Josh Lucas hits the "Glory Road"

The first things you notice about tall and handsome actor Josh Lucas are his incredibly striking light blue eyes. The ruggedly handsome Josh might have first made you sit up and take notice as the Southern good 'ole boy object of Reese Witherspoon's affections in the romantic comedy Sweet Home Alabama. A New Yorker, the accomplished actor has several major stage roles to his credit including a recent run on Broadway in "The Glass Menagerie". He was the "bad guy" in Ang Lee's Hulk opposite Eric Bana and will soon be on screens in the much anticipated actioner re-make of The Poseidon Adventure now dubbed just Poseidon.

Josh hits theaters this week in Glory Road, a gripping tale of the first college basketball coach to use an all African-American starting line up way back in 1966, wining the NCAA championship. Up until then, African-Americans weren't the major force they are in the sport today. Most just had to sit on the bench. Texas Western's Coach Don Haskins' efforts helped break that barrier and Lucas is proud to play him.

Josh looked especially hunky for our interview in dark purple shirt and black suit with tiny purple pinstripe and that ever-manly "I didn't shave this morning" beard. And, is there anything more "poor baby" than a hot guy with an injury? Josh had badly hurt his hand and thumb shooting action sequences for Poseidon and had on a hand brace. Let's chat with Josh about his transformation into a tough yet charismatic coach and a bit about his role in Poseidon...

TeenHollywood: Did you know the "Glory Road" story of this amazing 1966 college basketball team the Texas Western Miners?

Josh: I knew a little bit about it. What was daunting was that I realized not just how important the story is, but how the people who do know the story have extraordinary passion about it and particularly the Haskins. Haskins is a really, truly beloved man. In his [El Paso] community he's a king. I suddenly realized what a huge pressure I had to get him right and to respect the essence of what I've come to learn is just an extraordinary, extraordinary person.

TeenHollywood: Was he aware that he was making history at the time, or did he just have the single focus of winning?

Josh: He will give himself no credit for that and does not want to be looked at as a hero. He just does not like that title or does not like the fact that he was considered maybe a bit of a civil rights leader, but what's true about this is that Haskins had a best friend who was black when he was growing up who was a better basketball player than Haskins was, and Haskins was recruited in the NCAA and his friend was not. His friend therefore did not go to college, and Haskins was enraged by that fact. So, when he was in a situation to start recruiting players, the best players he could get were black, but he's literally psychologically, totally colorblind. To this day his three best friends are Chinese, Black and Mexican. There's just something about him that is so special that way, so kind of forward thinking, but he definitely does not want credit for it and doesn't accept it.

TeenHollywood: That's a cool attitude. After the real players saw the film during the premiere what did they say to you?

Josh: The first time they saw it they were almost speechless and they were so emotionally overwhelmed by it in a way, that it took a couple of different screenings for them to be able to just really look at it so they didn't really say anything. I think all of them have seen it three or four times now, and now they can talk about it a little bit. It's so tremendously important to them. They say 'you have no idea, because you don't know what we went through – how much this means to us, how important telling this event of our lives is,' We're actors portraying something, as opposed to the ones who lived it.

TeenHollywood: Can you talk about the research that you did for this – you spoke with the real Haskins as an older man, but you're playing him as a young man.

Josh: You know, that's a very interesting point. That was a hard thing to get my head around. I had sort of a cocoon in my trailer of hundreds and hundreds of images from that 1966 season, and some stuff racially from the country as well. Haskins and I would actually disagree about his own life. He would say, 'I didn't ever wear a tie, and I always wore cowboy boots,' and I'd say, 'You know, Don, that's not true. Once you won the national championship that's true.' But what I had to figure out was how to play him pre-national championship, because there's a big difference between the respect that someone garners who is literally a girl's basketball coach, living in a men's dorm, to a national champion. It was like one year and he was a different man, and he had a different confidence about him after that.

TeenHollywood: Did you talk with people he worked with?

Josh: I had his assistant coach, who is now the head coach at USC, this guy Tim Floyd, and Floyd was with Haskins for seven years, and Floyd was with me almost every single day, talking to me about the way that Haskins' coached and the way that Haskins was such a particularly eccentric coach in a sense. The way that he moved, the way he calls timeout, and there's a lot of stuff that didn't make it into the movie where he would particularly harass referees in this very, very funny way, that would be so sarcastic to listen to. It would be fantastic and humorous and even kind of showy, but when it's actually coming at you it's even painful at times.

TeenHollywood: According to the movie, he was really rough with his players too.

Josh: He did the same thing with his own players, where there was an intensity that is ferocious, and unrelenting, and yet at the same time he can be extremely lovely off the court. And my problem was the times I spent with him, he was just so great, so fun and so playful, and so it was like, 'Wait a second, I heard that your players hated you.' They hated him. And yet, this is a man who is bringing young black men down to Texas in the 1960's and literally bringing their mothers to be there to basically say, 'You respect this man. You play for him, you get good grades because of him.' So he's an odd combination of this power and anger and also charisma.

TeenHollywood: Was there something within himself that he had to prove?

Josh: Yeah. He would talk to me about how he wished he wasn't that way so much. He would talk about how he would go take two six-packs straight out to the middle of the desert and just go through every single moment of the game, even when they won. It's just that his competitive spirit is extraordinary.

TeenHollywood: I heard you put on a lot of weight for the role.

