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 | AT THE MOVIES
Profile in Acting: |
It was a tough year in terms of big shoes to fill, you know?" said Bruce Greenwood. "President Kennedy's size 400 loafers sitting there on your desktop, and then Joseph Cotten's right beside them."
Mr. Greenwood plays the president and enduring icon in "13 Days," a dramatization of the Cuban missile crisis that goes into wide release today after its Oscar-qualifying runs in New York and Los Angeles over the holidays. And he will soon be seen in "The Magnificent Ambersons," an A&E mini-series based on the original screenplay of Orson Welles's mangled masterpiece, in which Mr. Greenwood takes over Cotten's role as a well-intentioned Midwestern industrialist.
Reached at the home of his in-laws in the mountains near Vancouver, where he was trying to squeeze in a ski vacation with his family, this Canadian actor said the casting process for "13 Days" was "a pretty standard story in that the agents send you a script and tell you that at some point they're hoping to get you in for a reading.
"But then you realize that it's John F. Kennedy, and you think, `O.K., I guess they're hoping to get me in, but it's not likely I'll get it.' I read the script, and they called me in a couple of weeks later for an audition, and Roger Donaldson, the director, said: `That's not bad. Would you like to come back and try it again?' "
"I went back about half a dozen times, and each time, there were more people in the room," Mr. Greenwood added. "Eventually you realize, `I stand a chance of getting this,' and then of course the pressure really ramps up."
In performance Mr. Greenwood manages to incarnate Kennedy without obviously imitating him. "I pulled some tapes off the Internet from the J. F. K. Library, and I realized pretty early on that his conversational voice - pitch, tone and cadence - was decidedly different from his oratory voice. Since the movie is mostly conversation, I thought I should stick with this much lower, slightly less Brahminesque conversational pitch. That was something the producers hadn't seen, and something that was interesting for me."
"It was a couple of conscious choices, and the rest was instinct, " he continued. "But the instinct would have been different if I hadn't done the research."
Mr. Greenwood continued to play films and tapes of Kennedy during the filming, letting the Kennedy inflections slip into his subconscious. The result is a Kennedy at once familiar and new, an interpretation that is not a simple imitation.
Mr. Greenwood is probably best known to the general public for his long-running role as Dr. Seth Griffin on the television series "St. Elsewhere," though filmgoers will remember him for his portrayal of a bereft father who has lost two children in a bus accident in Atom Egoyan's "Sweet Hereafter." "I'm very lucky to be doing Atom's next one also," said Mr. Greenwood. "It's called `Ararat,' as in the mountain, and it's a movie-within-a-movie that takes place in Turkey, and I play an American missionary - or actually, I play a movie star playing an American missionary."
Filming begins in June, as the big shoes march on.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/12/arts/12FLIC.html
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