Dermot Mulroney braves the cold for “The Grey,” “Big Miracle”

Posted by brandy

on February 3, 2012M at 8:41 am

Cast member Dermot Mulroney arrives at the premiere of "J. Edgar" during the Opening Night Gala of AFI FEST 2011 in Los Angeles, on Nov. 3, 2011. AP photo

A version of this story appears in Friday’s Weekend Look section of The Oklahoman.

Dermot Mulroney braves the cold for “The Grey,” “Big Miracle”
The prolific actor has supporting roles in the harrowing survival thriller about marauding wolves, which was last weekend’s top movie at the box office, and the uplifting fact-based adventure about stranded whales, which opens Friday.

LOS ANGELES — Dermot Mulroney braved arctic temperatures for nearly six months to make two very different movies about man’s relationship with his fellow creatures.

In the harrowing existential thriller “The Grey,” last weekend’s top movie at the domestic box office, he plays one of a small group of plane crash survivors hunted by gray wolves through the Alaskan wilderness. In the fact-based PG-rated romantic adventure “Big Miracle,” opening today, he has a supporting role as a National Guard commander trying to rescue three gray whales stranded off the coast of Barrow, Alaska.

“I can tell you this: all the mammals that live above the 40^th parallel are friends of mine, whales and wolves alike,” Mulroney said with a smile during recent interviews at the Four Seasons Hotel.

“I think I’m the northern mammal guy this season, so I’m pleased.”

While the prolific Mulroney, 48, has earned nearly 75 film and television credits since the mid-1980s, as a leading man, he is best known for the romantic comedies “My Best Friend’s Wedding” (1997) and “The Wedding Date” (2005). He has frequently appeared in Westerns, including 1988’s “Young Guns” and 1994’s “The Last Outlaw” and “Bad Girls.” He also has played cops in several films, including 1995’s “Copy Cat,” 2007’s “Zodiac” and 2011’s “J. Edgar,” in which he portrayed Col. Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf, an Army veteran who became the first superintendent of the New Jersey State Police and father of Gen. “Stormin’ Norman” Schwarzkopf.

Dermot Mulroney and Ted Danson appear in a scene from "Big Miracle." Universal Pictures photo

Fact-based drama

In “Big Miracle,” Mulroney plays another real-life military man, National Guard commander Col. Scott Boyer, a fictionalized version of Alaskan guardsman the late Scott Carroll. The movie is a dramatization of the true story of a family of whales that gets trapped by rapidly forming ice in the Arctic Circle and how their plight brings together Cold War superpowers the United States and Soviet Union for 1988’s Operation Breakthrough.

Loosely based on Thomas Rose’s 1989 book “Freeing the Whales,” “Big Miracle” stars Drew Barrymore as an animal activist and John Krasinski as her ex-boyfriend, a local news reporter.

As Boyer, Mulroney plays the colonel initially tasked with using a huge hoverbarge to puncture holes in the ice for the whales; when that fails, he recommends reaching out the USSR and asking the Soviets to use an icebreaker ship to save the massive mammals. It’s also another role with romance for Mulroney: In real life, Col. Carroll and White House executive assistant Bonnie Mersinger (Vinessa Shaw plays the character, given the fictional name Kelly Meyers) connected by phone during the mission and eventually met in person, fell in love and got married.

Director Ken Kwapis was determined to shoot “Big Miracle” entirely in Alaska. Since filming in the northernmost city in the U.S. wasn’t feasible, the production team recreated the Barrow ice field and portions of the town itself in Anchorage. Although the locals refer to Anchorage as a “banana belt” city because of its comparatively mild weather, Mulroney said the temperatures were still frigid but ultimately good preparation for making “The Grey.”

“I had just done a three-month stretch in Anchorage right before this movie on ‘Big Miracle’ … so I was the one at the rehearsals going ‘Fine. I got this. I don’t know about you and I don’t know about you, but I know how to work in the cold.’ So I did six months in zero and subzero temperatures,” he said.

From left, Dallas Roberts, Dermot Mulroney, Liam Neeson and Nonso Anozie share a scene from "The Grey." Open Road Films photo

Mythical thriller

In “The Grey,” the native Virginian plays Talget, a thoughtful family man among a team of oil refinery workers that gets stranded in the far-flung Alaskan tundra after their plane crashes. Under the leadership of taciturn sharpshooter Ottway (Liam Neeson), the survivors face prowling wolves, dangerous cold and rugged terrain. For the cast and crew, making the survival drama meant enduring hip-deep snow, howling winds and 40-below-zero temperatures on an isolated mountain in British Columbia, Canada.

Getting cold and dirty in the wilderness was part of the appeal of the role, said Mulroney, who is almost unrecognizable in thick glasses and an even thicker beard in “The Grey.”

“We were all ready to do something other than the drawing-room dramas. And for me it’s the perfect combination because there are aspects of this that are dramatic, even deeply moving scenes as a part of this wild, hell-ride thriller. It’s a pretty rare combination,” Mulroney said, sitting alongside “The Grey” co-star Dallas Roberts.

“I’m not called in to go in for action movies very frequently, but I would be called in for a philosophical discourse film where you sit around and you talk about the meaning of life. This one has both, so you’re reading it thinking, ‘Is he really writing two pages for Talget on page 70? Do we really get to sit down and act?’ So all of us and probably dozens if not a hundred other actors were banging on this guy’s (director/co-writer Joe Carnahan) door to get these parts.”

While the whales in “Big Miracle” are sympathetic creatures, the wolves in “The Grey” are larger-than-life enemies. Mulroney said they are a meant to represent the big, bad wolves of lore.

“If people are somehow going to protest that we’re wolf-hating, then I think they’re looking at it the wrong way,” he said. “The film is mythic, and if there were ever a myth that we all have a sense in our core about, it’s that thing out there in the woods. You know, the Grimm Brothers made it a wolf. … James Cameron made it an alien, and (Steven) Spielberg made it a shark. This is just that and only that.”

At the end of his arctic adventures, the Los Angeles resident said he didn’t mind braving the cold for his work because it made achieving authenticity that much easier.

“I think acting is really hard, so whenever it seems like it’s easy, I’m so relieved,” he said. “You were given everything that you needed in order to feel like you were doing what it would really feel like, instead of like stretching for something … so that for an actor means it’s easy.”

-BAM

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