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Barry Pepper [Exposed] is a fan site dedicated to the actor Barry Pepper. Have a look around and join us at the forum to talk about Barry and his career.
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TRUE GRIT as 'Lucky' Ned Pepper
2010 | more
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OWNERS: Ingrid & Cecile
HOST: lack-of-surprise.com
SINCE: 2004
© 2004-2010 to Ingrid & Cecile.
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| 03.25.2006 | March 25 |
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It's our annual update of what hot-shot directors are up to next:
Last year's Oscar winner Clint Eastwood is working on Flags of Our Fathers, a story about the Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945 and the six men who raised the flag in a famous picture. Ryan "Reese Squeeze" Phillippe, Adam Beach, Barry Pepper and Jesse Bradford play four of the six. Eastwood is doing a companion movie, Red Sun, Black Sand, about Iwo Jima from a Japanese perspective. (Postscript: Of the six men in the famous flag picture, three died on Iwo Jima.) |
| | 03.14.2005 | Pepper's Seasoning |
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Six Years ago, Barry PepperÊ gave his girlfriend a promise ring he'd sculpted, then jumped into a 1971 Dodge Dart Swinger he named Grace. Loaded with all his possessions ( and with his entire bank account in his pocket ), he headed due south from his native Vancouver to Los Angeles just another 26 year old in hot pursuit of a dream.
Grace survived the 1300 mile trek, but blew her radiator once she got to Beverley Hills. He recalls, "She was spewing green fluid all over this pristine 76 station", where they just happened to have a replacement part for $300. Most people would call that lucky. But for Pepper who plays a self-described "$30-million-a-year-Wall-St-whiz-kid" in Spike Lee's new film 25th Hour, it was kismet.
A polymath who eschews the Hollywood fishbowl for Walden Poad-like self-sufficiency. Pepper doesn't eat wheat or dairy, hunts for his own food, says grace before each meal and, fixes his own plumbing as adeptly as he inhabits complex characters.
For him acting is neither an ego trip or a journey of self-validation. "I'd sacrifice everything, all of the trappings, all of the excesses, the new cars and fancy clothes - to have a mortgage paid", says Pepper, who lives on a farm on the Pacific coast south of Vancouver when he isn't working. "It's wonderful being removed from the bright lights. You can keep it real in British Columbia."
You may not, however, be able to have a stellar career by staying there, which Pepper discovered after answering an ad in the newspaper for Super Stars Management incorporated in the early 90's. "Sounds like a quality organisation, don't it¿", he laughs. "There acting classes were in a barbershop. After they'd sweep up the hair, we'd do these ridiculous acting exercises as people walked by and looked in the windows. It was quite entertaining."
Having taken ballet and taught break-dancing, Pepper was also prepared to become a member of a manufactured pop group called Banned In The UK. "I had long blond hair down to my chest and I didn't mind taking my shirt off. But I quit after the second concert when I realised my microphone had been turned off."
After appearing in every television show filmed in Vancouver, he headed to Los Angeles in 1996. Following a couple of months driving Grace around the San Fernando Valley to auditions "in 100 degree heat, with no air-conditioning and sticky vinyl seats", he landed the role of Private Daniel Jackson, the Scripture-quotingÊ sniper in Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. He flew to Europe to make the Oscar-winning film, then married his sweetheart, Cindy. "In a little sea-side chapel overlooking the waves crashing in over the lava rock in Hawaii." They now have a daughter, Annaliese, born in June 2000.
In his career as in his life, Pepper has rarely checked the rear-view mirror. There have been some bumps in the road - the usual bit parts, TV movies and failed features - but mostly it has been a smooth uphill climb in such commercial and artistic successes as Saving Private Ryan and The Green Mile. At 5'10" with a wiry build and a hawk-like profile, he is more a methodical than a Method actor, adept at dialects and particularly moving when he plays innocent men caught in moral quandaries.
The actor recently found himself in just such a situation with 25th hour. "The subject matter was intensely disturbing and there was a moment of hesitation. You're never sure what supporting certain ideas in a film says about you as an individual. I find that inevitably, audiences have a very difficult time discerning between the character and the person who's playing it."
His own life is imbued with a cinematic sense of adventure. When Pepper, the youngest of three sons was 5, his father, a retired lumberjack, took the family aboard The Moonlighter,Ê a 50 ft fiberglass sloop he had built in the backyard of their Campbell River, BC, home. For the next five years they explored the South Pacific with only a sextant and the stars to guide their course.
