"Not the Easiest Dad to Meet"

Canadian native Bruce Greenwood‘s list of films include Thirteen Days, National Treasure: Book Of Secrets and the current Star Trek film franchise. Now the 57 year-old’s latest role is as Hugh Greenfield in the romantic drama Endless Love.

Based on a novel by Scott Spencer, it was originally adapted to film in 1981 starring Brooke Shields and Martin Hewitt. While the original film was plagued by uniformly negative reviews and a lukewarm domestic box office reception, its most enduring legacy was its duet theme song of the same name by Diana Ross and Lionel Richie, which became one of the biggest hits of the 1980’s and won an Oscar for Best Original Song.

Greenwood’s character is an overprotective father of Jade, a young girl played by British actress Gabriella Wilde, who becomes very suspicious of her love David Axelrod, played by fellow Brit Alex Pettyfer. We commented to him that his character is a great one and there’s a lot more emotionally going on. We asked him if his pro-active attitude towards his daughter is because he knows true love can lead to bad places.

“No, I don’t think he’s a cynic about love at all,” he contends, “I think it’s driven by several things, probably the thing he doesn’t realize most of all is that it’s driven by fear and that fear is rooted in some fundamental understanding is that when she falls in love, she’ll have to say goodbye and he’ll have to give her up. And he’ll have to give up some of that relationship he has with her, and he’s not ready to do that because he’s already lost a child.”

“His professional expectations for her has been transplanted from the child that died onto her, and as the perfect child, she absorbed that wish of his and made it her own, and there may be a certain amount of guilt there for him that he’s wrestling with,” Bruce adds, “But what we try

"Not the Easiest Dad to Meet"

to do is make it plausible. Originally, he sees the kid come in, he feels on a gut level, this is not who he would pick for her, like many fathers might, but he’s not ungracious. And the more she reaches out for this kid, the more comfortable she becomes with it, and it ultimately becomes irrational.”

We asked Bruce if Hugh carries frustration and the deepest kind of grief imaginable by the idea of a doctor like Hugh, whose mandate is to save lives, to lose his child.

“On some level, you live in fear,” Greenwood believes, “Having been proved that the thing to which you’ve dedicated your life is saving people and controlling outcomes is not something that you actually have control over all the time, so the things that are still within your grasp like a child, you hang onto in ways that smother the child. So that’s what was appealing in terms of playing the character is, I think you mentioned, so sensitive and sensible to these details that we are trying to do anyway, whether we succeed is kind of up to you.”

We mentioned to Greenwood that unlike other teen films, where the sympathy is mainly with the teens themselves, Endless Love is equally rational in both the teen’s point of view and the parent’s.

“That’s the way the movie is crafted, so it’s not just a simple impediment who’s irrational at the outset and a prick and unthinking and rigid, just because he wants things his own way,” Bruce agerees, “He wants her to be happy and he wants her to survive and he wants her to avoid making mistakes, but it’s very subjective on what a mistake might be. Love or no love, he thinks that other kid is a mistake and love is more complicated.”

We mentioned to Bruce that one of our favorite scenes involves Robert Patrick saying, ‘Go embarrass yourself, it builds character.’ We asked him if he’s had

"Not the Easiest Dad to Meet"

moments like that himself.

“I’ve had many innumerable embarrassing moments, some of them which I’ve learned and some I’ve learned more than once,” Greenwood says, “But I’ve embarrassed myself more times than I can count.”

We added that if he reflected back on those embarrassing times, that if they hadn’t happened, he wouldn’t be the person he is today.

“I think probably I’d have to cull through my experiences to tell you what those might be,” Bruce answers, “The answer is yes, but specifically, I can’t tell you.”

We told Bruce that we had heard that the environment of the set on Endless Love felt like a real family. We asked him if there were any silly pranks or jokes cracking a lot.

“I don’t think there were any sort of [George] Clooney-style gags where we were filling people’s hot water tanks with molasses or something, although he’d be much more subtle than that,” Greenwood adds, “He’d probably fill it with Saline or Cristal. Well, Joely [Richardson] and I had an ongoing shtick where we’d speak in German accents, which I think drove few people crazy.”

We told Greenwood the film definitely appeals to both teens and adults.

“I hope so and I hope it’s uplifting,” Bruce says, “It feels pretty real.”

We replied that the film felt uplifting by the end of it, in an environment where sentiments seem so dour all the time.

“You kind of want to see them again,” Greenwood says, “I want to see that family again and see what’s going to happen next.”

We mentioned to him how much we enjoyed Greenwood on the short-lived 2007 HBO series John From Cincinnati. We asked him how he felt about working on the show in hindsight.

“Well, it was almost like an acid trip,” Bruce says of the experience, “You never knew what was coming next and it was crazy and inspired and really challenging and endlessly strange.”

We asked Bruce if he ever found out what had been planned for the end

"Not the Easiest Dad to Meet"

of the story.

“No, I remember [creator] [David] Milch saying, ‘Listen, for us really to understand what it’s about, there have to be 100 episodes,’” Greenwood says, “I’m sure he knew, but I couldn’t begin to plum what he was after.”

We also asked Greenwood about the most thoughtful criticism he’s heard about the new Star Trek films and the divided fan reaction it’s received.

“I wouldn’t want to boil it down to one evaluation or comparison at all,” he says, “I think there’ve been numerous takes on its relative strengths. I’m not sure how I can really answer that. I don’t read reviews. I try to spend as little time online pouring over how people respond as I possibly can.”

“I started caring about that stuff. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s just that if I started listening to it or paying attention to it, the day would disappear and I just don’t need that part of my brain occupied in that way,” Bruce continues, “I got enough to think about. After the work has come and gone and it’s out there, people are going to think what they will think.”

We asked Bruce whether he feels any gay characters would show up in the new films of a franchise with a storied history of pointing out social progress.

“I think there were plans afoot at some point to be part of the mix and why it fell out of the mix, I’m not sure,” Greenwood says, “I know they were talking about it at some point. But it may have been a character that was excised for other reasons. I don’t know why, I have no idea.”