NEW YORK — Think playing gay in a movie is a risky career move? How about playing gay in a play about a closeted gay actor who’s about to play gay in a movie? Cat got your tongue?
It certainly had Tom Everett Scott’s when he found out, on the Vancouver set of his hit summer TV show “Saved,” that Douglas Carter Beane had offered him a lead in the Broadway run of his play “The Little Dog Laughed,” opening tonight at the Cort Theatre.
“We shot the rest of the day, and I just couldn’t stop thinking about Broadway,” says the actor, who is making his debut on the Great White Way.
Scott, 36, who grew up in a small town in Massachusetts, first encountered Broadway in high school on a trip to New York with his parents to see “The Fantasticks.” In “Little Dog,” which had a critically acclaimed off-Broadway run last winter, Scott stars as Mitchell, a red-hot movie star with a problematic predilection for other men. Julie White plays his agent, Diane, obsessed with keeping her client in the closet and his career on the rise. When Mitchell falls in love with a young male escort (Johnny Galecki), the plot thickens.
As part of his preparation, Scott hired a trainer and nutritionist, intent on getting into the best physical shape of his life. But it wasn’t all brutal workouts: Scott also felt that some grooming was in order for him to fully embody his character.
“I decided I wanted to pamper myself, you know manis and pedis, which I’d never done before and which I f—-ing love!” he says, down on the spa lingo.
And though Scott is straight (and married with two kids, who live in Los Angeles), he has had experience with a coming out of sorts. While in high school he acted in plays, and his senior yearbook future goal declared he wanted “to be a star of stage, screen and film.” But when he headed off to Syracuse University, it was not as a drama major.
“I got accepted to their communications program because I wasn’t accepting the fact that I was going to be an actor,” recalls Scott. “I wanted to do it, but I didn’t know how to say it or do it….I thought I could get communications past my parents and then everyone would get on board, and then somehow I’d get into acting.”
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He moved to New York after graduation and did just that, landing his breakout role 10 years ago in Tom Hanks’ directorial film debut “That Thing You Do.” It is a film for which he is still probably most recognized and certainly an experience that helped him channel Mitchell’s feelings of being a movie star on the brink.
“I think after ‘That Thing You Do’ I made a couple of movies I maybe shouldn’t have made,” he says. “At that point I wasn’t even knowledgeable enough to be afraid I was making the wrong movie. I had people telling me that I was bulletproof and that it wouldn’t matter what movie I made. Horrible advice.”
But the film career that could have been is not something about which the actor waxes nostalgic or regretful.
“It’s hard to stay on top and keep making great movies and keep getting chosen for the right stuff,” says Scott. “You’re hot for a minute. If you’re hot for longer than that, that’s really cool.”