Updated at 12:00 on September 26, 2003, EST.
TORONTO (CP) - Money, sex and power, it's presumed, place a lot of pressure on Hollywood marriages more than on the marriages of ordinary civilians.
But actor Eric Stoltz isn't convinced that's necessarily true. "You don't have to be from Hollywood to deal with being attracted to people other than your mate," says the russet-haired star of the new made-for-cable miniseries Out of Order.
"I know a lot of marriages that are not from Hollywood that deal with a lot of the same issues."
Out of Order is a U.S. Showtime project debuting Monday in Canada on Movie Central and The Movie Network. In it Stoltz and Felicity Huffman play Mark and Lorna, a husband-and-wife screenwriting team with plenty of personal issues.
It is the brainchild of real married screenwriters/producers Donna and Wayne Powers (Cagney & Lacey, The Italian Job) who say the script is "loosely based" on their own experiences.
"They say it's loosely based on real and imagined events from their lives," says Stoltz. "I think the core of the relationship - the struggle to remain true to each other - that's true of almost every relationship and certainly to theirs. The actual events in the show, I think they made up a lot of it to heighten the drama."
And plenty of drama there is.
Mark clearly loves his wife and wants to stand by his woman. But there are temptations all around, not the least of them being Danni (Kim Dickens) the comely mother of one of the kids who plays on his son's soccer team. Add to that the pressure that Lorna is bi-polar and cycles between manic highs of drinking and drug-taking and deep lows of taking to her bed and abandoning daily life for a tear-soaked pillow.
Stoltz says it's a major element of the story.
"We've all had dealings with manic depression," he says. "I think a lot of her behaviour is her disease speaking and a lot of his behaviour is not dealing with it well."
Adding another layer to the drama is the depiction of Mark's lifelong fantasy of living as though he were in a movie. Sometimes the (real) camera backs off and the audience sees an (imagined) camera crew in the frame, along with a mike boom.
It's a physical manifestation of a common fantasy - that our lives are one big motion picture melodrama. Stoltz agrees that it's often true these days when the big events - weddings, Christmas, graduations - actually ARE recorded for posterity and we perform accordingly.
"We even choose our soundtrack, you know, our preferred score to back up our behaviour."
After one moral misstep, Mark even turns to the camera as though he were on trial pleading with the jury/audience to beg for understanding because he is, after all, "only human."
It's another complexity of Out of Order, that there is no demarcation between villain and hero, good behaviour and bad.
"I know I've certainly done things that weren't exactly noble," Stoltz offers, choosing his words carefully while a brief smile crosses his face. "And then copped to it by saying 'Hey, I'm just a man, you know, forgive me.' What more can you do?"
The actor says the public is used to dramas that end grandly when good triumphs and the villain is punished, but that this story is more like real life.
"This has a lot of ambiguities and a lot of questionable moral behaviour and not a lot of easy answers.
"My character does a lot of really questionable things and isn't exactly punished for it."
Stoltz says that's what he likes about the kind of project he chooses these days, as opposed to big studio movies many of which, he laments, seem to be based on comic books.
"It's a terrible time, I think, for the entertainment industry, it's very hard to find a film that's really, really good," he says.
"Cable television has filled a. . .void, in that they do what used to be independent films. And they do serious dramas that network television won't touch. So thank God for cable television!"
Stoltz throws his head back and laughs heartily when asked about the series' sexually explicit scenes, torrid even by Showtime-HBO standards. The actor who has been romantically linked with Jennifer Jason Leigh, Lili Taylor, Bridget Fonda and Rachel Griffiths, says his character is just a sexual guy and lust is a major part of the show.
"It wasn't that difficult because I've known Felicity Huffman and Kim Dickens both for many years and we've been friends. And it's much harder doing those scenes with people you don't really know."