Keith Carradine
Keith Carradine
Keith Ian Carradineis an American actor, singer and songwriter who has had success on stage, film and television. He is perhaps best known for his roles as Tom Frank in Robert Altman's Nashville, Wild Bill Hickok in the HBO series Deadwood, FBI agent Frank Lundy in Dexter and US President Conrad Dalton in Madam Secretary. In addition, he is a Golden Globe- and Academy Award-winning songwriter. As a member of the Carradine family, he is part of an acting dynasty...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth8 August 1949
CitySan Mateo, CA
CountryUnited States of America
[Mel Gibson] had just directed The Passion [Of The Christ], and it had just been released as we started production on Complete Savages. But I have to say, nobody ever talked about it, and he never brought any of that to work. He was just delightful, and I had a great time.
When I was in high school... I loved the outdoors, and I was introduced to wilderness camping. I was in a little prep school - a boarding school in southern California, in Ojai - and when I was in this school, they had a camping program, and there would be regular trips: hikes into the mountains, the Sierras, the Sespe River Valley, and different places.
I was accepted to Colorado State University in Fort Collins, which is a terrific Aggie school, and they had a great forestry program. But when I saw the syllabus and realized what I was going to actually have to be studying, there was a lot of science! If you want a degree in forestry, it's basically a science degree. And I just thought, "No, no, no, wait a second. Never mind!"
I decided, "Well, I'll be a forest ranger!" Because I thought, "I'll get to go out in the woods, I'll be in the forest, and I can sit in a tower and watch for forest fires and play my guitar. That's what I want to do!" Well, I was an idiot, of course.
I changed my major to English literature, which was on the advice of my father. I finally said, "You know, Dad, to heck with it: I'm just going to be an actor. But I'm going to go to school." And he said, "Well, if you're going to go to school, then major in English literature. Those are the tools you are going to be working with as a man who's going to be acting in English, one would assume."
I changed my major to English and I went off to Fort Collins. And within the first couple of weeks, I noticed that they were having auditions for a production in their theater department. They were going to stage Jean Anouilh's Becket, which was a film I loved, with Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton. So I went down and auditioned, and I got the role. I got the Peter O'Toole part. So here I was, a 19-year-old playing King Henry.
So we went off and made this movie ["Jim Younger"], and I've gotta tell ya, it's as much fun as I've ever had making a movie. It was kind of like adult summer camp. We put on this Western gear, strapped on our six-shooters, and went out and played cowboy all day! It wasn't an easy shoot.
I mean, it [Southern Comfort] is basically a story about the folly of our misadventure into that war, done in the context of these National Guard weekend warriors who wander into a world about which they know nothing and then wind up wreaking havoc on themselves.
I like the Western genre, I think it's uniquely American.
The Western genre is certainly something with which I'm familiar.
I think that the film ["Jim Younger"] still resonates, because there's just something that you can't fake about those kinds of relationships. When you see James and Stacy Keach on the screen together, they're brothers!
Well you know I've been fan of Tony Hillerman's books for years.
I can't put bars on my insides; my love is something I can't hide.
And so I love films that are kind of rural in atmosphere. And you know, it's just a nice place to be day after day. All be it, it can be hard, it can be hard work. You can get hot.