By Bud Elder
It has been said that Hollywood is, at its heart, a family town. Generations of moviegoers have grown up alongside clans such as the Hustons, the Fondas, the Douglases and the Bridges. Then there’s the artificial lineage – everyone from Paul Newman to Dennis Hopper and Leonardo Di Caprio were to have replaced James Dean. Brando’s heirs include Hoffman, Pacino and De Niro. Is Jack Nicholson our generation’s Cagney or Bogart?
Bearing this in mind, we’re about to make a bold pronouncement: James Marsden, our August DOK cover, is a direct descendant, cinematically speaking, of Clark Gable, the King of Hollywood.
Upon first glance, there are obvious similarities – both are impossibly handsome leading men who rely on a mix of deep-seated confidence and wicked charm and wit to imbue their characters with a sense of masculinity that can cause the fluttering of hearts for one gender and grudging admiration from the other. But it doesn’t stop there. Gable and Marsden have Oklahoma heritage, and are adept at whatever genre is put before them, from musicals (Gable in a boater and cane, singing and dancing in “Idiot’s Delight”) to romantic comedies and serious drama.
Actually, our comparison is not the first time Marsden and Gable have been linked – several years ago, for its “Hollywood” issue, “Vanity Fair” posed Marsden as Gable, alongside actress Rose Byrne as Claudette Colbert in a recreated scene from “It Happened One Night.”
James Paul Marsden was born in Stillwater, Oklahoma on September 18, 1973; he was educated at Hefner Middle School and bitten by the acting bug while at Putnam City North High School.
“It was my mother who convinced me to take drama class at North, which I did because I thought it would be an easy ‘A,’” Marsden said. “Up until then, I had made a pitiful stab at sports, because all the jocks found me amusing.”
Under the tutelage of Rosemary Martinez Baker, Marsden appeared in musicals such as
“Good News” and “Bye Bye Birdie,” even landing on local television as a student anchor on the popular “Good Morning Oklahoma” program, hosted by Ben and Butch McCain.
“I found my own inner voice on the stage at Putnam North High School,” Marsden said. “I watched my confidence and my grades grow, made relationships that I still enjoy, and loved every minute of it.”
Now that he breathes the rarefied air of a name above the movie title, Marsden says that acting peers envy his high school experience.
“I’m forever finding myself talking about the wonderful theatrical training I received when I was at North,” he said. “I find more and more that my co-stars and other workers didn’t have that same type of grounding experience in their lives.”
After three semesters at OSU studying broadcast journalism, Marsden, claiming he was “too dumb to know any better,” decided to give in to his performing instincts and head west to L.A.
“I look back now and see that, through my ignorance at the time, I just didn’t know how far I could fall,” he said. “My father knew an agent who pretty much took me on immediately – I was very, very lucky.”
After a respectable career in television, including regular stints on “Party of Five” and “Ally McBeal,” Marsden hit the big screen, big time, landing the role of Cyclops in the then much anticipated film version of the “X-Men” comic books. It was a career-making role, and Marsden’s confident, assured portrayal was a major component to the success of the film, and the two sequels that followed.
Those of lesser talent might have parlayed the Cyclops role into a regular string of one-dimensional superhero characters that would have offered them an unending amount of work, along with an oversized paycheck. That this was not the case was proven with Marsden’s sympathetic portrayal of what could have been the thankless third-wheel, Ralph Bellamy-like role in “Superman Returns.”
From there, Marsden took his stab at classic leading man status in such films as “The Notebook” and “27 Dresses.” In the latter film, Marsden channels his inner Gable to play a reporter following the antics of perpetual bride-to-be Katherine Heigl. The picture is a blatant Valentine to every cute “boy meets girl” story from “It Happened One Night” to “Woman of the Year,” “Pillow Talk” and “Pretty Woman.”
A lesser talent might have gone on autopilot until these types of roles had been outgrown. Not so Marsden, who still had a few tricks up his sleeve.
