"I've been called a nice guy," Tom Selleck says, "and I don't mind that."
Well, there are worse things to be called. What Selleck does mind, though, is being saddled with the nice-guy image. For one thing, it's limiting. "You can't play a nice guy throughout your career or the result may not be nice, it can just be boring." For another, it's just not where Selleck is personally: "I guess I'm just a dark guy."Repeatedly during an interview with Selleck at his office on the Walt Disney lot in Burbank, the actor talked about how he tried to give this or that character rougher edges, about how projects appealed to him because of their bleak aspects, about how he would have made certain movies - including his latest, "Mr. Baseball" - even darker.
In "Mr. Baseball," Selleck stars as Jack Elliot, a washed-up major leaguer and all-star Ugly American who tries to stretch out his career a bit longer by playing in Japan, where the usual culture-clash mishaps ensue.
Thanks to the era of political correctness, the comedy has had a rather stormy past. Universal, the studio distributing the movie, was purchased by Japanese megacorporation Matsushita while the film was in production, which spurred talk that the film would be watered-down; more genteel observers, on the other hand, feared that the movie's Japan-bashing would not be watered down enough.
For his part, Selleck is happy to perpetuate the ersatz controversy. "If I can stir the pot a little bit and make people want to see the movie for themselves, then why not?" he said with a laugh.
His office underscores his fondness for the movie - it's strewn with "Mr. Baseball" memorabilia, including a framed Sports Illustrated cover featuring Selleck's visage, poster-sized baseball cards of Jack Elliot, gloves, helmets, even a large Chunichi Dragons stuffed animal, a souvenir that Japanese ballplayers receive every time they hit a home run.
While shooting "Mr. Baseball" in Japan, Selleck said he felt alienated, and what's more, "I encouraged it. I deliberately didn't expose myself much to Japanese culture and didn't read much about Japan, or even Japanese baseball. I knew it would be very new for me, and I knew I would get homesick, and I knew those things would help me understand the character. I tried to heighten the cultural gap in certain ways.
"The Japanese have legitimate complaints about our society, and certainly, in my experience over there, we have things to criticize about their approach. American players over there get flat-out discriminated against. If the movie didn't do its fair share of Japan-bashing and America-bashing, it wouldn't be about the subject that it's about.
"The fact is, the movie seems to be creating some controversy on both sides. First, they said it was sanitized because (Matsushita) bought the studio, but there's also been other things. ABC rejected an ad because they thought it was insensitive, and now there's word that the Japanese are less than thrilled that the Japanese female character goes to bed with my character so quickly, after only three meetings."
Selleck insisted that the Japanese had no input in the film. "I sat in a lot of script meetings and I never saw anybody from Matsushita - I never saw anyone at Universal from Matsushita or anyone from Matsushita on the set." All changes in the script, he said, were made by Australian director Fred Schipisi, and few of them pertained to the conflict of cultures.
"If I really was a coward and I ran Universal Pictures, I probably would have killed the picture," he said. "Because then you dodge the bullet. The courage was in making it and keeping going."
Selleck also noted that at a few preview screenings of "Mr. Baseball," some fans seemed to wince occasionally at Jack's obnoxious behavior - "My big dilemma all through the movie was I was playing a very flawed character and yet I was representing American baseball." But he'd prefer that audiences not associate his performances and his films with his persona.
This dichotomy between Selleck's image and the material he's worked with has no doubt hurt a number of the films he has starred in, including the recent black comedy "Folks!" and the violent drama "An Innocent Man." It seems audiences reject a mean-spirited Selleck.
"I don't think in terms of image," he said. "People who hire you may - it gets in the way of some people. In this business, you are who you are in your work.
"But if you get concerned as an actor with image, you're gonna get messed up. It happens to a lot of careers. With the body of work I have now, I think I'm being perceived differently now, and that's good. I'm not interested in doing vehicles for myself."
But there's no other way to work, he insisted. "The more you play a character and wink at the audience - `I'm really not this much of a jerk' - the more you dissipate the product," he said.
"When I'm doing comedies, I'm looking for where the tragedy is in there. Comedy to me is playing something that is very real, maybe tragic to somebody, only twisted a little bit."
Playing Jack Elliot was easy, he said, whereas "I had much more of a struggle with Peter Mitchell in `Three Men and a Baby,' as far as getting an initial gut reaction of what this guy was about. Even that character, I tried to push toward being rougher at the edges. He was crankier than the other guys and didn't want to show that he cared. That helped take some of the saccharine out of the movie. If you played such a sweetness through a movie, people would get diabetes. If you don't play a character with flaws and awkward and rough moments, there's no ride for the audience, and it's no fun for an actor."
But Selleck admitted that the transformation from likable "Magnum, P.I." to big-time movie actor has been tougher than he expected.
"It's always been my frustration that despite a deal at Disney and doing well in the business, I still have to answer the question, `Can I graduate from TV to film?' " he said. "That's an old question, and sometimes I worry that someone's going to make it true simply by keeping on asking it."