As Good As It Gets Interviews

C'Mere, Kinnear
by Charles Tatum
December 1997
Tribute Magazine

Hollywood stardom has so far avoided Greg Kinnear, but things are still pretty good if that's As Good As It Gets.

The world can thank Mrs. Pinopoulos for Greg Kinnear. You might ask Who's Mrs. Pinopoulos?; there's also a good chance you'll ask: Who's Greg Kinnear?

You see, Greg Kinnear was supposed to be a big movie star by now. Everyone said so. After all, he was picked from the relative anonymity of a cable TV show called Talk Soup to play opposite Harrison Ford in the Sabrina role that Tom Cruise turned down. That should have told Kinnear something right there. Tom Cruise takes a pass and you gotta ask yourself if a guy whose last five films each made over $100 million doesn't want to get involved, do you?

But Kinnear was hungry for success. Has been all his life. The acting bug bit him shortly after he was dodging bullets in Beirut. It's a long story. Here's the short version.

He was born and raised in Logansport, Indiana. In 1972 when Greg was nine, his father took a job with the State Department. Three years later he accepted a posting to Beirut, Lebanon, a few months before a civil war tore the city apart.

"At first," Kinnear says, "you'd hear occasional gunfire. Then it escalated every night and, along with the machine-gun fire, we started hearing explosions. Then we had a couple of hits very close to where we lived. All sorts of frightening things started to happen, and it got worse and worse. The last few weeks we stayed inside our house sitting on the floor listening to the BBC by candlelight. That's how we got the signal that we were being evacuated."

For the next six years, Greg lived in Greece where, at an American school in Athens, he met a teacher who changed his life. You guessed it -- Mrs. Pinopoulos.

"She was the first one to get me interested in performance," he says. "She went out of her way to be encouraging. Because of her, I quickly got involved in anything that was performance oriented."

In 1981, Kinnear returned to the U.S. and entered the University of Arizona where he narrowed his options to acting or broadcast journalism. "All I could realistically see myself doing was either acting or television and radio journalism," he says.

After graduation, Kinnear headed to L.A. where he landed not-for-him jobs before getting a gig as a video jockey for the new Movietime channel. "I was bad!" he says. "But I had the sense that maybe I'd arrived where I was meant to be."

Although his star turns in Sabrina, A Smile Like Yours and Dear God have yet to bring Kinnear the major stardom that was predicted to come his way, he's a working actor who gets some pretty good gigs. That includes As Good As It Gets with Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt and Cuba Gooding, Jr., joining together behind the direction of three-time Academy-award-winner James L. Brooks (Terms Of Endearment, Broadcast News).

As Good As It Gets is about a dysfunctional and bitter romance novelist (Nicholson) who takes a road trip with a disheveled waitress (Hunt) and a gay painter (Kinnear) after the painter is savagely beaten by thugs. Call it City Slickers meets The Odd Couple as the trio form a bond around a fourth character -- an ugly little dog named Verdell (a Brussels Griffon whose real name is Jill).

"None of us," says Kinnear, "is going to survive this film without having been horribly upstaged by Jill."

Oh well, if Greg Kinnear's career goes to the dogs, he can still console himself with having worked with three Oscar winners (Brooks, Nicholson and Gooding Jr.) on this film, which is pretty good, even if it's only As Good As It Gets.

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'GOOD' GUY KINNEAR TO STAY
By Larry Worth
NY Post, December 1997

CHRISTMAS came a week early for Greg Kinnear. He woke up last Thursday to news that he'd received a Golden Globe nomination as best supporting actor for "As Good As It Gets."

"Man, I'm on top of the world," he says, sporting an ear-to-ear grin, "even after hearing that every actor I admire and respect was nominated in the same category."

Of his competitors, Kinnear has only seen Burt Reynolds in "Boogie Nights," a performance he considers "absolutely mesmerizing."

Kinnear has been doing his own share of mesmerizing, having also got the National Board of Review's nod for best supporting actor. Heck, his role as Jack Nicholson's down-and-out gay neighbor has even generated Oscar buzz.

But Kinnear isn't getting cocky. Indeed, the guy whose raised eyebrow became a trademark while hosting the E! channel's "Talk Soup" and then NBC's "Late Night with Greg Kinnear" comes across as a down-to-earth guy.

Truth be told, there's no hint of the smart-aleck personality that first put him on the map. Yes, the self-deprecating wit and boyish good looks are still front and center. But throughout a lengthy Post Plus interview, Kinnear, 34, appears thoughtful and bright, an all-around nice guy.

He says he's perfectly comfortable walking Manhattan's streets by himself, having just hoofed it from his Four Seasons room to the Sony Building's plush penthouse suite.

"I'm not Jack," he says, referring to his "As Good as It Gets" co-star. "I don't have 150 paparazzi wherever I go. I may get occasional acknowledgements, but I'm quite capable of navigating the city unimpeded."

That may change as Kinnear's screen career continues to soar, despite critical drubbings of the 1995 "Sabrina" remake and two subsequent bombs, "Dear God" and "A Smile Like Yours."

And though being "eternally grateful" to director Sydney Pollack for putting him in "Sabrina," Kinnear has no fond memories of his other cinematic ventures.

"Do I wish they had turned out better?" he asks. "Of course. But that's been part of my learning process. They were baby steps. Maybe not in the right direction but they were steps."

The giant step came when James L. Brooks' "As Good As It Gets" script arrived at Kinnear's L.A. home (where he resides with longtime girlfriend Helen Labdon, a UCLA student). Recognizing it as "something truly extraordinary," he didn't hesitate over playing a gay artist.

"I had no trepidations, none whatsoever," he says. "It wasn't like these were uncharted waters. And the character was everything I could hope for: a man with integrity who's pitted against a horror of a human being Nicholson."

