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Mar. 14 - Mar. 21, 2004 |
The romantic in Bruce Greenwood
Versatile Canadian actor sheds bad-guy image in Deepa Mehta's film The Republic of Love
By Angela Baldassarre
Originally Published: 2004-02-22
Canadian-born Bruce Greenwood is tired of playing the bad guy. That's why the handsome actor, who played JFK in Thirteen Days, decided to change his image and do a love story.
Deepa Mehta's The lic of Love, based on Carol Shields' novel, features Greenwood as a lovelorn DJ for a radio station who's been married three times, but still believes in true love. Fay (Emilia Fox) is an academician who doesn't believe in love even though her parents (Edward Fox, Martha Henry) have been together 40 years. When Tom and Fay meet, it's love at first sight, but sudden situations drive the couple apart.
"Playing bad guys is not a mistake I made, but now I've got to sort of snap out of it," says 47-year-old Greenwood referring to his roles in Hollywood Homicide, Double Jeopardy, The Core and Swept Away. "People look at me and they expect me to be a bad guy. In a sense it's working for me because people don't want to hire me as a bad guy anymore. If the bad guy is supposed to be concealed in the movie, why are they gonna hire me?"
Despite his past experience playing evildoers, the Vancouver-raised actor admits that playing a romantic is much more akin to his real nature than his previous roles. "I had to stay closer to home really, cause I'm generally I'm a more of a cheery guy than not," he admits when he was in Toronto recently. "Tom wears his heart on his sleeve, right? He's just one of those guys, who there's no artifice, there's no fakery. There's no agenda other than, here I am. You seem like a nice person and I'm a decent guy and you know, maybe something can happen. He's quite genuine and in spite the fact that he's been married three times, you know, his ex-wives still like him except for the one who is insane. I just, he was a decent guy who woke up in the morning happy and I thought I'd like to do that."
Sure, but he's also somewhat of a doormat. After Fay dumps him because her own parents' marriage is falling apart, Tom is more than willing to take her back. "I think he's in love with the idea of being in love and when he was younger he allowed himself to be swept away," explains Greenwood, who's been married for 15 years to his childhood sweetheart. "It just doesn't always work out but it never spoiled his desire to let it in, right? He didn't fault himself or his ex-wives or his lovers for it not working out, he just went 'well, ok, its alright, its alright, we're just still lookin'; it's bad to try.' You know what I mean? It's not a bad to thing to try being in love and if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out but I'm not gonna stop trying. Would I have taken her back? If I love her, yeah. If she does it twice? No. Once, sure."
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