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Bruce Greenwood is a character actor in the classic sense. He moves comfortably from role to role, from big screen to small and back again. You know his face, but you may not know his name."I've worked hard to build that clich," he says during a recent phone conversation about his latest and most prominent role, as President Kennedy in Thirteen Days, which opens Friday.
A historical drama about the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Thirteen Days stars Kevin Costner as Kennedy aide Kenneth O'Donnell, a fly-on-the-wall observer of the tense White House debates about how the United States should respond to the Soviet Union's placement of nuclear missiles in Cuba.
Thirteen Days may have Costner's name over the title, but it's Greenwood's movie.
These days, when thoughts of President Kennedy bring to mind tabloid images of womanizing, Greenwood's interpretation of JFK serves as a reminder that once there were presidents who, though seriously flawed, could meet the test of leadership with skill and grace.
Born in Canada, Greenwood, 44, has spent at least half his life in the United States. TV audiences are likely to recognize him from his stint on St. Elsewhere, while moviegoers have seen him in such films as Double Jeopardy, Rules of Engagement and The Sweet Hereafter.
Question: How did you prepare for your role as President Kennedy?
Greenwood: Voluminous reading. I don't know whether you've seen the bibliography in the press kit, but mine became twice as long. And now I have an absurdly large Kennedy library at home.
Question: At the risk of sounding like a smart-aleck, did you prepare for the role by sleeping with the ghost of Marilyn Monroe? (Greenwood laughs.) By that, I mean the Kennedy image has been tarnished over the past couple of decades by some pretty sordid revelations. Was it hard to keep that tawdry information out of your portrayal?
Greenwood: No, that's . . . well, that's such a well-worn path, you know. That path is deep and wide with people dragging their own baggage along it. So the fact that this script concentrated on a period on which every waking moment was spent in agonizing deliberation about how best to avoid the end of the world -- it wasn't, you know, "Bobby, I'll get back to you. I've got Marilyn on line 3."
Question: You avoid a literal impersonation of JFK, yet you capture him in a way that is both faithful and fresh. And you do it without any apparent makeup or other tricks . . .
Greenwood: There was one trick. A tiny little wiglet, about the size of a chipmunk's tail, that they glued to my forehead to lower my hairline. But I took the role really seriously. There's the odd account about this period that comments on how Kennedy was able to conceal from the outside world and from many of his friends just how much pressure he was under. But all of the books indicate very clearly that the weight on him was visible. So I tried to think of him not as a hero or an icon but as a man who was saddled with this impossible task.
Question: Kevin Costner, in terms of star wattage, overshadows the rest of the cast of Thirteen Days. Did you have any reservations about doing a movie with such a big star?
Greenwood: No. I don't think of stars as stars when I meet them. I think of them as actors. They're stars because they're good actors for the most part. Kevin's such a megastar that when he walks in the room there's such a zone around him. But then you realize that it's not so much what he's projecting as what we're projecting on to him. And he knows it's there, so he made a great effort from the first couple of weeks to remove that barrier.
Question: He easily could have demanded to play JFK, I suppose.
Greenwood: Sure. But then the audience would have had to get through two icons, in a sense, to get to the man.
http://www.gopbi.com/partners/pbpost/epaper/editions/thursday/accent_1.html
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