Everyone on the set of the new film The Hero knew the scene was a good one: Sam Elliott was playing Lee Hayden, a washed-up cowboy actor who somehow landed an audition for a plum role – a patriarch estranged from his daughter – in a big-budget sci-fi franchise. He really wants the part. He needs it.
He asks Jeremy, his former co-star – now his weed dealer – to run lines with him. Jeremy would read the lines of the daughter. And Nick Offerman was playing Jeremy.
Elliott and Offerman, of course, are two of the gruffest dudes in Hollywood; they met while playing rival alpha males on the television series Parks and Recreation and became instant friends. Their weed-smoking scenes in The Hero, which they'd already filmed, were gems. Watching them play father and daughter would be even better. The setting was an L.A. canyon terrace. The morning light was the perfect delicate yellow. Then something unexpected happened.
"I had one goal in mind: You see that Lee can still deliver the goods as an actor," Elliott, 72, recalls in a recent phone interview. "We read through it a couple of times. Pretty soon, I could feel people coming in closer to watch. It was evident that something was going on."
That something was the thing that all actors reach for: a moment of grace. Elliott and Offerman connected – to their characters, to each other, even to their sci-fi dialogue. They suspended disbelief. They became Elliott/Lee/Patriarch and Offerman/Jeremy/Daughter. By the scene's end, Offerman's eyes were filled with tears.
"None of that was scripted," Elliott says now, in his trademark wagons-on-gravel rumble. "Nobody knew it was going to go there. It took on a life of its own." That happens sometimes, he adds. He's not afraid to call it magic.
Elliott's belief that he could make movie magic brought him to Los Angeles in his early 20s. Fifty years later, he still believes it. "To make people smile or cry – that's a great gift," he says. "I don't take it lightly. I try not to take myself too seriously, but I take my work real serious."
In The Hero, Lee is coasting on the fumes of the one iconic western of his younger days, also called The Hero. He's divorced from his wife, Val (Katharine Ross), estranged from his daughter, Lucy (Krysten Ritter), and bored by his paycheque job, doing voice-overs for barbecue sauce commercials. But a chance meeting with Charlotte (Laura Prepon), a much younger client of Jeremy's, gives Lee hope that it's not too late to turn things around.
In real life, Elliott's career has been such a long, slow burn that his golden years have been his hottest. In addition to Parks and Recreation, he's had recent arcs on Justified and Grace and Frankie. He plays Ashton Kutcher's dad on the Netflix series The Ranch. On film, he played Lily Tomlin's ex in Grandma and Blythe Danner's new boyfriend in I'll See You in My Dreams. In all of them, he's a rogue, a rascal and a straight-up sex symbol. In The Hero, Prepon wants to sleep with him even though he's literally twice her age. It's a testament to Elliott that he makes that conceivable.
Further proof that Elliott is not Lee: Elliott's voice-over work ("Guts. Glory. Ram") doesn't frustrate him; it's freed him from ever having to take a paycheque role. He enjoys a warm, close relationship with his adult daughter, Cleo, a musician. And he and Ross have been a couple for 39 years. (He got married, turned 40 and had a baby all in the same year.) The Hero is their sixth film together.
The idea for Elliott to play a distaff version of himself was born during the media tour for I'll See You in My Dreams, when Elliott and that film's writer/director, Brett Haley, criss-crossed the United States, "logging a lot of miles, eating a lot of meals, having a few drinks and talking about our lives," as Elliott puts it. "Then Brett went home and got it all down with his writing partner, Marc Basch."
Of course, there are areas where Elliott and Lee converge. Elliott did his fair share of phoning indifferent agents to ask why he wasn't getting scripts. As well, the speech Lee gives – while collecting a lifetime achievement award from a low-profile but enthusiastic group – echoes Elliott's sincere affection for his audience. "We all work hard," Elliott says. "I'm no better than you and you're no better than me. I believe those things strongly. Without an audience we'd all be reading to ourselves on our porches."
Growing up in Sacramento, Calif., Elliott was either outdoors with his father, who worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, or he was in the dark in his neighbourhood cinema "watching too many bad movies." Film, not theatre, was his dream. "I came to L.A. without any illusions," he says. "I knew what I wanted to do. I never thought, 'I'll give it 10 years and see if it works out.' I came here knowing it was difficult and I was in it for the long haul.
"I also knew that if I wanted to be at it until I'd had enough, I had to have some measure of integrity," he continues. "Some sound judgment of what's good and what to stay away from. Truth is the thing I look for more than anything. Honesty. If I don't believe it, the audience won't either."
Elliott recognizes that he embodies authenticity in a world starved for it. Still, he finds it "very strange" he's doing his best work now, in his third act, and he's being lauded for it. "I thought these things would come sooner," he says. "But here they are."
I tell Elliott why I think audiences turn actors into heroes: We're grateful to them for making us feel. For giving us their magic. "You may be right," he rumbles. "My favourite thing is when someone says, 'Thank you for all the entertainment.' Or, 'I watched your westerns with my dad' – I hear that line a lot. That's the great reward."
If it all goes away tomorrow, "I'd be fine with that," Elliott says. "But I want to keep going. I'd just as soon die on a movie set as at home in bed."