Roy "R.D." Call started acting on a bet.
"I was in school at Weber State (College in Ogden) and went to a play with some friends," Call said during a telephone interview from his Los Angeles home. "It was awful, and I said, `I could do better than that.' And a friend bet me $50 that I wouldn't audition for the next play."Call did audition - and what's more, he got the part. He says he was instantly bitten by the acting bug.
"I discovered I could do things on stage and get away with things that ordinarily, in life, they'd put me in jail for. So, I guess you'd call it therapy. But it's not a tangible thing, it's not something you can explain in words. It's just something I had to do."
After acting in more college plays at Weber and then Utah State University in Logan, Call eventually decided to try and make his mark in the profession. "I got fed up with academic theater and flipped a coin to see whether I'd go to New York or L.A. And here I am (in Los Angeles)."
Unlike that first tryout, however, Call quickly discovered that an aspiring actor could go through hundreds of auditions for plays, movies and television and never land anything. So, he attended an acting school, studying with Lee Strasberg for two years and taking side jobs to get a steady paycheck. "I worked in construction, I was a truck driver, bricklayer - anything to make some money. Any backbreaking kind of work to pay for school."
That was nearly 20 years ago, but these days Call gets plenty of film work, having established himself with a steady string of tough-guy roles in uncountable TV programs, ranging from "Little House on the Prairie" to "Hart to Hart" to "The Young and the Restless" to "The Gangster Chronicles," and in feature films like "48HRS." "State of Grace," "Colors" and "At Close Range," among others.
He does break out of his usual character-type from time to time (he was a Vietnam chaplain in Oliver Stone's "Born on the Fourth of July," with Tom Cruise, and played Danny DeVito's deadpan chauffeur in the comedy "Other People's Money"), but he's also philosophical about having to play the stereotype most of the time. "It's hard to get out of that. I kiddingly say I play cops and killers, and there's not much difference between the two. It's given me a good living doing that."
And it's paid off this year, as Call has fourth billing in the biggest, most controversial movie to come along in some time - "Waterworld."
OK, the cast is billed according to the order of their appearance on screen - but Call's role as "Enforcer," the coplike guardian of the film's central location - a makeshift atoll in the flooded future - is more multidimensional than some he's had. The only drawback is that the part is also smaller than it was before the film went into the editing room.
"Of course, unless you're the star, 30 to 50 percent of what you do is not going to be in the film. That's the case with most movies. Otherwise, you have a six-hour film. It's nobody's fault, it's just the nature of what it comes down to. And people know that going in. Actors know that going into any film, especially a feature film, that a lot of the work you're going to do is not going to hit the screen."
Call says he approaches acting just as he approached his blue-collar jobs, as a professional. As a result, he managed to avoid the controversial elements of "Waterworld," which included reported battles between the star (Kevin Costner) and the director (Kevin Reynolds), as well as weather and construction problems on location in Hawaii that caused the film's budget to balloon to $175 million, making it the most expensive movie ever made.
"No, I never get involved in any of that. I just try and do my job. I give it 100 percent and do the best I can. I never saw any of that. I never witnessed any of that.
"You couldn't ask for better people to work with, but the working conditions - it was tough. You're shooting on water, you have the weather to contend with, it was a tough shoot."
It was also a much longer shoot than anyone anticipated. "I signed to work from the end of June (1994) to the end of October or November, and I worked up until the end of March. It cut into work that I couldn't do, but that's the nature of it, too."
As for the film itself, Call says he is confident "Waterworld" provides the escapist entertainment people seek in movie theaters. He does have reservations about all the controversy that preceded the film's release, however. "Yeah, I think it's a good movie. You take people and put them into a little booth and deprogram them from everything they've heard about it, and they'll think it's a great film. All this stuff about the money spent on the movie - it doesn't cost the ticket-buyer one red cent more to see it."
And while it's true that being in a big hit can often lead to more and better work, Call says he has learned to take things as they come. "It can do that, but it's a fatal mistake to count on it. You take a job, you do your work, you do the best job you can do and you move on to the next one."
Though talent obviously has something to do with it, Call attributes his success primarily to hard work and tenacity. And he admits that when he arrived in Los Angeles, he had only his own determination to guide him. "I had nothing and I didn't know a soul. I was married at the time and we just sort of did a rerun of `The Grapes of Wrath.' We loaded up the truck and came down (to California) and that was it. I got a place to live and found work, something to pay bills.
"Then I went to school again - but I had to unlearn everything I had learned in college. They don't teach acting, they teach stagecraft. They teach you how to be an acting teacher, not an actor.
"I don't mean to bad-rap academic theater, it has its place, but for the professional actor it's really misleading."
Call studied with Strasberg for two years before getting on stage. Then he became involved in a repertory theater company. An agent saw him in a play and signed him up, then a TV director saw him in another play and got him a job so he could get a union card. "And that that was it."
"I did episodic television, small things in feature films - I also had to do other things on the side for a long while. I loaded freight, worked as a armed-guard courier, things like that."
Then one day his agent got him an audition for Walter Hill, who was casting "48HRS." starring Nick Nolte and a young newcomer named Eddie Murphy. "I went in and met Walter Hill and had a little reading - and did the part. I was the duty sergeant in the precinct jail. Then Walter gave me another little job in `Brewster's Millions' (starring Richard Pryor and John Candy)." And soon he was working steadily in TV and movies.
Call says one thing he has never done is the typical Hollywood go-to-the-party-and-schmooze game. "For me, work begets work. I'm not a town guy, a Hollywood-socializing kind of guy. I don't buy into that, I never have. I have a certain standing in the community among producers, directors and casting people.
"And I hate thumping my own tub about that but I'm pretty well-respected for what I do. But I don't play the Hollywood game-thing.
"It probably has slowed me down, but I can also wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and not want to throw up."