Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(70)

CHAPTER 13


Perfect Timing


Back in 2002 and 2003, I wasn’t sure where my movie career was headed. I’d had a solid string of hits in the 1990s followed by some up and down movies around the turn of the millennium. I appeared in several movies during those first couple of years of the 2000s—Impostor, A Gentleman’s Game, The Big Bounce, and a few others—but none of them did any business. The Big Bounce was a small part, but it was shot in Hawaii, so I took it. It starred Owen Wilson and Morgan Freeman, my only time acting with either of them. My scene with Morgan? I fall down the stairs. He walks up, puts his hand on my neck, checks my pulse, and says, “He’s dead.”

So the career had slowed down a little at this point.

But one movie made during that season shone a bit more brightly: The Human Stain with Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, Ed Harris, and myself in the cast. Based on the novel by Philip Roth, the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in August 2003, so along with the film’s director, Robert Benton, and some of the producers, we all traveled to Venice for that. Although it received mixed reviews when it opened in October that year, it felt good to be part of another movie with great actors. In a moment of on-screen silliness, I had a wonderful Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers–type dance scene with Anthony. My character, Nathan Zuckerman, is a bit reserved and inhibited, and Anthony’s character tries to snap him out of it. When the song “Cheek to Cheek” comes on the radio, he yanks Nathan out of the chair and spins him around until Nathan is laughing. Not many people have danced with Hannibal Lecter and lived to tell about it.

In 2003, I starred with Joely Richardson in a warmhearted Hallmark movie for CBS called Fallen Angel, a lovely little Christmas movie about an L.A. attorney who returns to his deceased father’s home in Maine where he’s reunited with his past. It was a love story, and I really hadn’t done that type of thing before. It also turned out that my work in the movie and track record of solid performances caught the attention of the CBS executives.

The movie aired just before Christmas 2003 and did well, with some eighteen million viewers tuning in. The network execs were happy with the ratings, and in early 2004, just as I was heading out on my first overseas USO tour with the band, I got a phone call. One of my agents told me that CBS was offering me the lead role in a big new TV series. CBS planned to do a third spin-off of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, the award-winning forensics crime drama. The original CSI had been set in Las Vegas and was a massive hit. The network had already spun it off in another series, CSI: Miami with David Caruso, and it had also done well. The new spin-off they offered to me was tentatively titled CSI: New York.

Lead roles don’t come along every day—and I felt grateful for this initial offer. Network execs expected, reasonably, that CSI: NY would become a big hit—they were going to give strong support. That sounded really good to me. But strangely enough, my first reaction to the offer was mixed. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go into a weekly TV series. I’d always been an actor who moved from role to role and stayed flexible, and I couldn’t envision myself settling in and playing the same role week after week.

My agents set up a meeting for me to meet Les Moonves, the president of CBS, to discuss the role. The meeting went well. Then I sat down with Anthony Zuiker, the creator of the CSI franchise, for another conversation. We met at the Sagebrush Cantina in the San Fernando Valley for nearly four hours, and Anthony described how he envisioned the spin-off. The lead detective was named Rick Carlucci in the pilot script, and Anthony wanted Rick to be a fast-talking, hard-hitting, no-nonsense New York crime scene investigator who got things done. We tossed around a lot of ideas and hashed it out in a productive meeting, but still I didn’t say yes right away.

I set off for Diego Garcia, Singapore, and South Korea, and all during the tour, in every free moment, I considered the role, trying to figure out if I should accept. The show would receive a lot of attention and support from CBS. They held a great stake in making a successful third show in the franchise, and my agents and manager felt it was a good move for me. And I did love many of Anthony’s ideas. My family also encouraged me to do it. Even though the show would be set in New York, it would be filmed mostly in Hollywood, and as I had traveled so much over the years, Moira really liked the idea of my working closer to home. So did I. It felt like something big, something life-changing, was about to happen, although I couldn’t exactly see the future. But how would I feel about playing the same role week after week? That was still something I was trying to wrap my head around. As a character actor, changing things up from role to role is what I had always tried to do in my career. It’s a major element in what I love about acting. Inhabiting different people, different personalities. But I started thinking more about my family and my financial situation and the whole idea of steady work, something actors rarely get to experience, unless on a successful series. I went back and forth with this. Then I considered that by taking this offer, if the show did well, I’d not only have a steady job, but having that steady job could help me in my ongoing mission to support the troops. It would be hard to go overseas regularly, but I could still travel to military bases around the States on weekends. I could go forward with my new mission without needing to worry about scrambling for a paycheck all the time. And, come on, it was a leading role on a major network, a quality show in a very popular franchise, and I liked the creative potential offered by the part! What was I thinking? Finally, it all started to make sense.