That compensated for Kinnear having to frost his dirty blond hair, get used to a wheelchair (after his character becomes a gay-bashing victim), cozy up to the droppings-oriented pooch that plays his pet and hold his own against co-stars Nicholson, Helen Hunt and Cuba Gooding Jr.

It's a long way from when Kinnear first appeared before the cameras; as a young boy he was featured in news reports during the evacuation of Beirut's St. George Hotel. It was 1975, a time when he and his family lived in Lebanon due to his dad's job as a diplomat.

"I was 12, and not really thinking about my mortality," he says. "It hadn't occurred to me that a bullet in the head could end it all. Besides, the Lebanese people are probably the nicest on the planet."

In fact, the three months leading to the evacuation of Kinnear's parents and two older brothers were harrowing. Their next-door neighbor was kidnapped and the ambassador assassinated. So when the family resurfaced in Greece, it was a time for elation.

"We were eating souvlaki and going crazy in the streets of Athens," he remembers. "Freedom was suddenly ours again, and we could do anything we wanted. That's the best feeling in the world."

It's a feeling he tried to recreate after graduating from the University of Arizona and seeking a show-biz job in Los Angeles. Having no luck, he became a purchasing agent in a Fremont, Calif., electrical supply house.

"I sat in a windowless shack, ordering copper wire No. 2." he says. "But after six months, I felt that wasn't to be my destiny."

Sure enough, a series of fortuitous breaks got Kinnear onto cable TV, ultimately leading to "Talk Soup" and his burgeoning film career. Now that it's on a roll, he's particularly wary about his next role, which is still to be determined.

"It's all a crap shoot," Kinnear says. "I'm going slowly, taking one day at a time.

"But I gotta tell you, this morning's Golden Globe announcement made today into a damn fine day."

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Star Watch: Greg Kinnear

NEW YORK (AP) -- Greg Kinnear is living proof that the shortest distance between two points isn't always a straight line.

Less than two years ago, the polished thirtysomething gent was a sharp-tongued TV talk show host who had abandoned youthful acting aspirations in college, without regret.

Now he's the 1997 National Board of Review award winner for best supporting actor, a Golden Globe nominee in the same category and a much ballyhooed dark-horse Academy Award contender -- all this coming even before the Christmas Day release of the movie in question, "As Good As It Gets."

Similar acclaim for his veteran co-stars, Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt, surprised no one, ditto the good reviews given to Academy Award-winner Cuba Gooding Jr., who plays Kinnear's art dealer in the film.

"It is moving pretty quickly," Kinnear says in an interview.

As host of the cable TV-show "Talk Soup," Kinnear quickly built a reputation as a terminally glib smart-aleck who regularly pushed the limit but never went too far. When Bob Costas abandoned his late-late-late night network talk show in 1994, Kinnear was a natural to take over. A national Chrysler ad campaign around the same time added to his recognition factor, but Kinnear wasn't tempted to hope for more than television could offer.

"I was in 'broadcast journalism' and there was no feasible crossover for me to just gently segue into film work," Kinnear says. "So I just kind of thought these were the cards I was handed and I was actually very comfortable with the deck."

It was a deck he opted for midway through his studies at the University of Arizona.

He had started as a drama major, but "one day a professor came out and informed the class, in a very sobering way, that less than 1 percent of us would ever be able to make a living as an actor."

So he switched his major to broadcast journalism.

"I didn't have a bumper sticker on my car that said 'Born to Act,' or anything like that, so at that time it didn't feel like I was cheating myself out of that much," he says. "And the fact of the matter was that I didn't feel like the line between the two was that wide. And I found out with time that it wasn't."

Kinnear first crossed the line when director Sydney Pollack invited him to play a key part in the remake of "Sabrina" with Harrison Ford that earned him admiring reviews. Starring roles in "Dear God" and "A Smile Like Yours" followed, but nothing compares with his work in "As Good As It Gets."

"I haven't thought beyond anything other than today, which was a wonderful wake-up call," Kinnear says about his recent award and nomination.

He recalls his cynicism as an interviewer when a guest would describe the pleasure of being nominated.

"I'd kind of roll my eyes and you never saw such sarcasm come from my face. And yet as I sit here in this position now, I know, I swear to you, it is all of that. You really do feel honored."

In "As Good As It Gets," Kinnear plays Nicholson's neighbor, a gay artist who loses his apartment because of mounting medical bills following a brutal beating.

"I'm not gay, so I have nothing personal to draw on there. But for me that wasn't the hardest part," Kinnear says, leaning forward, letting his guard down a little. "For me it was, 'What is the formula to portray a person who is all good? What is the secret to that? Where do you tap into that? Where do you find that?' Because when it comes to that, I don't have a lot to draw on either, I'm afraid to say."

He was born in Logansport, Ind., the son of a State Department diplomat, and grew up in Logansport, Washington, D.C., Beirut and Athens. "There was always a sense of disorientation," he says.

Kinnear credits his upbringing for making him infinitely adaptable, a quality that helped him survive the often intense production process of "As Good As It Gets," directed by James L. Brooks, who also wrote and produced the movie.

The biggest ego on the set, he said, belonged to Jill, who plays Verdell, the Kinnear character's beloved dog.

"Jill is ... this unbelievable performer. She could suck the oxygen out of the studio when she walked on," Kinnear says. "Whoever said don't work with animals had some idea what they were talking about because there was charisma oozing from that canine."

For the veteran celebrity schmoozer, it was a fresh lesson in handling a prima donna.

"I'm not a dog owner. So Jill, from the get-go, you know, she sensed this and she used that as leverage against me," Kinnear says seriously. "Shortly before a scene, if I made eye contact with her, she would give me a little growl, like a little, you know, `Not here, pal. I'm working."'