Ray Pride

Second time's a charm: Robert Luketic's debut feature, "Legally Blonde" wasn't a fluke.

Luketic extends the goofy comic timing and invention he demonstrated in that movie with the carefully calibrated silliness of "Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!" A romantic triangle that gets turned twice in the course of the comedy, "Tad" pits a West Virginia Piggly Wiggly manager (Topher Grace, from television's"That '70s Show") against a bad-boy movie star (Josh Duhamel) for the affections of the longtime love (and coworker) he's never gotten the nerve to ask out (Kate Bosworth). It's genre material, expertly put through the paces, with unexpectedly masterful timing, and without a shred of condescension to any of the characters. (They're supported by Sean Hayes and Nathan Lane as Tad's manager and agent, both named Richard Levy, and Ginnipher Goodwin, a delight of a sidekick at the PW.)

"The best thing about the movie that the plot is so straightforward and so driven," Grace tells me when I ask if it's too simple, too sweet. "You can tell from the poster exactly where it's going. I think especially with a comedy, it's important to be really straightforward."

If someone called it predictable--"I'd like to meet those people," Grace interjects with his sideways grin. He laughs. We know who's going to get the girl. "I think you're absolutely right and I think that is one of the things we talked about setting out. It's not that these movies aren't supposed to be predictable, in fact, they're, they're, I mean, they're formula," he says in his familiar crisscrossing comic rhythms. "I think when people mess with how predictable these movies are, they come up with a bad result. I do think that it's about the craftsmanship and making the best version of that story that's been told to date."

There's a discomfiting scene where Grace's character confronts Tad in the men's room of a bar, and he threatens him, "I'll tear you to pieces with my bare hands or vicious rhetoric!" "The thing that's really interesting, which you're touching on, is that I think a lot of people play that role, the quintessential `friend' role, the other guy, with weakness or some kind of fault. Too something. It was really important to me from the get-go that he not be a victim of anything but circumstance. Because it's the worst circumstance ever. It's like Brad Pitt just came to town. And he's dating the girl you're about to finally ask out. To me, it was important. In every scene, Pete has a lot of strength and that was really important to me."

Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum dubbed Grace the "next Tom Hanks." "I just hope she's right!" He goes through several sheepish smiles. "Y'know, no. It was like... I don't think... You know..." He stammers charmingly. "But I, I... I think, what she was referring to more were people who started on sitcoms who made the transition. I hope that's true--certainly I'm working very hard to have an afterlife. `70s' is like the greatest experience I've had in my life and I would continue doing it forever if I thought it would actually continue forever. This film is a romantic comedy, but I think I got to do what I love to do in '70s', balancing comedy with real heart. But that to me, why do a role where you can't play both? There' s no purpose."

Grace didn't get to work with Nathan Lane, but indirectly, Lane led Grace's transition from being a teen tennis fanatic to a working actor. "I was discovered in high school for `70s.' I was in `A Funny thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,' and I made sure to come to set when he was working. I told him that it was basically a rip-off of what I had seen him do on Broadway like the year before, so I said, `Thank you for my career!'"

But he also strategizes. "When I was trying to get the part in `Tad', I went in and made this speech the first day with these DreamWorks execs, I'd just read the script a second time, I pored over it, I said, `There are two guys in this life. There's the guy you wanna be and the guy you are.' And this film is great, because it actually has both of those guys in it and I get which guy I am. It's Tom Hanks versus Tom Cruise. You only get to be one of those guys!"

And what kind of guy is his director? "He breathes this genre. Whatever David Lean is to epics, Robert Luketic is to romantic comedies," Grace gushes. "He always walks in, adds that little touch that would make the whole scene. When I saw `Legally Blonde,' I was on an airplane, and I was like, `Jesus! This is really smart and really funny.' It didn't rope me into the theater, but..."

Even stammering, Grace is funny. Can you learn comic timing? "I think you just have it. I don't think you can learn comic timing. I think a sense of humor is a sense of self. It's not really so much about being funny, it's more about your sense of the world and what you take seriously and what you don't."

Did he have to research a character who couldn't tell a girl he loved her? "Are you kidding? That's my whole life. I went to this co-ed boarding school, that's how I did research for this role. I'm like him; I'm strong about it! I would hope that Topher, if he weren't in this film--sorry to speak about myself in the third person--would actually go watch it..."

Or watch it on a plane? He grins, shrugs, winningly, a measure of Hanks-like self-deprecation. "Well, Topher's a dick sometimes."

"Win a Date with Tad Hamilton" opens Friday.

(2004-01-20)

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