Josh: I actually put on 43 pounds to the point where Haskins was angry at me because he said I was going to make him look fat. I was like, 'Oh come on, you were fat.' He goes, 'No, no, I wasn't this fat.' When I started filming I was really in almost the same shape as the guys, and it wasn't right physically because Haskins is a big guy, he's a big, intimidating coach, and there's a definite difference between athleticism of his players and him.

TeenHollywood: How did you put on the weight?

Josh: It was just all beer, tequila and New Orleans food! [laughs]. And it was Haskins that came to me the first moment I met him and said, 'if you're going to play me, you'd better start drinking beer'. It's way harder to play a real person and it's really harder to play a real person who is there watching you.

TeenHollywood: Did he tell you any other stories about what he went through that you weren't able to get into the movie, some of the personal problems that he had?

Josh: Well, you're definitely trying to present the harshness of it without having it be too in your face. But [when he used the African-Americans as his starting team] some people threatened violence against his children is the truth of the matter. And the thing that's so exceptional about what he did is that he kept going, and I think that's incredibly difficult when someone is saying 'we're going to hurt or take your baby'. That is what they said to him and to his wife.

TeenHollywood: That's horrible. His wife must have been pretty brave too.

Josh: Mary protected him for a while and then got to the point where she no longer could, because he didn't realize how much it was coming at her, and she was such a support figure, which is I think one of the nice elements of the story. She never was someone who was nagging or anything, she was constantly saying to him, 'I believe in you, I believe in this,' so when he found out, he was actually very, very angry at her, because he was scared. He was scared enough for his players, but when it was about his children, he realized what he was up against.

TeenHollywood: Did you just sustain the character on set because you needed that tension between you and the players or did you let it go and just be "Josh"?

Josh: I honestly kept a bit of a separation, because Haskins himself had to keep a strong separation, partly because he's not that much different in age, and I'm not that much different in age from the actors, yet he's the coach, the father figure so I also had to do that. I was pretty much in character. We went out to dinner before we started shooting once, and kind of had a conversation saying, 'Look guys, this is what I'm going to do, I'm going to come at you very hard, so don't take it personally.' And then we never had much of an issue that way though, because they were very respectful. Everyone was on the same journey, and everyone really respected the story and the movie, and they were very committed. They are young actors and some of them don't have a lot of experience so they were very excited and proud to be there.

TeenHollywood: The guys playing the team seemed to have a lot of fun.

Josh: These guys were having an amazing time if you talk to them. They were very close and they played and partied like madmen, and the only thing that would get to me sometimes is that I felt every once in awhile you'd walk in and there'd be fifteen of them asleep on the basketball court literally, you know, 'Get up!' They were up all night, and that was the point, I was like, 'Guys, come on, come on.' But mostly people were pretty committed to this, and at times they would come and ask for little pieces of advice. They were very unified together in terms of helping each other, which is very special for a movie.

TeenHollywood: Okay, the important stuff.. How did you hurt your hand?

Josh: Doing Poseidon, yeah. I tore the muscle so the muscle actually rolled back up into my thumb and they had to put two two-inch slits on either side. Go in and rebuild it, and reconnect it through surgery.

TeenHollywood: Ewwwww. Other than that, how was shooting that film?

Josh: Poseidon was physically insanely difficult. The director said 'I do not want to have a movie that relies on CGI, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to have real situations'. When you watch the movie you're going see the walls are imploding from the pressure of the water, and there are massive canons of water shooting at us, there are fires and all of it's real. First of all, you're under water for massive chunks of time, so you're sharing the germs and bacteria with a crew of two hundred people.

TeenHollywood: Again..ewwwww.

Josh: Yeah. Everyone was very sick for about four months of a six month shoot. And then physically everyone kept being hurt, and there's not much you can do about it. It was as safe as you possibly could make it , but you can't create situations where they look that dangerous and they're totally safe. The fire and the pressure of the water consistently kept causing injuries is the truth of the matter.

TeenHollywood: Were you a good swimmer before?

Josh: Yeah, you had to be.

TeenHollywood: Is director Wolfgang Petersen a bit like Don Haskins?

Josh: He is in a sense that he's obsessive, but he's very, very lovely, so it's a funny mix where I'd go to him and be like, 'It's going to kill me.' And he'd be like, 'Yeah, yeah, I'm so sorry, let's go again.' I'd be like, 'Wolfgang, I'm really scared, I really am genuinely afraid that someone is going to be very badly hurt,' and he'd be like, 'We just need one more.'

TeenHollywood: Whoa! Is the storyline the same as the original movie?

Josh: It's absolutely not. That's one of the things that we all realized. We have a movie that is revered by people, and that many people love, and so from the beginning, Wolfgang said 'we've got to make a totally different movie. We've got to have a movie that is the same structure in that the cruise ship gets hit by a wave on New Year's Eve, and everything else about it is different'. I'm sure some people will say there's a whole religious element to the book and the first movie, that isn't in the second movie.

TeenHollywood: Who do you play in it?

Josh: I play this man called (John) Dylan who is a poker hustler. It would be similar to Gene Hackman's character in terms of what he does through the whole thing. But, this is a very roguish, maybe self-involved personality, who does not want to save everyone but he ends up growing tremendously because he starts to care for the people that he's going through the ship with. But unlike Gene Hackman, he's totally not a man of God. He's quite the opposite. He's maybe not even a good guy in a way, but is becoming much better because of what is happening to him.

TeenHollywood: Where did you get your Texas accent, because I come from 200 miles from El Paso, and it sounded real to me.

Josh: [smiling] I just tried to figure out what Haskins sounded like then as opposed to now a little bit.

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Lynn Barker is a Hollywood-based entertainment journalist and produced screenwriter.