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Canwest News Service
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. – Josh Duhamel admits he could have been seriously injured when he ended up shattering a car windshield during a comic moment in his new movie, When In Rome.
But he still shrugs the experience off as being part of the territory for a project like this.
"Mark Johnson, our director, worried about me hurting myself, more than I did," Duhamel grins.
Co-star Kristen Bell quips that the production took out a huge insurance policy on his face.
"I'm more of a klutz than I am anything," Duhamel adds. "I just had a lot of fun coming up, with as much stuff as we could for the movie."
In the comedy opening Jan. 29, Duhamel plays Nick, a young journalist whose effort to keep his romantic life under control is challenged when he meets Beth, a flaky young museum curator, played by Bell, at a wedding in Rome.
Theirs is one of those on-again, off-again relationships that reaches its climactic moment of truth back home amid the traffic chaos of New York's Columbus Circle. Duhamel is running to reach the girl he's finally decided is his true soulmate, only to collide with a vintage car driven by his best friend.
The idea was for the car to hit him, with Duhamel rolling onto the hood.
"It wasn't the most well-conceived stunt ever performed," the 37-year-old Transformers star admits. "I'm running at the car, and the first two times we did it, I literally went over the top of the car. One time I landed on my shoulder and neck. Another time, I fell way over the edge of the car. They almost pulled the plug on the stunt, but I talked them into doing it one more time."
Well, they got it right that final time – too right. Duhamel figured the only way he could stop rolling off the other side of the car was to aim his body for the windshield. "And sure enough, I almost went through it – I broke the windshield. And it wasn't even a stunt windshield."
Duhamel laughs about the experience now. After all, during the actual shooting, when he kept botching the stunt, his parents were watching off-camera, and his own father was booing him from the sidelines. That was a joking dad's way of telling his son he had nothing to worry about; that he would finally get the scene right.
The tall ex-model contends now that the scene was all in a day's work. After all, he knew from the beginning that he had to be prepared for some physical comedy.
Producer Andrew Panay commented during shooting that Duhamel has a way of making physical awkwardness entertaining on screen. "One of Josh's greatest gifts is his ability to be physically funny. He was a college quarterback in real life, so he's very coordinated. But to watch him scramble, fall, and run into things – it's absolutely, incredibly funny. It's so natural."
Duhamel and Bell connected immediately when they first met off-screen – which was good, given that the script calls for instant attraction between the two characters.
"We had to start out so quick and fall in love so quick in order to propel the movie through," Duhamel says. "We had to make those first couple of scenes work at the wedding, and also the stuff afterwards, when we get back to New York. Otherwise, it would have felt there was nothing there to begin with, so what's he really chasing after? So we really focused on that wedding scene and tried to establish as much of a love-at-first-sight thing as we could – so that it would make sense when she got back to New York and all these guys were chasing after her."
Those other "guys" include a sausage manufacturer, played by Danny DeVito, and an eccentric artist, played by Canada's Will Arnett. They think they're madly in love with her, because they tossed coins into a magic fountain back in Rome to test the legend that they will fall in love with whatever girl retrieves them. The problem is that Bell grabs several during a drunken nocturnal plunge into the fountain's waters and that – ahem – leads to complications.
Duhamel's first professional film job came less than a decade ago with the title role in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. That movie never received a formal release, but by that time, Duhamel was already a fixture in daytime television, thanks to his Emmy-winning performance as Leo du Pres in All My Children.
That eventually led to the role of Danny McCoy on the NBC series, Las Vegas – and then to the blockbuster world of Transformers. His portrayal of Captain Lennox in the two Transformers thrillers has given him a huge international profile, and now he's attempting to broaden his scope with romantic comedy. He has three more films ready for release – Life As We Know It, co-starring Katherine Heigl; The Romantics, with Katie Holmes and Anna Paquin; and Ramona and Beezus, in which he appears with Joey King, Selena Gomez, John Corbett and Ginnifer Goodwin.
He was attracted to When In Rome because the two lead characters seemed so believable.
"I would say that Nick and Beth have the same outlook on life. Both of them are very driven in their given professions, and neither is really looking for love. It's one of those things. . . . You usually find it when you're not looking."
