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John Corbett is bullish on acting, making music |
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Written by Luaine Lee, MCT
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Tuesday, 30 January 2007 |
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It be not be music to most women's ears, but the hunky John Corbett from "Northern Exposure," "Sex and the City" and "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" says he's not the marrying kind.
That doesn't mean he eschews romance. In fact, Corbett and actress Bo Derek have been an item for some time. She's waiting for him at the hotel where we conducted this interview.
"I think people who want to have children should think about getting married first, that's always a good thing to do," he says, choosing a side table in the lobby lounge. "But if you're not a person who wants to have children, I don't think the pressure to being married should be so much for you, if you don't think you're going to be a parent."
Corbett, who arrived at acting relatively late in life, does things pretty much his way. Not encumbered by the need to plot out his career, he says, "I'm an only child. I've always been a little different doing whatever I wanted."
When he first told his family that he was going to try acting, they simply thought it was a passing fancy.
"I worked in a steel factory and got hurt and didn't have a job. And the next thing they knew I was in `Hair.' They saw me as a welder who was singing and dancing."
A rack of pipes careened off the assembly line, colliding with Corbett and injuring his back. It was enough to send him off to Cerritos Junior College in Southern California to try his hand at acting. "I did about four or five plays at the junior college and a year later I moved to Hollywood and tried to get an agent and enrolled in workshops and did extra work, got commercials which put some bread on the table," he recalls.
He was already 25 and living with four UCLA students in a two-bedroom apartment in Westwood. "I was in the bedroom with three twin beds. I lived that way for a year," he says.
"In the beginning it was tough. There was a lot of rejection, but you don't really know what you're doing in the beginning. You're a young actor and you think you're good, but you're really not because you're just starting out and the answer is 'No thanks' more than it is 'You're welcome.' I'm very tall, 6-5, so height was a little bit of a disadvantage because a lot of leading men aren't 6 feet tall and leading ladies tend to be 5-6 or -7," says Corbett, who's dressed in a blue denim shirt and Levi's.
But he wasn't deterred. "I had been working in the steel factory for six years. I always found a way to make money, always knew how to get a job and make cash.
I sold insulation door-to-door, introduced acts at the Magic Castle (a private Hollywood club featuring magicians). I had to quit that job to do 'Northern Exposure.' I'm not afraid to work. I like to work."
In his latest foray into TV, in Lifetime's "Nora Roberts' Montana Sky," Corbett plays a rancher who also knows how to work. When his neighbor dies, he finds himself overseeing both ranches and interacting with the three sisters who inherit the land. The movie premieres Feb. 5.
For all his considerable luck in acting, Corbett has spent the last two years concentrating on a music career. He managed to go to Nashville with his band, aptly named the John Corbett Band, cut an album, and even make it to the country charts. If acting is his living, music is his passion, he says.
"I was always sort of waiting for the phone to stop ringing a little bit so I could free myself up (for music). At one point I finished all my commitments to act and didn't have anything on the horizon so I thought, 'Now's the time to go to Nashville and make my record.' I said I was going to put two years aside so I wouldn't be distracted from anything that came along and that sort of happened. I did three projects in that two years, but whenever they came along they weren't distractions. Like this movie; they just fit in."
He and his band toured the U.S. performing in 600-700 seat theaters, five nights a week. "I did over 200 shows in the last year," he says, "traveling with four guys in a van — driving six, seven, eight hours a day. And I love it.
"I go into everything full thrust," he says, leaning forward. "I always think anything I do is going to win an Emmy, a Golden Globe and an Academy Award. If I make a record I'm sure it's going to make a Grammy. You could say I'm an optimist. If I have doubts I usually pull out and say, `Y'know, this isn't going to happen.' I can't work on something I have doubts about, for sure. Things will tank and take a dive and good shows like `Northern Exposure' have to end. You see the end coming and then you start to have your doubts that the show's not going to be at the level that it used to be.
"Things don't go on forever, especially TV shows. You get five or six seasons out of a TV show you're damn lucky, and we had five or six great seasons of `Northern Exposure' and you hope the universe sends something else your way. And it did. I started the '90s with 'Northern Exposure' and started 2000 with 'Sex and the City' and got to be on another sort of groundbreaking great show for two or three seasons."
© 2007, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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