To Be or Not to Be a Hero

By Joel Stein / Los Angelas

Josh Lucas has only two real moves--the squint and the smile--but they're superstar-level moves. He also has those freaky blue Paul Newman eyes and a growly, cigarette-stained voice. But when he is not talking or looking right at you, when the deep cowboy lines around his eyes aren't scrunched together and the smile creases on both cheeks are ironed out, he looks surprisingly average. He has slightly receding hair and a polite, shy gaze. But two moves is one move more than it takes to be an action hero--not that he wants to be one. "I think it's an easy way to make a huge amount of money--that's for sure," says Lucas, 34, who stars in Stealth (opening this Friday). The film is Top Gun meets 2001: A Space Odyssey, and his main co-star is a computer-controlled fighter plane with a mind of its own.

What with Stealth and the role he's currently shooting--the poker-playing John Dylan in Poseidon, a remake of The Poseidon Adventure--you could be forgiven for thinking he's action movies' Next Big Thing. But Lucas, wearing a platinum Gucci ring that washed up in the backyard of his Los Angeles rental during the winter rains, thinks of it more as being at the top of one of the cycles of his career. "I actually started to hit a little bit when I was young," he says, twirling a stack of poker chips in his hand. "But I looked at my work and realized I sucked. I didn't want to be thrust into fame or success. I was afraid my looks would carry me for a minute and then I'd be gone."

So he did theater and took small roles in such films as A Beautiful Mind and You Can Count on Me and has worked his way around to action-hero-dom. He got the Stealth role when a girlfriend of director Rob Cohen's talked Cohen into watching Sweet Home Alabama, and he noticed that Lucas looks a lot like Newman, his favorite actor. Sony wasn't so keen on building a $124 million film around an actor famous mostly for Sweet Home Alabama. So Cohen shot a $1 million screen test, which ended with Lucas, in Navy whites, saluting the camera while the theme from An Officer and a Gentleman played. Arnold Schwarzenegger was sold more subtly.

Once Lucas got Sony's nod (it didn't hurt that Jamie Foxx also signed on--at five times Lucas' salary), Cohen put him through hero school, teaching him the kinds of lessons that Method actors don't want to hear: unlike normal people, heroes don't flinch, and they don't reveal any backstory. "It was about constructing and deconstructing the male archetype," says Cohen. "He has enough male beauty without being pretty, he has the height, he has the physicality, but in the heart of Josh, he has the niceness and the intelligence. Plus, he has the ego. Because none of them are humble." Stealth co-star Jessica Biel sums up the archetype Lucas represents even more bluntly: "He has just enough arrogance to be sexy."

Even though being an action hero might not be his ultimate career goal (he has just shot a movie about a civil rights--era basketball coach and wants to do a slapstick comedy), Lucas certainly works hard at it. To prep for the role, he went through the Air Force's flight survival-training school, where he was blindfolded and put in a helicopter that was then crashed upside down in the water. "I really got close to extreme panic," he says. "I thought, I'm going to drown. And I'm drowning for a movie? I'm a f______ idiot." Filming in the cockpit simulator in Australia (where the movie was shot), he suffered three concussions and, after a deceleration injury, lost his eyesight for four hours. The producer's sister, a professor of neurology at the University of Sydney, checked him out and, to make sure he wasn't talked into more extreme work, refused to leave the set for the next two weeks. "I honestly don't know how to do it differently," says Lucas, smoking a cigarette in his trailer on the set of next year's Poseidon, which will be just as physically demanding. "I'm so interested in the physical integrity of the performance. You see Steve McQueen jump the wire fence [on his motorcycle] in The Great Escape; it makes a huge difference. Russell Crowe has been a great person who helped me understand that as an actor," he says. "I think that's what it takes, even if it's a plane action movie."

Lucas says he became an actor because his parents, who organized campaigns against nuclear power plants, moved him 30 times before he was 13. "I would lie in bed the night before a new school and decide who I was going to be. It would usually be based on someone I admired from the school before," he says. As he sits next to a poster of The Hustler in his trailer, having successfully campaigned for hybrid vehicles and recycling bins on the Poseidon set, it's pretty clear who Lucas wants to be right now.

Newman, after all, did The Towering Inferno.