He was in "A Beautiful Mind" and will be seen later in 2003 in Ang Lee's "The Hulk". But for now, Josh Lucas is married to Reese Witherspoon in "Sweet Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Alabama"...
The film plays up the differences between life in the sleepy South and the hectic metropolitan lifestyle of New York. Are they portrayed accurately?
The differences in the film are very realistic. New York has got this sort of wonderful romantic idea of the South. It's the South that maintains the idea that they're different, which is interesting because nobody else really cares. People aren't judgmental about it. There've been some critics - who aren't Southern - who claim that the movie portrays the South in a cliched light, but I totally disagree. Everyone I know from the South who's seen the movie does as well. We didn't create the scene of the Civil War re-enactment. That was filmed in five days during the largest re-enactment that the South has done. If that's a cliche it's a real one. I think that's an example of the kind of detail that the movie hits in a very correct way.
Did the fact that you yourself moved around a lot as a kid lead, in some way, to your current choice of career?
My nomadic childhood dramatically fed my eventual decision to be an actor, but not in the way you might think. I got so used to being unstable that I started to only be comfortable being unstable. It wasn't so much a need to fit in each place, it was a need to transform each place and be different each place. So when we finally settled down outside of Seattle I felt totally uncomfortable with that idea. I also really missed the South, and didn't like the place where we were. That really helped me relate to the experience Reese's character goes through.
Was there a particular moment you can recall when you thought this was it, you definitely wanted to act?
It's funny, but we were living on this small island off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina when I was 9. They were making a movie there and put Christmas trees in front of every single palm tree on the entire island. And they rented the house we lived in as a production office, so we weren't allowed to be in it during the day. That was my first experience of ever being around a movie set. I remember I snuck in to this beach scene with my friend and we were on these rocks looking down, and it was really cool. I had never seen anything like it before. That was funny when I read "Sweet Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Alabama", that was one of the first thoughts that I had in that opening scene, with those two kids being on the beach.
