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Lucky Thirteen for Bruce Greenwood |  |
HOLLYWOOD -- The 1962 Cuban missile crisis, which pushed the U.S. and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war, was one of the defining moments of the 20th century.
On a much more intimate scale, an $80-million movie about that crisis is becoming a defining moment in the career of a gifted Canadian actor named Bruce Greenwood.
The movie is director Roger Donaldson's Thirteen Days, a thoughtful and methodical epic-length production starring Kevin Costner in the marquee role as the American presidential adviser, Kenneth P. O'Donnell. Thirteen Days is now in limited release in Toronto, Los Angeles and New York and is due to open wide across North America on Friday.
Despite Costner's star status, the 44-year-old Greenwood is the dignified scene-stealer on screen. With uncanny precision, he plays the American political icon and legend John F. Kennedy. Kennedy was the real-life architect of a game of political brinkmanship that is believed to have saved the world from the devastation of a nuclear winter.
Insiders are touting Greenwood as a possible (if longshot) Oscar candidate as best actor. At worst, Greenwood has the role of a lifetime, a career-making performance that distinguishes him from the madding crowd.
But such talk makes Greenwood nervous and a tad self-conscious. "What does that mean?" he asks The Sun when the career-making question is posed. "What does that really mean? I hope it is not a career-defining role. It would be nice not to ever have a career-defining role."
Maybe what he really means is that he doesn't ever want to have a career-limiting role by being typecast or confined to one man, one movie.
A buoyant, charming man with a keen intellect and a boyish enthusiasm to know everything about everything, Greenwood says that, as an actor, he is never happy or satisfied with his performances. Not even as JFK.
"It's been so hard because, when I watch it, I see what I could have done. I think I am pretty objective. I look at it and see the tone of the piece and think: 'I could have pushed that a little harder, or I could have showed a little more restraint there.' It's only in tiny little moments that I go: 'Oh, that was a bead of truth!' "
He also is tough on his finest Canadian work, both as the tortured soul who visits the strip clubs in Atom Egoyan's Exotica, and the equally tormented father who loses two children in the bus accident in Egoyan's Oscar-nominated classic, The Sweet Hereafter. Both roles earned Greenwood Genie Award nominations. Doesn't matter.
"Exotica," Greenwood says in hindsight, "I would play 180 degrees differently now. I would never play that character the same way."
Trying to quote the French writer Gustave Flaubert -- yet careful enough to advise The Sun to check both the source and the wording of the quote -- Greenwood says as an indication of his restless creative muse: "A work of art is never finished, only abandoned." (Greenwood scores on the wording but it turns out that Flaubert didn't write or say it; rather, that familiar figure in books about quotes did -- Anonymous).
Greenwood was born in the Quebec mining town of Noranda, the son of a geologist. When Bruce was a mere six months old, the family moved to Princeton, N.J., then later to Washington, D.C., and Bethesda, Md. There was a sojourn in Switzerland when Bruce was in his teens. The Greenwoods finally settled in Vancouver, where the future JFK mucked about aimlessly at high school and then the University of British Columbia, the academic institution where his father headed the geology department.
Greenwood the Younger dropped out to make his stage debut in the play On The Job at Vancouver's Arts Club Theatre. For the next few years, he acted, he trained, he failed, he joined a drilling crew in Northern Alberta, he acted again, he succeeded, he failed, he worked in a factory mixing chemicals. All the while, he played a mean blues-rock guitar, a pursuit he still enjoys with passion.
If you count a brief, naive fling with the notion in 1977, Greenwood moved to Hollywood for the second time in 1983 to make his career. And he did, slowly, through television roles, bits in movies and finally more substantial parts in the 1990s. Greenwood remains in California, living comfortably yet modestly in a beachfront house with his Vancouver sweetheart and now wife, Susan.
His recent Hollywood credits include Double Jeopardy and Rules Of Engagement, both with the incorrigible Tommy Lee Jones. Thirteen Days is the most prestigious, serious role he had had in a mainstream movie. For that he is grateful. Greenwood is beginning to allow himself the luxury of seeing himself build a body of work.
"You know, it's just starting to cause a ripple on the pond. I'm just starting to think that, if I'm smart and I make some good choices now, hey, maybe I'll have more than a couple of good ones. Maybe I'll get a whole handful of good ones."
To that end, Greenwood already has committed to co-starring in Egoyan's next film, Ararat, which the actor describes jokingly as "an Armenian musical." It is about Armenia, which is Egoyan's cultural heritage. But it is not a musical.
Egoyan has taken a keen interest in Greenwood's rise to prominence in Thirteen Days.
"I wish him well," Egoyan tells The Sun. "I'm excited for him -- but I hope that it doesn't mean that he'll price himself out of range for my movie, especially if he gets an Oscar nomination."
Greenwood thinks that is hilarious. Not the Oscar thing, which he shies away from addressing, but the question of money.
"He doesn't pay anyway," Greenwood says teasingly of the Toronto filmmaker. "You don't do his movies for money. I've already told him I'm going to do it. I'm there. I'm all over it. You don't give up that opportunity to work with him, no matter what else is offered."
Greenwood enthusiastically sings Egoyan's praises.
"It's tremendous working with him. The crew is family. Everyone knows one another. The scripts are dense and complicated and he is willing to explore them any number of ways. The actors he gets together are always interesting, and it's a privilege for me."
The actors on Thirteen Days proved to be interesting, too. Greenwood, as is his nature, has nothing but praise for Costner. He is equally effusive about his lesser-known co-star Steven Culp, who is marvellous as Robert Kennedy. The two played what Culp calls "duelling Kennedys" for hours on the phone to hone their Massachusetts accents.
That and the enthusiasm every actor had for research kept things exciting on the Thirteen Days set, Greenwood says. "The environment was electric. Everybody was very, very into it. They took it seriously."
Out of that electricity, Greenwood took a jolt of reality. He discovered that his Kennedy, the one he portrayed in Thirteen Days, was not the man of myth or gossip.
"That path is so beaten down," Greenwood says of the libertine Kennedy who romanced Marilyn Monroe and held court at his so-called Camelot. "Who needs to go there?
"That was a 50th part of who he was, if that," Greenwood says, "and the more research I did, the more I realized it would be just absurd to focus on that if you wanted to get a larger sense of him. And this script doesn't go there. It goes to a much more serious place to show him as a driven intellectual at the height of his intuitive powers. This was Kennedy's coming of age."
This is also Bruce Greenwood's moment to illuminate a truth and define his own career, however strange the restless actor in him thinks that is.
The BRUCE GREENWOOD File
You have seen Bruce Greenwood's face many times before, and perhaps not recognized him. After all, his specialty is chameleon-like transformation. Here are some of the credits generated by this Noranda-born actor over the past 25 years:
Stage: On The Job, Bent, Cruel Tears (a landmark 1970s Canuck musical).
TV: Legmen, Jessie, Peyton Place: The Next Generation, Danger Bay, Matlock, St. Elsewhere (as scumbag Dr. Seth Griffin), Knots Landing, Nowhere Man, Summer Dreams: The Story Of The Beach Boys (as doomed Dennis Wilson), plus the still-to-be-seen productions Haven, It's A Girl Thing and the re-make of Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons.
Movies: Bear Island, First Blood, The Malibu Bikini Shop, The Climb, Wild Orchid, Passenger 57, Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter, Thick As Thieves, The Lost Son, Here On Earth, Double Jeopardy, Rules Of Engagement.
http://www.canoe.ca/JamMovies/jan7_greenwood-sun.html
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