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	Printed Articles & Interviews Cinescape January, 1996

RUNNING IN CIRCLES Bruce Greenwood battles fear and loneliness as UPN's adventurous pariah in Nowhere Man

Nowhere Man plays into my own personal paranoia," admits series star Bruce Greenwood, whose character, Thomas Veil, has had his identity wiped out by a mysterious, wide-ranging conspiracy. "Certainly the idea that everything can be yanked away without a moment's notice is a nightmare that I've had. The fact that I'm living it [on TV] doesn't seem so bizarre to me. I've lived it in little bits one way or the other in my mind. Talk to any actor. Paranoia is the main ingredient in their lives." An actor may have cause to feel persecuted in the poodle-eat-poodle world of Hollywood, but he probably doesn't have to worry too much about someone putting a bullet in his head. And for some reason, neither does Thomas Veil, whose photograph of a Third World execution apparently triggered his terrible plight. But even Greenwood doesn't know why his endlessly pursued alter ego hasn't been bumped off by the remarkably powerful conspirators, who presumably work for the government. "I suppose that it has something to do with the photograph Veil took, he says. "And maybe something that he saw that happened in the periphery of the photograph, or just out of frame. But [Veil] doesn't know exactly what it is he's done. It makes it really interesting to play, because I honestly don't know why the hell they're doing it to him. My personal feeling is that there may be some mall cabal just watching him like a guinea pig, just doing it to him to see how he behaves."

Greenwood puts his finger on what he considers the core issue of Nowhere Man: trust, without which, he says, life becomes unbearable. "'Who can I trust?'" he says his character must ask himself repeatedly. "'Can I reach out to somebody when I'm in desperate need of human contract? Do I dare? Am I going to be in a relationship at one point that seems to have everything going for it and then decide to pull away out of fear? Will I step away and then realize after the opportunity has passed that it was good? Those themes are interesting to me. And with that lack of trust, even the mundane or innocuous can be absolutely terrifying. Like meeting somebody on the street who you knew when you were a kid. In the context of Tom's experience, that becomes scary. For anybody else it would be, 'Oh God, how are you? Where have you been?' But not for Veil. He's got to wonder 'Is this just coincidence? What is he doing here?' He knows that seemingly innocent incidents can have sinister implications."

There was nothing sinister about Greenwood's childhood, which he spent happily in middle-class suburbia in Washington, D.C. and Princeton, N.J. His father was a college professor, but Greenwood realized early that academia was not for him. After graduating from high school, he went to Switzerland to pursue a career as a professional skier, but dreams of becoming a star athlete didn't last long. He moved on to the University of British Columbia, where he fell in with the theater clique.

Greenwood spent a few years enduring the traditional initiation for young actors: rejection and lousy day jobs. then he started to find occasional work on television. Prior to Nowhere Man, he was probably best known for playing the manipulative Dr Seth Griffin on the critically acclaimed '80s series St. Elsewhere, which effectively launched his career. "It gave me some measure of credibility," he says. Many roles on television followed, including Naomi and Wynonna: Love Can Build a Bridge, Bitter Vengeance, Adrift, Woman on Trial and The Beach Boys. His big-screen credits include Wild Orchid, Passenger 57, Exotica and a starring role in the sci-fi thriller The Companion.

Greenwood is thrilled with his breakthrough role in Nowhere Man, which he believes may have a long run on UPN. But he does feel that the show can --and will--get better. "I'd say we've been hitting about .500 so far," he says. "But it's early. You can really see the show writhing in its growing pains. That said, I really enjoy the show and the character, and I like how it's progressing. I think in the second half of the year [Veil's} going to become much more active; he's going to pursue [the conspirators] a little harder. It's going to be less that he's blind-sided by these bizarre setups and more that he actively tries to figure out something. He's going to be taking a more active role in hunting down these guys who stole his life. He's a very complex character, and I think we can afford to look a little more deeply at his interior strengths and weaknesses, not just batter him week to week. And I think the network might be listening now. For example, word came down recently, long after I'd been crying about it, that they don't want to hear Veil say, 'Who are you people?' anymore. They're not going to answer him. So that's finally been stricken from the show. It's no longer in Tom's vocabulary, which makes everybody happy."

There are two other recurring elements that have gotten the attention of the network and of viewers. One is Veil's propensity to leap out of a window in almost every episode. The second is the proliferation of cigars, which symbolize--or at least suggest--the ubiquitous presence of the conspirators.

"The window thing, I'm happy to sign a petition. Particularly when the bad guys come in the front and I go out a back window. You would think by now they would surround the building," Greenwood says with a laugh. "Vut viewers love the cigars, and we're having a lot of fun with them. We're sneaking cigars into all kinds of weird little places where most of the audience doesn't see them, but five percent of the audience does. Occasionally, we'll leave a smoldering cigar in a scene. We'll get a bunch of people calling in after the show asking, 'Was that a smoking cigar at the end of that piano?' The cigar is good for cryptic clues."

Greenwood believes that, with careful guidance, Nowhere MaN can transcend many of the early labels applied to it. "A lot of people have called this show a cross between The X-Files and The Fugitive," he says. "I'm so deep into the show in terms of doing it all day every day that I don't have as much time to sort of ruminate about its parallels and what it's mimicking or draws from or pays homage to. I've been doing it for three months and it feels like its own thing. It no longer feels like The Prisoner and The Twilight Zone mixed together with a dash of Run For Your Life. Now it's down to the grind of figuring out where Veil is going to get his next meal and where he's going to get his next clue. I think the conspiracy can become ever deeper. For example, I can discover who did it to me, and we could easily then discover that they were the puppets of somebody else. I think it can be endless--and that it can change radically, too. Tom Veil's experience may be more than just figuring out the who and why. His adventures may become more bizarre and more profound as time goes on."

The success of Nowhere Man, Greenwood believes, comes from the pervasive fears people have today about the government and technology, fears that allow viewers to connect personally with the show. "People feel that the government can control anything," he closes. "That plays into everybody's fears about Big Brother reaching deep into your life. What is that little stripe on the back of the driver's license for? That's new. I've been wondering about that. Does that mean they can learn more about me than just my date of birth and address? Probably. What are the chances , if it's there for some nefarious reason., that they're going to begin to let us know? Zero."