After a dozen years in supporting roles in movies and TV, Josh Lucas was eager to play a romantic — if rough-hewn — leading man in Sweet Home Alabama opposite Reese Witherspoon.

Josh Lucas and Reese Witherspoon in Sweet Home Alabama. | ZOOM |

        He was also surprised.

        “I don't know why I got this part,” he said during a recent visit to Cincinnati to promote the film.

        “I knew I could do it when I read it, I knew it was very close to me. But I've spent so much time playing characters who are so far outside of me that it was hard . . . to just kind of say to myself, "No, you're not playing someone hard,' ” like the snaky murder victim he portrayed in The Deep End.

        “I didn't have an easy time in the auditions, but I wasn't particularly good in them,” he said. “But (director) Andy (Tennant), for some strange reason from the very beginning was like, "This is the guy.' He fought Disney tremendously, because they were like, "Who? And why? Look at his movies, they're really dark and weird.' He kind of waited them out in a sense.”

        The result was a working experience where he learned “not to take myself so seriously all the time,” and a movie that he said he is proud to promote.

Josh Lucas on film

One of Josh Lucas' earliest movie roles was a small part in Alive (1993), the story of athletes who resorted to cannibalism after crash-landing in the Andes. He went on to appear in, among other films, True Blue (1996), Drop Back Ten (1999), You Can Count on Me and American Psycho (both 2000), and A Beautiful Mind (2001).     In his next major role, he plays a military colleague of Bruce Banner in The Hulk, due out next summer.

        “It's really lovely, it's really honest, it's smart, it's a little bit quirky. There are some funky little elements to it that are really unpolished for a big studio romantic comedy.”

        He also appreciates the way the film treats its Southern characters.

        “We were in somebody's back yard in a sense,” he said. He credited director Andy Tennant and executive producer Wink Mordaunt with searching out the tiny town of Crawfordsville, Ga., where the movie was shot. “They brought in all these people who were locals. ... There was this great barbecue chef who was the chef for the movie during that time, stuff like that that you actually felt you were inside it (instead of) reconstructing it.”

        “I love that element. I'm proud of that element. I'm from the South, and Reese is from the South. We both had a real genuine concern that the movie didn't come across as "aw shucks' or dumb down the people,” he said. “A lot of people have some sort of Southern influence in this movie in their own life — Fred Ward, Mary Kay (Place), Jean (Smart). There really is that element of understanding who they are and what they bring to it.”

        Born in Arkansas and raised in South Carolina, Mr. Lucas spent his high school years in Seattle.

        “We were an odd family in that my parents were very intellectual but we were pretty poor. . . . We were like student-poor, bouncing around from place to place as they were searching for themselves. And the South was the place I loved the most.”

        The experience of moving 30 times before he turned 13 influenced him “tremendously” to choose a career in acting. “I found stability in instability,” he said. “By the time I got to high school, I felt like I needed something to pour myself into. . . . (When) I discovered acting; I discovered this instant love for it. It provided that high of changing all the time. That's definitely continued, and definitely very necessary for my personality.

        “I think it's very common, particularly among a certain kind of actor, that stability is uncomfortable.”

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