With the one-two punch of “Hairspray” and “Enchanted,” Marsden, singing and dancing with a burst of talent usually reserved for Broadway, starred in musicals for the first time since wowing audiences in the Putnam North production of “Bye Bye Birdie.”
“When you throw yourself into a high energy musical like this, colorful with ridiculous costumes, I find the more extreme you take it, the easier it is – if you’re singing and dancing, it gives you less time to be neurotic about the acting,” he said. “Maybe it’s because I was so excited to finally do a musical that I enjoyed every minute of it. On every job I’ve ever done, like with the cast from ‘X-Men,’ the actors were always asking ‘when are we going to get you on stage doing a musical or something?’ I remember Hugh Jackman, who starred in “Oklahoma!” saying, ‘Mate, let’s do a musical together.’”
Spitting in the eye of conventional wisdom that said musicals were box office poison, both “Hairspray” and “Enchanted” were so successful that sequels are in the works for both.
That Marsden again wanted to flex his acting chops became evident with his next picture, “The Box,” directed by cult filmmaker Richard Kelley (“Donnie Darko”) and co-starring Cameron Diaz and Frank Langella.
While the picture achieved its share of derision from both audiences and critics, Film Comment magazine, along with other discerning viewers, felt that “The Box” was a picture that would grow in stature over time.
“From this moral ‘thought experiment,’ ‘The Box’ embarks on another delirious journey through the looking glass wormhole into the hidden dimensions underneath our so-called reality,” it said in a starred review. “The film explores the ethical, existential and metaphysical consequences of being involved, even peripherally, in another’s death.”
Marsden has lately returned to the comic fold, taking the role of Oscar, the accidentally strung-out husband in the 2010 remake of the English film “Death at a Funeral,” directed by renowned playwright Neil LaBute. When casting news was announced for the film with Marsden listed in the role, one wondered whether he would go “full monty” in the role, as it was acted in the original.
“I worked out extra hard before we shot that scene,” Marsden said, crossing yet another
threshold that bears evidence of his giving his “all” to a role.
Marsden’s home life is a studio publicist’s dream – happily married since 2000 to Lisa Linde, with two children, Jack and Mary. Marsden’s father-in-law, Dennis Linde, is a certified songwriting legend, having penned such hits as Elvis Presley’s smash, “Burning Love.”
So, how does Marsden balance a full-blown movie career with that of being a devoted
husband and father?
“Lisa and I have what we call a ‘three week rule,’ Marsden said. “No matter what part of the world I happen to be shooting in, I’m home in at least three weeks.”
In April, Marsden returned to his old haunts to be inducted into the Putnam City School Foundation Annual Wall of Fame. Before being honored at an induction banquet, he spent a morning of Q and A with students.
Standing on his old stage for the first time in many years, Marsden defined the term “good sport” as he fielded questions from those wishing to follow his theatrical footsteps.
“As a parent now myself, I wonder constantly what went through the minds of my mother and father when I announced what I wanted to do with my life,” Marsden said. “I will tell you that if you have a true passion for what you do, and it is recognized by your friends and family, you’re being dishonest with yourself if you do not follow through.”
With two films recently wrapped – “Nailed,” directed by David O. Russell (“Three Kings”) and a Rod Lurie-directed remake of the Sam Peckinpah classic “Straw Dogs” co-starring Kate Bosworth – Marsden is a true hybrid in the tradition of the Oklahomans who have gone before him on the silver screen. He can command a film as a leading actor, much like James Garner or Dale Robertson, or steal a movie in a character role à la Van Heflin or Tony Randall.
Whatever he chooses to do with the rest of his career, however, this much is evident – James Marsden is an uncommonly talented human being, who uses his celebrity not as a platform for histrionics, but as one to explore, learn, create and entertain. To say he’s a good guy is simply not enough – he is just about everything, in both his personal and professional life, that Oklahoma, and America, wants its stars to be.
All hail the new King.
