Bruce Greenwood answers the Bell
Canadian actor returns to series television with conflicted doctor role
He has played doctors, lawyers, TV executives, disapproving fathers, a murderous husband, U.S. presidents, a U.S. secretary of defence and a starship captain, among many other things.
In fact, if you have watched a TV show or seen a movie in the last four decades, chances are you’ve seen Bruce Greenwood’s face onscreen.
On this particular morning, that face is across the table at Cafe Boulud in the Four Seasons Hotel.
“I’ll do anything is the simple answer,” jokes Greenwood, 61, when his extensive list of credits is mentioned.
“I’m a little choosier now than I have been in the past, but I’ll fall off that wagon of choosiness with alarming frequency and just go and do something just because I don’t happen to be busy and it seems like fun, or it’s in a nice location or something like that.
“I like being on a set, I really do; it’s hard for me to say no.”
On the big screen most recently, Greenwood played Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in Steven Spielberg’s The Post, which was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar.
He also recently said yes to the TV medical drama The Resident, which airs Mondays at 9 p.m. on City.
Although Matt Czuchry ( The Good Wife) has the title role, Greenwood’s Dr. Randolph Bell is a key character in the ensemble drama: a hospital chief of surgery with an eye on the bottom line and a hand tremor he’s trying to keep hidden.
Greenwood, who was born in Noranda, Que., but considers Vancouver his Canadian home, has played doctors before, most notably Dr. Seth Griffin on the 1980s drama St. Elsewhere.
“St. Elsewhere was a real groundbreaking show, of course, for its time. They’re trying to do something different on this show as well. It’s the collision between commerce and care, medicine and money and, on its best days, the show manages to tilt at some of those windmills,” Greenwood said.
As for taking on Bell, he hadn’t played a doctor in a while and “I thought playing a guy who was past his best-by date might be really fun and interesting.”
“In some ways his ambition eclipses his ethics and in other ways, in subsequent episodes, that’s revealed to be something that only happens intermittently, that there is a soul in there,” he said.
It comes down to how strongly in denial Bell is about his frailties and how he rationalizes his mistakes, Greenwood said.
“If we find interesting ways to illustrate him justifying them then we’ll understand that he’s not just a venal, self-serving person; he’s a guy whose vision of himself and his identity is so tied to one specific thing that he’s unwilling to see the truth.
“So that’s what’s fun” to play, he said
Greenwood, who lives in Los Angeles, was to stay in Toronto to shoot a movie with director Jerry Ciccoritti and actress Leslie Hope, one with “absolutely no money, but it’s a beautiful little script and I’m really looking forward to doing that.”
In May, he’s heading to Winnipeg to make a Canadian movie about the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919.
Asked if he has a favourite among the many characters he’s played, Greenwood named several he particularly enjoyed: McNamara in The Post; the U.S. president in Kingsman: The Golden Circle; John F. Kennedy in Thirteen Days; the doomed husband in Gerald’s Game; and mountain man Stephen Meek in Meek’s Cutoff.
But he jokes that he’d like to play less serious characters “because I’m not a particularly serious person.”
“I’d like to play somebody who’s a little shallower, closer to my personal experience of the world.”