(Note: Strong Scientology vibes on this one, I’d say.)


You could reasonably call it a stroke of genius. After working together on 2015’s I’ll See You in My Dreams, writer-director Brett Haley realized that audiences were more than ready for a straight-up 90 minutes of Sam Elliott. And that’s what we get with The Hero, opening Friday (June 30), a film that’s prompted some serious gushing about the actor’s emergence, after 49 years in the business, from a place just a little left of the spotlight. 

“Tell me about it,” growls the man himself, during a call to the Georgia Straight from Los Angeles. “I dunno, I kinda shake my head about it, but, you know—it’s better to have ’em saying nice things about you than not. I just think it’s important to keep it in the proper perspective. It’s pretty heady to buy into a lot of really wonderful things that people are saying to you, or about you.” Elliott is quick to add that “a lot of us actors would love to have anyone write a screenplay for them,” and it’s to Haley’s further credit, not to mention his commercial instincts, that he fashioned a leading role tailored to his star’s deeply ingrained image as “the iconic westerner”. 

Elliott plays Lee Hayden in the low-key character piece, a 71-year-old cowboy actor now reduced to doing voice-over work for barbecue-chicken sauce. A cancer diagnosis and an unexpected surge in public interest compels the ornery old pothead to try and make amends with his fractured family, all while dealing with the equally unexpected attention of a woman half his age and a real shot at career revival. Elliott’s own genius lies in the way he suggests volcanic emotional activity behind Hayden’s tough-guy squint, leaving us to nervously await the explosion.

“I think at 72 it’s easier for that emotional stuff to come to the surface,” he offers. “But mostly it’s just founded in that dialogue, it’s founded in those words. And I get what’s wrong with Lee Hayden. I have known people that totally screwed their lives up in pursuit of a career. It cost them and it cost their families, so I get it, and I think when you understand the character you’re portraying, odds are it’s gonna be real instead of contrived.

“It’s unsettling in some ways,” he continues. “I didn’t see this film until we went to Sundance because I wanted to see it with an audience, particularly that Sundance audience, which is all kinda filmy types, and when they laughed at that first sequence where I’m doing voice-overs, man, I was totally relieved. ’Cause I know that this is kind of a dark, angst-ridden tale. But it’s got that humour in it that runs throughout, God bless Nick Offerman.”

Yes, indeed, Offerman—who joins Laura Prepon, Krysten Ritter, and Elliott’s partner of 33 years, Katharine Ross, in the beautifully modulated feature. If the performances have been universally praised, Elliott has a suggestion for the minority who feel, as one prominent critic wrote, that The Hero is otherwise “underdeveloped”. “It’s just a slice of life, and if somebody thinks it’s underdeveloped, then maybe they oughta go watch Baywatch or something,” he says, with a low chuckle. “For a fully developed story.”

Georgia Straight, June 2017