by Paul Fischer
by
Paul Fischer
It's been quite the year for 48-year old actor Dennis
Quaid, following the break-up of his 
marriage
to Meg Ryan. Quaid, who was promoting his family-friendly baseball drama The
Rookie, remains circumspect about his new-found love of life, and for Quaid,
it's now all about the acting, not the stardom. "Well, I think anybody who
carries themselves around like that is fooling themselves anyway, because it's
just a big delusion." Quaid explains. "Hollywood is just one big high
school and nothing has really changed. You know it's who's the most popular this
year and so what's the big difference? A hundred years from now, ask anybody who
was the biggest box office star of 1933? "Quaid has seen his own star rise
and fall over the years, following his breakthrough role in that other classic
sports-themed drama Breaking Away, back in 1975. His views on celebrity
have changed since then, he admits. "When [fame] first happened to me back
in my 20's I didn't know how to handle it very well having come from a lower middle
class family in Texas. I couldn't understand why anybody would be interested in
me and so I tended to shrink away from that. Now I've become used to it and I
sort of use it as a way to connect with people. You know, people don't have to
tell you anything; I'm a more people-person now."
Quaid's 10-year old son "has become my priority." Perhaps that accounts for the timeliness of The Rookie in which Quaid stars as a high school coach who makes it to the major leagues. The Rookie is based on the true story of Jim Morris, who, at 35, signed with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. While coaching high school ball, Morris promised his students that if his team made the playoffs, he would make another run at the pros -- an earlier deal with the Milwaukee Brewers had been ended by a shoulder injury. The film version, based on Morris's own book, co-stars Rachel Griffiths as his supportive wife. For Quaid, starring in this gentle baseball pic, was a fantasy come true. After all, "I haven't played [baseball] since I was in Little League." Preparing to do a baseball movie when one is in one's forties was far from easy, the actor recalls. "To get the pitching motion right is really extremely difficult." Much harder than being a quarterback as he was in Any Given Sunday "because you've got to know what's going on around you and you've got helmets and pads and stuff like that. Pitching starts from a dead stop and I didn't want to embarrass myself and throw like an actress.," At this point in the actor's career, making a film as pure as this was important to the star. "I think when you see the movie, the story just takes you; it's very emotional and about much more than baseball. It's about second chances in life and [director] John Leee Hancock really elevated a really good script."
Like many of Hollywood baseball films, The Rookie mythologizes this sport. Quaid agrees, that "there's a spirituality in baseball which hits the spirit that's captured in baseball more than football and you can see the players. They're out there and they have the names on their back and hats and they seem so human."
Playing a real-life character that inspired others, Quaid recalls being inspired by his college drama teacher. "I was 18 and I didn't really know which way I wanted to go in my life. So here I was in the drama department and, from the first week, I knew that what I wanted to do with my life and he instilled that in me. It was just the way that he taught it. I had done drama in high school, but he just illuminated it for me. It was a craft. It sounded really like something that had nothing to do with being a story or Hollywood or anything. It's a craft." Quaid, who spends much of the film acting alongside 10-year old scene-stealer Angus T. Jones, responded to the paternalistic aspects of his role. "My 9-year old son and I are the best of friends, so working with Angus reminded me a whole lot of my own son, and we all hung out a lot."
Working in rural Texas on this film, Quaid let loose by performing at times with his band, the other big love of his life. As passionate as he is about acting, Quaid loves his music, admitting that his musical performances "takes the place of theater for me. It's really fun and I've been doing it since I was 12." Quaid adds that he "just loves to play music. I always have and I just felt the need to play. And you know the natural progression of that is sort of playing in front of a live audience. You've got a group of musicians that you play with and so it's always been a part of my life." But he doesn't anticipate choosing his music over his acting. "I have a really good day job in my acting and I don't want a record deal," he admits. "I had another band back in the 80s and we were going for a record deal, which we actually got, and I think my ego was really too wrapped up in it at the time. It became this thing where I wasn't having fun doing it, to tell you the truth, while this time around it's a lot more fun."
Quaid remains in love with the movies. "I think I'd like to be a part of some sort of classic movie that people are still seeing a hundred years from now; I'd like to be a part of something like that." If he hadn't made it as a movie star, Quaid says that he'd have either stayed in acting "doing regional theater" or had been a veterinarian." As The Rookie explores a man's quest for fulfilling his own dreams, it begs the question: Are all of Quaid' s own dreams fulfilled? "Yep, I realized quite a bit of mine, but your dreams keep changing as you get older. It used to be all about me, me, me, me, me but now it's about my son and I really want to help him realize his." As for the kinds of dreams he has for his son, Quaid gently concludes that he "should really do something that he really wants to do in life and to find something that he loves doing and be able to do that for a living." Like father like son.
