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Printed Articles & Interviews |
Bruce Greenwood jostles for a spot at the window bar of a Hornby Street espresso place and offers one of the two cups of coffee he's holding. It's determined that the bustling cafe is too noisy for an interview so we move down the street and find a quiet couch in the Hotel Vancouver lobby.
This is a dialled-down version of the usual celebrity interview -- Greenwood bought the coffee and picked the spot -- as befits the more intimate scale of his latest movie, the whimsical romance Republic of Love, which opens Friday.
People who know Vancouver's Greenwood, 47, from his U.S. movie roles -- most recently the no-nonsense astronaut in The Core and the humour-deprived rival to wise-cracking cop Harrison Ford in Hollywood Homicide -- might be surprised to find out that Greenwood is the wisecracker in person.
Part of what drew the actor to Republic of Love's lovelorn radio host was that Greenwood isn't like those other guys he's played, the suits with the devious agendas.
"I'm sort of a romantic, I'm not as nasty as many of the characters I play," Greenwood says. "That's one of the reasons it appealed. Not just that it's closer to me, it's just that I don't get an opportunity to do that stuff that's a little more light-hearted, frivolous and animated. The guys with the agendas are often played close to the vest and this guy has his heart on his sleeve."
Republic of Love's Tom is a late-night talk-show host who slides so easily into love that he's been married and divorced several times. That part's fiction -- Greenwood's been married for almost two decades to wife Sue, who drops in briefly on the interview.
"The older I get, the more easily moved I am by gestures of kindness, so in that sense I'm a romantic," says Greenwood after his wife leaves. "I don't do the flowers as often as I should, probably. I guess romantic is a roundabout way of saying I'm a softie."
The movie is based on the late Carol Shields' novel, but the setting has been changed from Winnipeg to Toronto, where it was filmed in the winter of 2002 by director Deepa Mehta. British actress Emilia Fox plays his love interest Fay, an academic who studies mermaids. The movie's irony-free, idealized romance unfolds in Toronto's downtown tunnels, malls and high-rises.
"Like a flower growing out of a crack in the sidewalk, love can bloom anywhere, because we all want it," Greenwood says. "We're all craving that moment when you look at somebody and go 'I didn't understand anything until I met you.'
"If to the uninitiated, to the unloved, it seems a bit Pollyanna-ish, well, it ain't, really. Once you're in it, everything means something -- the number of cars at an intersection, the way clouds are flowing."
Republic of Love marks the beginning of a high-profile year in the multiplex for Greenwood. He spent last year working back-to-back on movies around the world, at one point commuting between the Vancouver-filmed I, Robot with Will Smith and Budapest for work on the Annette Bening romance Being Julia, "which got a bit gruelling, but good problems to have."
As well, he was in South Africa for the children's adventure Racing Stripes, a Babe-like story about a little girl who trains a zebra to be a racehorse. A typical year in his recent career, and one of the reasons the L.A.-based actor stopped keeping a place in Vancouver a few years back. "I really don't have a home, actually, just travel and work all the time. Home is a hotel."
But he still found time to get together in Vancouver with former University of B.C. theatre classmate Camille Mitchell last month to workshop her stage adaptation of Nick Bantock's picture novel Griffin and Sabine. The two did a couple of staged readings at the Arts Club, and Greenwood hopes he'll be able to come back and star in the finished play.
As well, he's optioned Vancouver author Tim Taylor's novel Stanley Park, and Taylor is writing that screenplay.
Any chance we'll see the Greenwood sense of humour onscreen anytime soon, amid all those serious guys?
"Well, it's not just something you can snap your fingers and do, 'cause there's a lot of Owen Wilsons and Ben Stillers out there. Well, not a lot of those two, but a lot of guys half as good as that who get work also. You get a good comedy script and there's a lot of people to fill those slots before they filter down to me and go: 'Hey, what about that guy we've never seen do anything funny?'"
CAREER MILESTONES
Bruce Greenwood looks back at his career:
- Thirteen Days (2000) Greenwood as U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Kevin Costner as a JFK aide during the Cuban missile crisis.
"The gift of that character was such a luxury for me. I had the opportunity to do a month of intensive study, and then another four months as we shot the movie. I was completely taken by Costner's generosity. He really gave me the floor and let me do the best I could do. You're a barn-door of opportunity for critical pot-shotting -- I just wanted to do something that I felt people might not expect."
- Double Jeopardy (1999) Thriller with Greenwood as a double-dealing rich guy who fakes his death and frames his wife (Ashley Judd).
"It was a lark. A goofy, silly, absurd script with a ridiculous premise that was tremendous fun. (Director) Bruce Beresford was a laugh a minute, we became good friends. When I saw it, I thought, 'I guess I better be hunting for a movie-of-the-week.' But it confounded everyone's expectations, except the people at Paramount who had done the audience testing. We're all going, 'Well, statistics can only tell you so much pal, don't go buying that Beemer yet.' A lot of people recognize me from that more than anything."
- The Sweet Hereafter (1997) Greenwood as a grieving small-town dad after a fatal school bus crash. He goes against the rest of the town when they want to sue the bus company. Director-writer Atom Egoyan got Oscar nominations in both categories.
"A labour of love from start to finish with a cryptic, eloquent script that went to those emotional places that I hadn't really been invited into before in a film. Surrounded by people who cared deeply about every moment -- and full of humour, you might not expect it. As was Exotica (another dark film with Egoyan). We laughed our heads off because it was so dark."
- The Malibu Bikini Shop (1985) Comedy with Greenwood as Todd, who inherits a bikini store. Could happen, right?
"Buh-bye. All I really remember is that I was extremely young and I had so much energy that I ran into every set-up. If you see the movie, you'll realize that I literally run to every mark, independent of character requirements, all that. Just so happy to be alive, so wigged-out on life. Said the dialogue quickly and ran off. That's an evening well spent, I guarantee you, that's some really good theatre. I was paid $3,000 for that movie."
gschaefer@png.canwest.com
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