Interview: Dennis Quaid
Being all that he can be
Dennis Quaid is at the point in his career where he has fun no matter what the role. So you can imagine what a blast it was to play General Hawk in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
By Bob Strauss
If any actor has earned the right to just kick back and enjoy the fruits of his labours, it’s Dennis Quaid.
A true Hollywood journeyman, the 55-year-old Texan has survived an overhyped early career in which he didn’t quite make it to the Next Big Thing level, some attendant struggles with substance abuse, the scandalous breakup of his marriage to Meg Ryan and a harrowing hospital snafu in which his twin babies were accidentally overdosed with a blood-thinning drug.
But in a recent chat at a Santa Monica, California, hotel, Quaid was enormously relaxed and cheerful. In fact, he could hardly disguise his amusement when talking up his latest movie, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, derived from the cartoon series that, let’s face it, was cheesy enough to make Transformers look like The Iliad.
“I play General Hawk, the leader of the Joes,” says Quaid. “I remember when they first came out; soldier dolls for boys. They hardly did anything, either.
“This is based on the cartoons, where they came up with a whole other story; that was big. General Hawk is the guy who created the Joes. He’s sort of a cross between Chuck Yeager, Sergeant Rock and a kind of naive Hugh Hefner. It’s like, my aide-de-camp is a Victoria’s Secret supermodel [played by the real thing, Karolína Kurková], and I never acknowledge that anything’s out of place, it’s strictly professional.
“How serious can it be?”
Well, as serious as any movie directed by Stephen Sommers (The Mummy, Van Helsing) gets. With a cast that includes Channing Tatum, Marlon Wayans, Sienna Miller, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ray Park and Rachel Nichols, it’s a special-effects destructo-thon in which Quaid supplies whatever gravity there is to be found.
“It’s set in the future and the Joes are sort of this international Special Forces that mainly fight these terrorist groups that spring up,” he explains. “The movie is really more like James Bond than it would be about an army squad. There’s this evil mastermind behind this group that’s like SPECTRE; he has his own private island and people wearing these magic coveralls.”
And if it succeeds at the box office, Quaid’s contracted to come back for more. Twice.
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From left to right: Channing Tatum,
Dennis Quaid and Saïd Taghmaoui in
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
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“It was planned to be a Transformers type of big action, popcorn
tent pole,” says the actor, noting that the giant-robots-from-space
maestro Michael Bay was originally attached to direct G.I. Joe, too.
“We hope to make a franchise out of it. There are supposed to be two
more movies.”
That noted, it isn’t all silly stuff these days for the man whose admirable filmography includes Breaking Away, The Long Riders, The Right Stuff, The Big Easy, Great Balls of Fire, Wyatt Earp, Any Given Sunday, Traffic, The Rookie, Far from Heaven and In Good Company. Upcoming projects include playing Bill Clinton in The Special Relationship, which was penned by The Queen’s Oscar-winning screenwriter Peter Morgan.
Quaid has indeed reached that presidential stage of his career; he did a deft George W. Bush caricature a few years back in American Dreamz.
But the actor harbours no delusions; he’s well aware that most people
are familiar with him from the undemanding, but popular, family
comedies The Parent Trap and Yours, Mine and Ours.
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“I guess I have a kind of American everyman quality,” he reckons. “I’m not really interested in nurturing it; I just have no control over the way I’m perceived by other people. But I do think actors serve as archetypes, and there are a certain number of archetypes that audiences see in films. You could say that George Clooney is the Cary Grant archetype, Tom Hanks is the Jimmy Stewart archetype…you could pretty much go down the line replacing that mythic figure from the Hollywood pantheon with someone today.
“I don’t know who I am, to tell you the truth.”
We suggest Gary Cooper.
“That’s fine, I’ll take that,” he laughs. “Thank you.”
Fatherhood again well into middle age seems to have reinforced Quaid’s realistic outlook on life (he has a teenage son from his marriage with Ryan). Except for the horrible few weeks he and wife Kimberly went through in late 2007 when it looked like infants Thomas Boone and Zoe Grace might not survive, it appears to have given him all the fulfillment he could want.
“They’re beautiful kids, fantastic and really healthy,” he reports. “Something good came out of it. I don’t know if fatherhood’s better the second time around, but it is easier. Y’know, that first one comes along and you worry about everything. The second ones come along and it’s kind of, seen that, done that. You realize that they are going to go off to college one day, that you’re not going to be changing diapers for the rest of your life.”
As for the job, there’s really nothing better than being at a stage where you don’t have anything to prove anymore, yet still get the chance to prove you can do something new now and then.
“Variety is really what I’m always looking for,” Quaid says. “On the other hand, I’m just going along, probably having more fun with my career than I’ve ever had. You go through different stages in your life and your career. In your 20s and, especially, your 30s, you take yourself so very seriously. I just feel, now, that I’m acting for the same reasons as when I started out, just that I really love to do it.
“I mean, it’s not a real job, for God’s sake,” he cracks. “And I think I’m better at it than I used to be. Certainly, you would hope that. If you’re a plumber, you learn little tricks as you go along that make you better. I don’t think this is much different.”
Bob Strauss is an L.A.-based writer.
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He’s so plastic
We’re not sure it’s the first time Dennis Quaid’s been immortalized in plastic (there must have been Postcards from the Edge action figures, no?), but it’s certainly the coolest. It is, after all, a G.I. Joe doll — the daddy of them all.
Hasbro
is releasing this 3.75-inch, fully jointed replica of Mr. Quaid
alongside Sienna Miller and Channing Tatum dolls, allowing for hours
and hours of plastic-mashing fun. Or, you can just let your $10
investment sit in its box for a few decades and increase hundreds and
hundreds of cents in value.
—Marni Weisz
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