Movies: To Be or Not to Be a Hero

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Even though being an action hero might not be his ultimate career goal (he has just shot a movie about a civil rights--era basketball coach and wants to do a slapstick comedy), Lucas certainly works hard at it. To prep for the role, he went through the Air Force's flight survival-training school, where he was blindfolded and put in a helicopter that was then crashed upside down in the water. "I really got close to extreme panic," he says. "I thought, I'm going to drown. And I'm drowning for a movie? I'm a f______ idiot." Filming in the cockpit simulator in Australia (where the movie was shot), he suffered three concussions and, after a deceleration injury, lost his eyesight for four hours. The producer's sister, a professor of neurology at the University of Sydney, checked him out and, to make sure he wasn't talked into more extreme work, refused to leave the set for the next two weeks. "I honestly don't know how to do it differently," says Lucas, smoking a cigarette in his trailer on the set of next year's Poseidon, which will be just as physically demanding. "I'm so interested in the physical integrity of the performance. You see Steve McQueen jump the wire fence [on his motorcycle] in The Great Escape; it makes a huge difference. Russell Crowe has been a great person who helped me understand that as an actor," he says. "I think that's what it takes, even if it's a plane action movie."

Lucas says he became an actor because his parents, who organized campaigns against nuclear power plants, moved him 30 times before he was 13. "I would lie in bed the night before a new school and decide who I was going to be. It would usually be based on someone I admired from the school before," he says. As he sits next to a poster of The Hustler in his trailer, having successfully campaigned for hybrid vehicles and recycling bins on the Poseidon set, it's pretty clear who Lucas wants to be right now.

Newman, after all, did The Towering Inferno.