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	Printed Articles & Interviews USA Today Feb 5, 1996

BRUCE GREENWOOD, CHASING SUCCESS by Jefferson Graham USA Today

CULVER CITY, Calif. -- For more than a year, UPN has been trying to attract attention for anything other than Star Trek: Voyager.

Platypus Man, Live Shot, Deadly Games, Legend, Marker and Watcher are some of the casualties that have littered the network's schedule.

Finally this season, Nowhere Man caught the eye of critics and viewers. Bruce Greenwood stars as a photographer whose identity has been erased by a mysterious organization. Each Monday at 9 p.m. ET/PT, he searches for clues to who he is.

Nowhere Man certainly hasn't raced to the top 10, but its ratings have been respectable for a show on the fledgling UPN. And more importantly, it has the sci-fi/fantasy cyberspace crowd buzzing.

That's why UPN gave Greenwood a few days off from production in Portland, Ore., earlier this year to promote the show. Which led to a breakfast of flapjacks with a reporter at the Ship's diner here.

Greenwood admits that before nabbing the part of Nowhere Man's Thomas Veil, he auditioned for seemingly every part in Hollywood, including Dr. Jeffrey Geiger on Chicago Hope (which went to Mandy Patinkin) and Mike Ryan on Almost Perfect (Kevin Kilner).

"That 's the actor's lot," he says. "You go in, do your best, and the door swings on your butt on the way out." But Nowhere creator Larry Hertzog liked what he saw in Greenwood and hired him.

It's a good role for me," says Greenwood, 39. "It was meant to be."

But he took quite awhile to get there.

Greenwood was born in Quebec, spent his early years in Vancouver, British Columbia, and lived some of his teen years in Switzerland. Returning to British Columbia, he lived as a ski bum.

He was so moved by the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest that he enrolled at the University of British Columbia to study acting. But low pay for local acting jobs forced him to work as a technician in a chemical-mixing factory. Then he joined a Top 40 band as a singer/guitarist and toured Canada for a year.

With $1,000 in his pocket, he came to Hollywood in 1984 and within a week he found a role on an NBC series called Legmen, about two college kids who do the legwork for a private eye, played by Claude Akins.

The job lasted only seven weeks. But from there he got parts on Jessie, Peyton Place: The Next Generation and St. Elsewhere. On the acclaimed medical drama, he played Seth Griffin, "a self-impressed scumbag, who got jabbed with an AIDS-tainted needle and found the Lord."

A year as Pierce Lawton on Knots Landing followed. Since then, he has appeared as Naomi Judd's husband in NBC's miniseries about the Judds' lives.

Now he's Veil, the photographer fighting for his life. "He had a certain arrogance about him," Greenwood says. "He needed to drop down the ladder a few steps. The experience has given him the opportunity to think about who he really is."

Greenwood, who lives in Los Angeles with his wife when he is not working, is still involved with music. He owns and operates a Southern California recording studio and writes songs, some of which have appeared on children's entertainer Norman Foote's albums and music videos.

After Nowhere Man premiered this fall, Greenwood closely followed the weekly ratings, but he eventually stopped because the low numbers only brought him down.

"All I can do is try to do the best I can, and if people want to watch, great."

For now, UPN thinks enough of the right people do.