Sunday, August 16, 1998
Los Angeles Daily News
'Private Ryan' sniper part gains Pepper another role
By James Sterngold
Director Frank Darabont had an experience common to many
filmgoers this summer when he was watching Steven Spielberg's wrenching
World War II drama, "Saving Private Ryan." He found himself mesmorized
by the character of Jackson, the Bible-quoting sniper with an angular
face and an ambiguous humanism.
Darabont was so impressed that he quickly offered the actor
who play Jackson, the little-known Barry Pepper, a part in "The Green
Mile," a new film he wrote and is directing a group of guards on Death
Row in 1935 and their unusual prisoner. Darabont, whose last film,
"The Shawshank Redemption," won several Oscar nominations, had Pepper
read for the role of the guard Percy, who is a msifit and a loner.
But he found that the role did not fit the actor.
"He had an innate sweetness and a real soulful light in his
eyes," Darabont said of pepper, who is 28. "It wasn't working. But
he was a perfect Dean, who's maybe the most sensitive of the guards.
Barry can play anything, but it's much harder to be an interesting
good guy than an interesting bad guy."
Actors can quickly become hot after a compelling performance,
but usually not this quickly. Barry has been acting just a few years,
and he has suddenly won prominent part alongside, for the second time,
Tom Hanks, who plays the head guard in "The Green Mile," which is
based on a novel by Stephen King. The film is being shot on the
Warner Bros. lot and is expected to be released next summer.
"I didn't want to meet Frank originally on Percy because I
knew if he'd offered it to me, I'd have to take it, and I feared being
typecast as a sort of evil character," Pepper said. "It was a
difficult choice, but I decided to leave my ego at the door and do
what I always do, which is bring a little of my dad to my character.
I was so totally flattered that they saw some sensitivity and asked me
to do Dean."
Pepper, who will be in the Thanksgiving release "Enemy of the
State," credits his unusual unbringing and his father's adventurousness
for giving him the inner strength that comes through in Jackson and
got him the part as Dean. He grew up in Canada, eating laregely wild
game like moose, vension and duck. When he was 5, his father built a
50-foot sailboat and packed up the family; they sailed for five years
throughout the South Pacific. Pepper was educated partly by his
parents and partly at schools where they stopped - places like
Rarotonga and New Zealand.
Pepper and his family eventually moved to the west coast of
Canada, where his parents built a farm. He found his calling in
college.
"I don't like to play the victim," he said. "I look for the
choices the character makes for himself. Even if you play a villian,
you do an injustice to him if he's just like, programmed to do those
things. It's always more complex."
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