"I read the script and the story hit me. The script hit me right in the gut and the heart, a place where I really don't have words," explained Quaid at the film's Los Angeles press day. "It's inspiring. Also, it's about more than football. Even if you don't like sports, I think there's something in it for you because it is an inspiring story. You take The Rookie, movies that I do that are sport movies, they have to be about more than the sport. They have to transcend the sport. The Rookie was about second chances in life. The Express really, I think, is about living your life gracefully. If God's grace is bestowed upon you, you live your life to its full effect. Ernie Davis really embodied that."
Davis had to deal with racial prejudice both on and off the field. Opposing players didn't embrace playing against African-Americans at that time, and fans in the stands voiced their opinions about mixed teams in no uncertain terms.
Quaid, who grew up in Houston, Texas in the late '50s and early '60s, witnessed some of what Davis went through. "I remember the segregation and the racism, which was certainly more overt in the South, of that era. I grew up in Houston and I remember separate restrooms and drinking fountains. Black people sat in the balcony of the movie theater with separate concession stands. My generation, I think, started to question that. And certainly the civil rights movement came along and it really started to bubble up. But that was the way things were," said Quaid.
"The character I play, Ben Schwartzwalder, which I also found interesting because therein lies the conflict I think in the film. By today's standards, I think he would be labeled a racist. I think he was a man of his times. I think most white Americans would be labeled racist based on what the attitudes were back then. We tried to approach the question of race and segregation that existed. We tried to approach it honestly and not be so politically correct about it."
Quaid says Schwartzwalder was a very complex man. "He was a groundbreaker in the sense that he was one of the first coaches to actively recruit African-American players to his team. But it wasn't any kind of sociological reason or anything like that," explained Quaid. "They could play. He and Jim Brown butted heads and before that, there was Avatus Stone who was at the school. He made the mistake of dating a white cheerleader. That was just a line you didn't cross. Ben certainly didn't stand up for him or anything. So that's what I mean about he was a man of his times."
Just as Schwartzwalder motivated his players to exceed on the field, his African-American players changed his attitude on race. "He evolved. I think more than anything else, it was because of the personal relationship that he had with Ernie. I think Ernie changed him. He certainly made Ernie a better player and gave to him this mentor, but they became kind of a father and son. But really, in a way, the movie speaks I think to today and where we still are yet to go. When Ernie picks up that bottle at the end and says, 'You see this bottle? It has no label on it.' He didn't start out to be the best 'Black' running back. He wanted to be the best running back."
Quaid had an excellent resource in preparing for the film in legendary running back Jim Brown who attended Syracuse before Ernie Davis and was instrumental in getting him to play for the school. Quaid worked with Brown on Any Given Sunday and they've remained friends. "[We] played a lot of golf together so he was really valuable. He's a straight talker and told me what Jim was like and his own relationship with Ben where they really kind of butted heads quite a few times."
Rob Brown (Coach Carter, Stop-Loss) tackled the role of Ernie Davis and according to Quaid it seemed as if he was channeling the athlete. "It's a daunting role to really take on and Rob has that ability. It's in his persona and he's such a good actor that he can just stand there and quietly convey a lot of things without having to say a word," said Quaid.
On a different note, there's a lot going on in Quaid's life outside of acting. His twins are now 10 ½ months old and after an early health scare, they are both doing fine. "They're completely healthy and happy and we're really grateful about that. Could've been not good at all. We were very lucky. The same incident killed another set of twins in Corpus Christi just in June. I don't know if you remember that."
The twins – Thomas and Zoe – were mistakenly given massive doses of Heparin which left them clinging to life. Dennis and his wife Kimberly are pursuing the matter legally so that no other parent will go through what they endured. "We have our ongoing case with Baxter, against Baxter as far as the labeling and packaging goes, but it was a chain of events, of human error. Baxter was the first link in that chain. What we're trying to facilitate and it's coming anyway, just trying to facilitate is the introduction of bedside bar coding and electronic record keeping in hospitals. Medical errors kill 100,000 people a year in this country and their procedures and their record keeping is still stuck back in the 1920s where the doctors who write prescriptions… Who can read a doctor's writing? There's a lot of sound-alike, look-alike names on medicines. It's just human error. Nurses get overworked. In aviation they have auto pilot and color radar and a lot of other instrumentation that is a backup for pilots. It's really brought the incidents of plane crashes way down. Same thing ought to happen in the medical industry, I think."
Page 2: Up Next - G.I. Joe
