Word: heros
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...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...
...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...
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...
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...
...people have my full devotion," he said in a statement. It remains to be seen whether the people of California harbor such doubts; his approval ratings have already plummeted to 37%, down from 57% a year ago. "A lot of voters were looking to him to be their hero," says Kim Alexander of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation. Now he's looking dangerously like a politician. --By Laura A. Locke