“I was awful,” Mr. Lucas said. “I looked at it and I thought, ‘You know, you can’t play with these guys you want to play with right now—they would blow you down.’”
SO WHAT DOES a young actor in L.A. do to earn his chops?
“That to me was really coming to New York; that to me was Julliard and these different consortium schools where you come and you get your ass kicked,” he said.
“I started over in a way, and I lived in a 300-square-foot apartment on West Fourth and Sixth for 11 years,” he said. “I was 21.” He made a living doing bit parts and odd jobs, and as much Shakespeare in the Parking Lot as time would allow—as it turned out, Parker Lewis Can’t Lose on your résumé actually counts as a strike against you in the theater world.
Eventually, he broke through on the stage landing the part of the gay Judas in Terrence McNally’s controversial Corpus Christi.
His big Big Screen break would come in 2000, playing another bad guy, Craig McDermott in American Psycho.
Along the way, he fell in love with New York: the energy, the spontaneity of it! A new adventure around every corner—one night he got brutally mugged by three men! Or worse, the romance!
“There’s this place I really like down by the World Trade Center, it’s this section of blue lights,” he tells me, grinning. There is a certain self-aware element to his trademark grin that only enhances its wonderful naughtiness. “I met this girl and it was years ago, and it was that moment in that ultimate romantic part of the city she literally turns and looks at me and says, ‘You’re not gonna kiss me, are you?’ And I was like, ‘Well, that’s kind of why we came down here,’” And she was like, ‘Oh my God you brought me to the most romantic place in the city to kiss me, it’s so obvious, I can’t even do it now.’ And she just walks away. It was just one of those moments where I was like, ‘What’s wrong with you? This is the romantic moment.’”
Despite dishonoring the blue lights of Battery Park, Mr. Lucas’ charm has worked wonders in Tinseltown: He’s been linked to Salma Hayek and Anne Hathaway and is currently courting the comely Rachel McAdams.
To date, Mr. Lucas is still probably best known for his role as Reese Witherspoon’s hunky high-school sweetheart in 2002’s Sweet Home Alabama. The success of that film sent him running scared.
“I got offered all these terrible romantic comedies, and I didn’t do any of them and I went and did these small, dark independent movies, and so now everything is about small, dark independent films,” he said.
He feels that with Death in Love, he’s taken the whole exploring the dark side to the “nth degree.”
In order to get into character, Mr. Lucas committed to being crazy for 25 days. Like the character, he avoided all things beneficial or healthy.
“I tried to do everything to be beaten and rundown, a sense of feeling that pain. I purposefully did not do yoga or go to the dog park or hang out in bright, beautiful places.”
He even reached out to some of the erotic performers at the Box, the burlesque nightclub he helped found with his close friend Simon Hammerstein, in order to get closer to his character’s perverse pathology.
“When you speak to them,” he said, referring to such performers as the woman who dazzles crowds by wrapping her pet dog around her body like a boa constrictor, “you find real reasons—what it was they’ve been through in their lives—that makes them perform the type of acts that they do.”
And then, about-face.
“The minute the movie was done, I really tried to get out of it to get back and do exactly what I’ve been talking about with you,” he said, which is putting some sense of humor and stability and happiness and sanity back into his life. “Funnily enough, I didn’t have my dog yet. I got my dog right after making the movie. That was kind of the reason why, to commit to something beautiful.”
He also switched from Bikram yoga, which is intense hot yoga, to Kundalini yoga. Sometimes, he says, “it’s as esoteric as sitting there with your hands in a strange posture and just quietly breathing.
“It’s funny, I was doing yoga the other day, and it must have been a fire truck that pulled up and started blasting its horn because the cars wouldn’t move out of its way, and I actually burst out laughing, ’cause I was like, ‘This is incredible.’ I was like, ‘Thank God I’m doing yoga right now, because otherwise I might not be laughing, I might be screaming.’”
Mr. Lucas begins his mornings with a trip to this cool dog park on Grand Street with Loki, whom he rescued from a shelter in Harlem.
“He’s a weird mix. Everyone thinks he’s a border collie, but he’s a chow, and an Akita, and an Irish setter, and a German Shepherd. And he actually is if you start to get to know him.”
Death in Love wrapped nearly two years ago, but—while that role might have affected him more than others—his fascination with villains continued: Only the night before, he had finished shooting an indie film, written by New York actor and perpetual student-auteur James Franco, in which he plays an eccentric crime boss who rules a prostitution ring with an iron fist. Well, it may not be good-natured, but it’s a long way from Death in Love.
“You cannot overstate how dangerous that movie is, how disturbing it is and how painful it is,” he said. “It has actually caused people to leave the movie screaming.”
Now, when he’s reading scripts and anyone rapes or kills anyone else, he puts it down and says, “Not for me.”
“I’m kind of searching for my Matthew McConaughey career,” he said. “In a way, I’m more connected to playing in that way right now, and also, I think, to go along with the Obama mentality of putting hope out into the world, I’m a little concerned about putting dark material out into the world,” he said. “I feel like I’ve done a lot of it.”
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