Marc Blucas

Thursday, September 23, 2004

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

At 6 feet 2 inches, Marc Blucas is tall for an actor, short for a professional basketball player. And especially polite for either, sincerely thanking the waitress who doesn’t recognize the man who just ate a Cobb salad and soothed his sore throat with hot tea at a Downtown hotel.

Blucas, who was beau Riley Finn to Sarah Michelle Gellar, TV’s Buffy the vampire slayer, and is starring alongside Katie Holmes and Michael Keaton in "First Daughter," is still a Girard, Erie County, native at heart. A self-confessed square who earned good grades, excelled at basketball and doesn’t drink, he grew up 15 miles southwest of Erie, the son of a school superintendent and a mother who now oversees school personnel.

His parents are Walter and Mary Blucas, and he made it clear early on, "I said there will be no name changes and no surgeries." At age 32, and looking lean in brown shirt and jeans, he’s not exactly in need of a Joan Rivers tune-up.

His high school championship basketball team was like something out of "Hoosiers" (minus the Dennis Hopper character), down to the red and gold colors, man-to-man defense and support of the entire town where businesses closed early and hung signs, "Gone to the game."

He went on to become a standout at Wake Forest University and spent a year playing in Europe for the Manchester Giants. No wonder he was perfect as the basketball hero in "Pleasantville."

"I love going home," he said of Girard. "I try to get home for two weeks every summer, and this summer was the first summer I really couldn’t. But I won’t miss Christmas. ... Of course, I come back doing snow dances, because I want it to be miserable." He likes driving in the white stuff, shoveling it and even rescuing motorists stuck in the snow.

And then he can go back to his home of seven years, Southern California, where the only snow is on a movie set.

Blucas, whose credits include "The Alamo," "Sunshine State," "We Were Soldiers" and "I Capture the Castle," plays the romantic interest of Holmes’ first daughter in the movie, which opens tomorrow. She is Samantha Mackenzie, whose father (Keaton) is running for re-election as she starts her freshman year.

Director Forest Whitaker calls Blucas’ character, James Lamson, a "Lancelot to Samantha’s Guinevere." He’s a dorm resident adviser who rescues the president’s daughter from nosy newspeople, an ill-advised night in a bar and cars that come too close for comfort. At one point, he has to toss Holmes over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and walk up a set of steps.

"At the end of the day, I think we did that probably 24, 25 times," Blucas says. "That’s where I wanted it to be Sarah [Michelle Gellar], because Sarah is only 5-2 instead of Katie, at 5-11." And the ride was none too fun for the leading lady, who had to pretend to be dead weight, while Blucas’ shoulder was jammed into her stomach.

"I loved working with Keaton and with Forest Whitaker as a filmmaker, and obviously Katie. It was so nice to have an actor as a director."

Blucas was on location filming "The Alamo" when the casting process started for "First Daughter," so he made a tape in his hotel room and sent it to Whitaker. He later met with him and read with Holmes.

"I think at that point, it was a lot about chemistry, it was a lot about how do these two look together, what’s their dynamic with one another. I’d like to think that Forest liked my take on the character."

In addition to the usual girl-meets-boy angle, the movie is about a lot of firsts, from leaving home to falling in love for the first time. "Those are things people can grab onto, and say, ’Oh, I remember being there,’ " Blucas says. "For me, I wanted it to be about, we’re all sometimes in that space in life of, what’s next? Am I on the right path? Am I doing the right thing?"

Although he had mastered the fox trot for "I Capture the Castle," he and Holmes had an instructor for the formal dancing scenes. "We had our fun moments of stepping on dresses and stepping on feet ... but Katie grew up with ballet, and she’s very graceful and elegant. I don’t think anybody will be calling us Fred and Ginger, but it was certainly fun to do."

Acting wasn’t in Blucas’ plans when he went to college.

"I was an academic all-American and I had a scholarship to law school. It should have been a telltale sign that the night before the LSAT, I was watching ’A Few Good Men’ and not studying."

Although Blucas had done some community theater in North Carolina and suspected that acting might replace basketball as his passion, "You’re from Girard, Pa., you don’t grow up wanting to be a thespian. ... And then two weeks before law school started, I just said, this is not what I love. Law schools won’t disappear. I need to do this. I’m not a guy who lives for the what-if. I’d rather fail miserably than wonder."

But he didn’t fail, getting his first big break with "Pleasantville." He went to an open call that attracted 2,000 actors. Director Gary Ross asked who had played basketball in high school and all hands went up. Then he asked who had played in college and Blucas’ was the only hand. The job was his.

And when he was unable to get hired as a waiter, the perfect job for out-of-work actors, he turned back to basketball, working as a referee and giving private lessons to kids. Today he plays basketball in an NBA Entertainment league.

In fact, he recently was named MVP and won a year’s supply of free beer from sponsor Bud Light. "I picked up a lot of friends. ’We know you don’t drink, Blucas; what are you doing with all the beer?’ "

Sharing it, of course.