NEW YORK--Greg Kinnear sits back and smiles a friendly little lopsided grin _ as well he might. After two years of following Conan O'Brien on NBC-TV, hosting ``Later,'' Kinnear has given up his night job. ``I don't have one of those `Born to Act' bumper stickers on the car,'' he says, ``I really don't.''
But what do you do when Sydney Pollack phones out of the blue and asks you to audition opposite Harrison Ford in ``Sabrina'' _ and it works? And Garry Marshall casts you as a comic deadbeat assigned by the US Postal Service to answer letters to God in ``Dear God''? And you're shooting a new movie with Lauren Holly and Shirley MacLaine after just wrapping another with Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt?
What you do is start to worry a bit if it's all real, says Kinnear, 33. He somehow mixes the late-night hipness that launched him on TV's ``Talk Soup'' with a heartland directness imprinted by an Indiana boyhood that stayed in place even when his diplomat father later transplanted the family to Beirut and Athens.
``The fear level isn't lowered on your second film. In some ways, it's higher. People will say, `Hey, shot more film, huh?' They would give that raised-eyebrow look that suggests that doom is on the horizon. I think the transition to film had I not come from TV would have been scarier. It helped that Garry could identify with whatever fears and reservations there were, having been in that television-to-film role himself, masterminding the likes of `Happy Days' and `Laverne & Shirley,' to say nothing of `Mork and Mindy.'
``I was doing fine in television,'' Kinnear says. ``I had been doing the hosting thing for about seven or eight years, and had kind of closed off even the option of pursuing acting, which I had studied in college. I just thought that this was the road I was on, and that was that. Then an unexpected phone call from Sydney Pollack changed all that. It was like I won the lottery. Then I liked it more the second time out, and I knew I was going to have to make a decision between `Later' and film. NBC was aware of that, too. We had our cards on the table, both them and me. It just seemed the time was now. Jay Thomas, who is in `A Smile Like Yours' with Lauren and Shirley and Joan Cusack and me, said, `I had to go through a big audition process for years, and you sit behind a desk and get a movie.' '' He laughs.
``I thought I'd encounter real resentment, but I've encountered the opposite. Maybe the moment I walk out of rooms, the conversation changes. But at least to my face they don't say anything but nice things. I mean, I wasn't stalking Sydney Pollack, or Garry _ a process I've now begun to undertake,'' Kinnear quips, adding that he's been thrown more by the downtime between films than by anything that goes on during the shoot itself.
``There's something visceral and immediate that takes place in a talk show,'' he says. ``It's very fast, and you immediately see the results of your work. If it was bad that night, you fix it the next. If you have a bad day in film, it isn't going to rear its ugly head for months, so it's going to be a long time till you can correct it.
``We went back and did two days of reshoots, on a weekend, which isn't that unusual. It was kind of great to see everybody again. You kind of make these little families and then it's, `See ya,' and everybody disengages. The biggest way my life is changing is that I always had a focus, something that needed to be tended to consistently. I think it's important to keep busy. Sitting around not doing anything much is not a healthy lifestyle, so I'm going to try and keep as many fires going as I can. Maybe including production. To just sit idly around for five months waiting for your next thing to start, what do you do? How many islands can you visit? How many football games can you watch?''
Kinnear stops, shakes his head and smiles wryly when asked how he likes having the interviewer-interviewee tables turned. ``I'm getting a little more comfortable with it. I still haven't mastered the art of waxing poetic about the sordid details of my life. It's a little tricky to try to articulate the goings-on in your life in this sound-bital world. Sound-bital _ is that a word? I think I would have been a little more compassionate to those poor souls I dragged out there at 1:30 every night had I known how uncomfortable it could be. But doing the show brought home one piece of advice Sydney gave me, which was that the most important aspect to the process of acting is listening. I always felt that. Anything you are going to ask, whatever you do at any given moment, is determined by what the other person says, by whatever information is coming at you.''
The information that came at Kinnear during his childhood, he's the first to admit, was mixed. ``Bizarre is more like it,'' he says, with practiced, self-deprecating irony and more than a casual eye for the absurd. ``I just remember feeling so safe in this little town, Logansport, feeling so protected in every way. Maybe there would have been that kind of innocence no matter where I grew up. But then after living in Virginia when my father worked in Washington, we were posted to Beirut. School closed down for the last two months I was there. We would huddle around this great BBC radio with one candle lit, listening to the news, my father, my mother, my brother and I. I was always the last one up. It would take a good two or three explosions to jolt me out of bed.
``This was the real thing. Our neighbor, Mr. Gallagher, was kidnapped. The acting ambassador was assassinated. Shooting would go on near us. I remember once crossing the street, sort of an outdoor marketplace, filled with apple carts. I saw this group of guys walking down the street. All of a sudden I looked and saw no apple carts and a couple of apples on the ground. Quickly it turned into this `High Noon' environment. A couple of gunshots rang out and we ran. My mom and dad were terrified, probably because they were more worried about us than anything. But we were like that John Boorman film, `Hope and Glory.' War through the eyes of a kid. You're not thinking about your mortality. You're thinking, `Wow, I used to play army man, and here's actually army men.' It was a wonderful game. Today, I'd be hiding under the table, screaming.''
Because he never thought his father enjoyed diplomacy, Kinnear says he never saw it as a profession for himself. On the other hand, he vividly recalled the show-biz guy in his family, his grandfather, a salesman who briefly worked as a professional magician. ``You don't have to push the envelope that much to impress kids. He did that trick where you stick a cigarette up your nose and I could watch him do that all day long. I wanted a media-inspired career, but was kind of vague on it. But there was this guy in high school in Athens who had this little radio show on the Armed Forces Radio Network. He was graduating and he came up to me in the hall and said, `Do you want to take over the show?' All the girls were crazy about this guy, and I thought, `Wow, there's the ticket to open up all sorts of dating venues.' So I said yes.''
So while his voice was still changing, Kinnear followed Casey Kasem, got a lot of free records and was a hot ticket in Athens, thanks to the Bee Gees and a plethora of surfing and disco immortals. Then, as now, you feel, Kinnear knew that not taking yourself too seriously could be an asset. It was his jauntiness that got him the likable lightweight role of Harrison Ford's playboy brother. To a degree, he displays the same qualities in ``Dear God.'' But Kinnear is aware of locking too early into a persona. ``A Smile Like Yours'' may be a romantic comedy, he says, but it's bittersweet. ``A couple married happily for eight or nine years finally decide to have a child and hit an obstacle in the fertility department. It's known as "we need swimmers." You do the math on that one.
``I'd like to tell you that people faced with this obstacle come closer and bond like no one's business. Unfortunately, that's not the case. Joan Cusack [note: Lauren Holly plays the wife. Don't know if this is a typo or if Greg was a little confused...] is the wife. I would be the husband _ and (he's) a good portion of the problem we're having in the baby department.
`` `Old Friends' is with Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt. He plays an angry, hostile man who doesn't care for the world or the people in it. I play a gay artist who lives across the hall from him. I'm one of those he doesn't care for. In the course of the story I suffer this trauma. In his own somewhat horrible way he helps put the pieces together again, and it involves a budding relationship with him and Helen Hunt. Well, so far it keeps the cobwebs out of the brain. And the best way to keep it that way is to be in the company of people who kind of know what they're doing.''