|
DENNIS
QUAID is 53. He has been in the business for 35 years
and has more than 60 movies to his name. In his latest,
Smart People, he looks awful: creaky,
disaffected, worn. In real life, he has settled into
this conclusion: “I’m never going to be the big deal.”
He delivers that sentence like a punch line. And follows
through with a full, husky laugh—soundtrack to the
singular image of Quaid’s face, curling into that
joker’s smile.
So he’ll
never be the big deal: Life, he insists, “is better than
it’s ever been.”
“I’m no
longer on my way up,” he says. “I’m not trying to become
something or achieve something or be something. I’m
just, um, enjoying what I do.”
Lately,
he has been doing a lot. Quaid made four movies last
year, including Smart People, a melodrama in
which he appears opposite
Sarah Jessica Parker and
Ellen Page as a curmudgeonly English professor who
has receded into a shell of petulance after his wife’s
death.
NO WORRIES.
Well beyond his
hot-shot years, Dennis Quaid is nonetheless having the
time of his life with a career now packed with
interesting characters, the latest being a creaky and
disaffected professor in Smart People.
“I saw
him as somebody who’s sleepwalking through life.
Somebody who’s lost his way as far as the fire in his
belly...which I think happens to all of us at some
point,” he muses on the phone from
New York hours before the film’s premiere. “I know
it’s happened to me.”
Quaid
still vividly recalls his first week of college at the
University of Houston, when he fell in love with
acting. Ten years later, after some easy, early success,
he was in his 30s and always “one movie away from being
the big deal.”
“And
that one movie never happened, actually,” he says,
laughing again. Then came a 1990 stint in rehab, a year
off that turned into two, an unheralded return and a
stretch of something like sleepwalking. Quaid continued
to make movies, but “it became a real struggle,” he
says. Until, one day, it just wasn’t. He considers 2002
(the year The Rookie and Far From Heaven
were released) as a turning point. The films were well
received, but more important, it’s when he decided to
focus on having fun with his work and that “being the
big deal doesn’t really matter anymore.”
He
apologizes for tripping over clichés as he talks about
his career, but here it comes: “Really, the only
satisfaction I get from my work is doing it,” he says.
“I’m having more fun now at my craft than I did when I
was in college.”
The
opportunities coming his way lately are abundant,
diverse and more interesting than anything he can recall
from his hot-shot, thirtysomething period. Last year, in
addition to Smart People, he made Vantage
Point, an action flick released in February; The
Express, a 1960s-era drama about Ernie Davis, the
first black football player to win a Heisman Trophy,
slated for release in October; and a dark thriller
called The Horsemen, expected to be released in
August.
Along
with the work, there is perspective. Quaid says he
worries less now, doesn’t “take things so seriously and
with so much weight as I used to—except for the things
that deserve it.” Things like his relationships with
16-year-old son Jack, from his marriage to actress Meg
Ryan, and his wife, Kimberly Buffington, and their twin
babies, Thomas and Zoe, who were born in November and
given a dangerous overdose of an anticlotting drug, but
today are completely healthy. (Quaid started a
foundation dedicated to preventing medical errors and
has sued
Baxter International, maker of the blood thinner.)
He’s in
cliché territory again, but Quaid posits that this—all
the good, and the ability to appreciate it—might not
exist without the bad. That without one or the other, a
fellow might get stuck and end up missing out on
“finding new things in life...keeping alive that feeling
of discovery.”
Like
that discovery about never being the big deal. And the
one that came after that: “This is just what I do, you
know—and I love doing it.” |
