In "Sweet Home Alabama," Josh Lucas stars as Jake, Melanie's (Reese Witherspoon) redneck husband who refuses to sign the divorce papers and set her free to marry her new beau, the very handsome, very wealthy New Yorker, Andrew (Patrick Dempsey).
Director Andy Tennant couldn't be happier with this cast. On casting Josh Lucas as the Southerner with a big heart and an even bigger attitude, Tennant jokingly says, "I hate Josh Lucas for so many reasons. He has talent and he's gorgeous, and that just shouldn't be allowed in the same package. Something has to be done about that guy - I can't stand him."
JOSH LUCAS (Jake)
How do you feel about the film's portrayal of the South?
The thing I love about this movie is that I think it's so incredibly dignified towards the South. I think it paints the South in a gentle but an honest light. Even though there are often times clichés, the clichés are totally true. I think that often times Hollywood panders to the clichés of small town life, specifically Southern small town life, and I think that this movie does the opposite. I think if anything the South comes across better than New York.
You're from Arkansas. What was it like playing someone from Alabama?
It was interesting because I thought it was going to be really easy, because he's quite close to me in so many ways. From the moment I read that script I felt such a kinship with him, such a similarity in the way that we grew up in terms of my friends. A bunch of different aspects of our lives all collated together very well. I guess my instincts are so dramatic and I'm so used to playing a very specific zone of characters that have nothing to do with myself, where you're layering on aspects of another personality or at least dramaticly accentuating some small aspect of your own personality.
When I started this audition process - and the film itself - it was tremendously difficult. I was having amazingly difficult time. I felt incredibly uncomfortable. I felt really like I just didn't know what I was doing. I felt like the comedy of it wasn't coming to me. I was having to kind of strip away barriers and defense mechanisms to display more about who I feel I am and who I think I am. Maybe people just see me as miserable (laughing). Comedy is so hard; it's so much harder than drama. The pacing of it, the energy of it.
Did you ever get to the point where you felt comfortable with it?
Part of it too is that maybe I'm just one of those people that works that way. Even on “The Hulk” there was between the first three to five days of work where I just felt massively insecure. And yet, I'm also starting to realize that that's the place where I am the most creative and the most free, and that I know that I'm possibly doing something truly challenging and unique to what I've done before - if I feel that way - because it means I'm risking a tremendous amount because I'm coming home each day going, “I'm about to be fired.” I just generally feel insecure about it. Then what happens is that you start to get feedback about what people are seeing. Once everyone else around you starts to become incredibly comfortable - if anything, quite happy with what you are doing - then I start to settling in and trusting all those choices that I've made up to that point.
You've worked with Ang Lee and Ron Howard and now Andy Tennant. How is Tennant's style as opposed to Lee's and Howard's?
I'm incredibly lucky. I feel like I've had this triumvirate of three dramatically different, absolutely wonderful directors who are also, oddly enough, wonderful human beings, which I think really is very rare that that goes hand-in-hand. I've worked with some incredibly difficult directors but my understanding is that a lot of the best people are driven from a place of being extremely challenging and dark within their way. The James Cameron sort of approach to moviemaking [where] you're almost torturing everyone around you. These three people are almost the opposite but they are all very, very different, too.
I learned massively from Andy about taking myself less seriously, really is what it comes down to. It was like a lesson in life. His whole thing was basically playing with you all the time like, “I'm f****ing with you,” in a sense, to make you loosen up, enjoy yourself, have a good time, and then the work was so much more easy that way - that it was just kind of coming out of you. He's an extremely comedic personality who has an ability to tell stories. Every once and awhile he'd do a couple of our lines, kind of jokingly. The whole crew would hit the floor laughing. He's just one of those kinds of personalities that can do that. I just don't have that at all. A lot of it was about trusting what he was doing. He had fought so hard for me to do this movie because no one at Disney had wanted me. It was just a battle the whole time.
Why didn't Disney want you?
Because they had nothing to see that could show them I could do it. They had these movies like “The Deep End” and “A Beautiful Mind,” which wasn't out yet and that wouldn't have even showed them. They're like, “You're talking light romantic comedy/leading man stuff and everything we've seen him do is psychotic and weird and dark and edgy and small. We don't see it.”
So Andy won them over?
He basically waited them out is really what he did. They came to him with a ton of different ideas and he basically just was like, “No, no, no.” By the time it got really incredibly close to filming they were like, “Fine. Hire him.” And I'm incredibly cheap (laughing), that's another thing. They were like, “He's so cheap, who cares?” I made less than anyone else in the cast.
I'm sure it wasn't hard to work with Reese Witherspoon.
No. I've had a crush on Reese since “Man in the Moon.” Reese is an actor's actor in many ways. I wouldn't [put her] in the territory of the common 'movie star.' Her work is incredibly precise and somewhat challenging. She's not afraid to put herself in a bit of a dark light in a sense, to play someone who is off-kilter to some extent or another. She has a tremendous respect amongst the acting community, which is rare for a movie star. You don't necessarily know what you are going to get any time you go into working with an actor and the thing about Reese is that she's massively intelligent. She sits down at these things and she's very light and playful but when you get on set with her it's like sparks of fire. If you watch her outtakes, they are just so fast and so comedic and so sharp. A lot of my things came from basically reacting off of her. I wasn't driving the comedy, and I knew it. I'm not about to [because] I don't know how to do it, and she does. You just kind of play off of her in that sense.
