Dennis Quaid stepped outside of his comfort zone for 'Smart People'

by John Anderson

Newsday (MCT)

7 April 2008

Known for his broad smile and his sex appeal, Dennis Quaid will be appearing as of Friday in a movie that required him to wear a full beard and a fat suit. In fact, to play “Smart People’s” mournful academic, Lawrence Wetherhold, the actor - known for his exuberant performances, general effervescence and setting a piano on fire as Jerry Lee Lewis ("Great Balls of Fire") - had to change his walk, downshift his attitude and internalize the professor’s dour complexities.

“To tell you the truth,” said Quaid, who turns 54 on Wednesday, “I wondered why they wanted me for this role.”

But in a career, and life, that’s had its ups and downs, Lawrence Wetherhold may end up being one of the touchstones in Quaid’s career - much the way the closeted Frank Whitaker was in “Far From Heaven,” or Arlis Sweeney was in the underpraised “Flesh and Bone.” Roles, in other words, that few might associate with Quaid. And ones even the actor isn’t quite sure he can play. At first.

“I was going to bow out of it,” he admitted, during a conversation from New York. “But I came to the conclusion that - well, I hate to say the word `risk’ or `taking risks’ because what’s risky about acting? You know, being in combat, now that’s risky. But I felt I needed to do something that maybe I was afraid to do, or felt I wasn’t quite right for - to step out there, into the ether. Do something new.”

“That’s exactly right,” said director Noam Murro. “And that’s when you get something new.”

It wasn’t until the Texas-bred actor met Murro that he decided to do the role in a film that was written by novelist and short-story writer Mark Poirier ("Goats," “Naked Pueblo") and is steeped in academia. Wetherhold, a professor of Victorian lit, is a widower with a daughter, Vanessa ("Juno’s" Ellen Page), who’s too clever for her own good; a brother ("adopted brother,” Lawrence always adds), played by Thomas Haden Church, and a disaffected poet son (Ashton Holmes). His on-again/off-again girlfriend, Janet (Sarah Jessica Parker), is a doctor. They shine with an aggregate intellectual light. But for all their credentials and snarky wit, none of them seems capable of getting out of their own emotional way.

“That’s why it was called `Smart People,’” Murro said, “because they’re all dumb.”

It’s new terrain for Quaid, who is perhaps better known for some of his earliest roles - “The Right Stuff,” in which he played Gordon Cooper, or detective Remy McSwain in “The Big Easy” or Gavin Grey in “Everybody’s All-American.”

“I was a guy back in the `80s who was one movie away from a huge career,” Quaid said, “which at that time didn’t happen. In the `90s, I worked a lot, but it was kind of get out there and dig and find things. So I guess `The Rookie’ and `Far From Heaven’ the same year, that’s what’s referred to as my comeback.”

The so-called comeback continues. To get inside Lawrence - “He was one of those guys I like to work from the outside in,” Quaid said - the actor didn’t wander far from the page. Or his own life. “I didn’t draw on anybody I knew or who was in my past,” he said. “The script was so well-written and Mark drew such a great character on paper and he was on the set and he comes from that world. I really was able to take what was on paper and get inside this guy.”

On the other hand, “there have been times when I’ve been like Lawrence, a walking-wounded person, unaware that I even needed to change a thing, stuck in a way,” said Quaid, who’s had well-publicized trouble with drugs and marriage (notably, with actress Meg Ryan).

“Emotionally unavailable, maybe. I’ve always been dragged, kicking and screaming, into change. It may just be the human nature, but if I related to Lawrence in any way, if I could relate him to myself, that’s how it would be.”

Many actors in Hollywood go both ways - from big-budget studio films to independent features, and back again. Few take it to Quaid’s extremes. “Far From Heaven” was directed by one of indie-dom’s bona fide mavericks, Todd Haynes. “Yours, Mine and Ours,” the 2005 comedy in which he starred with Rene Russo, was the most formulaic kind of movie industry slag. The recent “Vantage Point,” although not a critical favorite (our apologies to Quaid), was a risk-taking movie; he’s also just finished his part in the as-yet-unfinished “G.I. Joe.”

“Independent films is where you’re able to do movies like this,” he said of “Smart People.” “I’ve gone back and forth between the two. I like to do all different kinds of films, so, if I’ve had any kind of strategy, it’s been about doing as many different types of movies and genres and characters as possible.”

Despite the actor’s own reservations, Murro said that when the movie was in its infancy, the discussion always came around to Quaid. “We had a list,” he said. “You know, you start by sitting around in a room and saying, `Who would you like in this role? Who would you really like it to be?’ and every time it was always `Dennis Quaid.’ He asked me why. And my answer was we didn’t want a typical academic with a pipe and trench coat.”

Quaid’s mind has been somewhere other than acting recently: In November, the newborn twins of he and wife Kimberly Buffington were given an accidental overdose of the blood-thinner heparin at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Used to clean intravenous lines, the heparin was delivered to Thomas Boone and Zoe Grace Quaid at 1,000 times the normal infant dosage.

“It happened twice, over an eight-hour period,” Quaid said. “The same incident happened a year and a half ago in Indiana and killed three infants. We were very lucky.”

He said this kind of thing happens everywhere. “Medical mistakes kill over 100,000 people a year,” he said. “It’s mind-boggling. It’s an open secret in the medical industry. My wife and I have formed a foundation, trying to make lemonade out of lemons, about trying to get bedside bar-coding into hospitals where they could scan the patient’s wristband and the medication and if there was a mistake, a warning would go off.”

Hospitals are likely to resist. The automotive industry “resisted seat belts, too,” Quaid adds.

Quaid will next appear in “The Express,” which he described as a big studio movie. It’s about Ernie Davis, the first African-American to win college football’s Heisman Trophy; Quaid plays coach Ben Schwartzwalder. Then “The Horseman,” which he said was a more independent film, despite being produced by Michael ("Pearl Harbor") Bay’s production company. And, in keeping with the indie-studio rhythm of Quaid’s career, “G.I. Joe,” in which he plays Gen. Hawk.

“I wanted to do it, and it turned out to be a lot of fun,” Quaid said with a laugh. “It’s a three-movie deal. Hopefully, I have more to do in the second one.”