"The purpose of the trip was to raise us kids in a less materialistic environment. Keeping up with the Joneses really was something Mom and Dad didn't want us learning about. And it definitely exposed us to a lot of cultural diversity", says Pepper, who didn't watch television until he was 20 and spent his teens in an artists colony on Vancouver's Denman Island.
He recalls those years at sea as preparation for life in the Hollywood food chain. "When all of your worldly goods are being washed off the deck by a squall, it's pretty humbling. My middle brother, Alex and I would be on night watch, harnessed in, making sure the steering-wheel stayed on course and looking for giant tankers coming out of the darkness."
Navigating Hollywood proved to be just as daunting, he says. "Getting into the film industry is like getting on to one of LA's freeways and just trying to pick your spot". Secure that he has found his Pepper believes "all things can be overcome with hard work and perseverance. You need a strong work ethic to survive in the film industry. When it dries up for me, I'll go do something else for a living and I'll bring the same strength to whatever that may be."
At the moment, that is producing and starring in an upcoming survival adventure set in the arctic. Currently entitled Snow Walker, it's the most expensive Canadian film ever made. "We shot a week in 35-below-weather in the Winter and in the Summer we were constantly surrounded by guardsÊ with shotguns and rifles because Polar Bears are just so curious - and hungry - at that time of year. Biblical swarms of mosquitoes and horseflies the size of your thumb would come busting through the air at about 50 miles an hour and actually take a chomp out of you. We looked like a beekeeper's convention everyone was netted from head to toe, except for the actors and most days I'd come home looking like the Elephant Man."
Would he have it any other way¿ "Of course not," says Pepper. "My most cherished memories are the films I've truly struggled on." |
| | 02.23.2006 | Barry Pepper had the salt for role |
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Barry Pepper, the accomplished Canadian character actor from Campbell River, B.C., was not on the list, says Tommy Lee Jones.
The list in this case was of 150 "acceptable" actors that Jones, as a first-time director, was given by his French and American financiers. They wanted to ensure that the co-star of The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada would carry the weight on the marquee.
But Jones wanted to make sure that his co-star would survive the experience -- and carry the weight on screen -- because playing the role would call for an unusual level of abuse. So he extended the list by one name.
"He's a good actor," Jones says of Pepper, who faced a similarly arduous task in making the Canadian film The Snow Walker in the Arctic. "He did an awfully good job of playing a physically and emotionally and intellectually demanding role. And it is not obvious on the face of it. You really have to do some thinking before you can play that role. And he did the thinking and he looked right and he has the talent. And he was perfectly willing.
"I mean, that kid was beat up by the experience. He was covered in bruises, scratches and cuts and he was 110 percent committed all day long, every day."
The physical demands meant that Pepper missed out on the joys of shooting in some of the most strikingly beautiful country in southern Texas.
"It is absolutely stunning," Pepper says of the rugged vistas on what was then Jones' own ranch (he has since sold the spread). "But it was more a matter of being beaten up and dragged around than seeing the sights."
The weather on the shoot also changed dramatically from hour to hour. There were hailstorms, snowfalls, heavy rains and then blistering sunshine.
"You never knew what you were going to get from one minute to the next," Pepper says. Add in the lack of creature comforts and the "logistical nightmare" of getting equipment trucked in to remote canyons.
So why bother¿ "I was there for the same reason that everybody else was," Pepper says.
"You read the script and you knew the story that Tommy Lee was trying to accomplish. You knew that it was going to be something extraordinary. There was really no question that it would be difficult, but it was just such a unique story to tell that you would be hard pressed not to be a part of it." |
| | 08.24.2005 | The Voices of Magnificent Desolation |
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Columnists Marilyn Beck and Stacy Jenel Smith report that Paul Newman, Matt Damon, Matthew McConaughey, Morgan Freeman, John Travolta, Gary Sinise, Bill Paxton, Barry Pepper, Peter Scolari, Brian Cranston, John Corbett, Scott Glenn, Rita Wilson and Kevin Pollack will be lending their voices for Tom Hanks' and Gary Goetzman's newest IMAX 3D space film, Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3D, hitting screen September 23.
The duo talked to director Mark Cowen who is convinced that with the film, "We're going to get the next generation of explorers." He said that when thinking of actors who "could lend credence to it and give it some heft, Tom said, 'Let me look through my Rolodex and give you some names.'" About a dozen astronauts are also heard in the film, which Hanks himself narrates.
The film takes audiences to the surface of the Moon to walk alongside the extraordinary Apollo astronauts who have stepped upon its surface. With never before seen photographs, CGI renditions of the lunar landscape and previously unreleased NASA footage, audiences will be immersed in the life-changing experiences of these astronauts by showcasing what they saw, heard, felt, thought and did while on the lunar surface. |
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