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By Charla Jones
Toronto Star News
Bruce Greenwood
Bruce Greenwood is in Toronto pushing Racing Stripes, a family-oriented comedy about a zebra who dreams of being a racehorse.
The Canadian actor plays Nolan Walsh, the widower who trains the plucky Stripes at his daughter's urging.
The studio's publicity package sells this as a rare non-villain role for Greenwood, which seems surprising: Canadians saw him as a romantic lead in The Republic Of Love, as distraught fathers in Atom Egoyan's Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter, and he was hailed for his portrayal of John F. Kennedy in Thirteen Days. But the rest of the world knows him as Ashley Judd's duplicitous husband in Double Jeopardy; he's also played shifty characters in Rules Of Engagement, Hollywood Homicide and I, Robot. So as far as Hollywood goes, Racing Stripes gives him major nice-guy exposure.
Plus, he does all the heavy lifting in a movie about talking animals.
"Without wanting to sound too serious," he explain, "the emotional life of the human characters are independent of all the animals. So I just looked at that as a very simple emotional story that's quite easy to follow ... I thought it was really well-told on the page, and it's surrounded by all these goofy characters."
Like Steve Harvey and David Spade as flies. Or Dustin Hoffman voicing a Shetland Pony. Whoopi Goldberg as a goat. And Frankie Muniz as the young Stripes.
Again: Stripes is a zebra.
"They bite and kick ... they're really wild animals," Greenwood says about working with zebras. "It's difficult to train them."
It isn't exactly easy to act opposite them, either.
"My work with them was mostly a lot of caressing, and some leaping out of the way when they'd snap," he says with a rueful smile.
Greenwood plans to take some time off this year and turn his attentions to producing. "I'm working on a film called Stanley Park," he says. "A Canadian writer named Tim Taylor wrote a novel that was quite successful in Canada, so we're putting that together. We'll shoot it in Vancouver."
But for now, he's happy to promote the talking-animal movie. He's even got his own pull-quote for it.
"It's high-energy, very funny," he says with a big smile. "The animals are ridiculous."
Racing Stripes |