, 'Did I just see the whole movie?'

"It seems to work. It's a science I don't really understand, but it is a science."