An interview done several months before its broadcast date, a correspondent from Star TV was sent specially to L.A. to meet with Bruce Greenwood, the Canadian actor who would be playing JFK. The interview was amusingly casual and was conducted on a stretch of overcast Southern California beach, probably somewhere near Greenwood's home. Sharing a sandy treasure (black lipstick) and laughing good naturedly as his interviewer wandered too close to the water, it was a revealing look at Greenwood on his own turf.
Bruce's Comments:
BG: (picking up a sandy treasure) Lipstick? It must be L.A.! It's black!
INSERT: 13 Days footage.
BG: They told me, you might have to audition in NY. And I was thinking --- are you crazy? Me, playing this guy? It's ludicrous! But they said, well, just go in anyway. So I pulled some sound files off the net - of his voice - and put them into a little cassette, you know, one of those portable cassette players, and listened to that on the flight out there.
INSERT: more 13 Days footage
BG: I've played real people a couple of times before, ...but never somebody who was so....covered with research and film and books and reminiscences of people! It's tremendous to have that to work with. It's just something different. You're gonna get wet! [Big laugh].
INSERT: DOUBLE JEOPARDY footage
BG: Whoever didn't see it in the movie houses, saw it on the in-flight movie in the last couple of months. [Using broad NY accent] Oh yeah! I was just coming back at Christmas time from New York. I wasn't listening to it, I was just watching it occassionally and saw you were in it. Was it any good?
Tommy Lee's great! We had a lot of fun together. He has this reputation of being irrascible and reticent and all that. But he was great. We had a lot of fun.
INSERT: THE SWEET HEREAFTER footage
I knocked out a tooth a few years ago, right? And I have one of those flippers, 'cause I haven't had a chance to have a permanent tooth implanted in there,... so I have this flipper. So I said, how about this? And I popped out my tooth...and he [Atom Egoyan] goes, "oh...oh...oh...oh, yeah..OK..." So, I kind of set the tone for how we were gonna just stab at it and let stuff happen.
INSERT: THE SWEET HEREAFTER footage
BG: It was a sad movie in a lot of ways. All the actors had to dial up all this sadness. So we had a lot of fun! You know, just to kind of temper the zone you had to be in when the camera was running. We did the same thing on Exotica actually.
INSERT: EXOTICA footage
BG: Exotica took me awhile to a.... I was pretty...pretty drowned in that. And I expected it would take me a couple, three weeks to shed it. But we ended up shooting the beginning of the film at the end of the movie, so I shaved off the beard. And instantly [snaps his fingers] as soon as the beard came off, all the weight kind of fell away.
INSERT: 13 DAYS footage
BG: On some level I'm expected to get heavily pot-shotted at. But on another level, who cares? So what? I did the best I could.
Thirteen Days
Television Interviews
