Josh Lucas keeps it low key

L.A. Correspondent

Actor Josh Lucas, in pinstriped suit and light-blue shirt, was wobbling when he entered the interview room. We asked if he was still hurt from the Poseidon shoot, and he quietly, slowly broke into a "gotcha"-type smile and explained that he was just kidding.

"I am just limping! Actually I was walking on the street one day, and I thought I saw this one homeless person wobbling and I was like, ‘Benicio?’ It was Benicio Del Toro who was totally, completely in some character that he was working on and he literally looked like this homeless man and he was limping and he was out working on his "walk." I am trying to be Benicio," he laughed.

Lucas, who has a pair of piercing blue eyes this side of Mel Gibson, first gained international notice as a romantic hero when he acted opposite Reese Witherspoon in the charming love story Sweet Home Alabama. Afterwards, he dabbled into the action genre acting in such hits as Hulk and last year’s disappointing Stealth.

This summer, he is headlining one of the eagerly-awaited films of the year. In Warner Bros. stunning disaster epic, Poseidon, the actor stars as Dylan Johns, a professional gambler who reluctantly leads a group of daring survivors who are unwilling to surrender their fates, and attempts to climb up the top of the overturned ship and swim out to safety.

Is the actor ready to become the next action-hero?

"Oh, I’ve been ready for years!" he joked. "Nah, I like it because he’s not really an action hero. Dylan is interesting because I don’t think he wants to be a hero. What I like is that he grows and he becomes someone who cares more for the people he’s with and he changes a bit through the environment and through what happens to him. But for me, I work and I jump around from movie to movie to movie and I don’t wanna go trying to do action movies all the time."

Filming Poseidon proved to be a tough experience to the actor who had to endure a torn ligament, several bruises and cuts, most notably an eye injury he sustained when he was accidentally hit by Kurt Russell during a take for one of the movie’s climactic scenes.

"I am not angry about the fact that I was hurt, I just think I went home from this movie thinking that people were not killed. You got to imagine that it’s a human Petri dish, everyone peeing in the water, everyone sick out of their mind because of the water and people getting hurt regularly," he says.

"The achievement in filmmaking was quite very extraordinary. We had a very difficult time because there are so many terrible disasters last year. How do you make a big fun summer playful rollercoaster movie and have to be legitimate and truthful to what people are going through? We had the responsibility to have this movie become what it is, which is a violent film in a way, which is this is the situation, this is what happens to people and this is how they get out."

"It’s not a movie about tidal waves. It’s not a movie about Katrina. What I like about it is that it is not bogus, cheesy little crap where people are saying, "What shoes you have on?" It’s not those moments. We were trying to make it fun and at the same time trying to honor the fact that people are going through those situations around the world right now," the actor further adds.

To realistically capture his character’s fear and determination to survive, Lucas recalled an incident he experienced some years back.

"I was in a sailboat that literally tore apart in a storm and two people went overboard and in that moment there was so much adrenaline and there was a strange sense of calm, it was a weird mix between the two. That’s what I kept referencing to in this movie," he says.

After graduating from high school, Lucas decided not to pursue any college degree and left his hometown in Washington and moved to Hollywood in 1989. After struggling to find decent work as an actor; he endured a period of waiting tables before he could save enough to afford an agent. But, even with an agent, acting work was still scarce so the actor packed his things and moved to New York in 1994 and started acting on Broadway. It was while performing in Terence McNally’s acclaimed Play Corpus Christi that film offers started picking up.

When he did Sweet Home Alabama, critics declared that his time as a film actor has finally come. But, nothing much is known about the actor. Aside from the occasional gossips of him dating Salma Hayek, among others, nothing much is written about him.

"The media celebrity frenzy, I don’t like it," he says. "I don’t value it at all. Look at people who are famous these days and you just go, wait a second, you know, you’d done nothing, and so much of that is the way they create the impression of their fame and I am totally not interested in that."

"Philip Seymour Hoffman said, ‘the job of an actor is to be able to disappear’, so the more people know about you the more that’s gonna get in the way of their ability to enjoy the movie."

The actor currently lives in New York City and revels in his quasi-anonymity.

Poseidon is currently showing in Metro Manila theaters.