Ironically enough, the key to making “Win a Date with Tad
Hamilton!” was in finding a movie star who wasn’t a
movie star.
“It had to be a nobody or a big somebody,” Josh
Duhamel said of the actor who could play the title character.
“It had to be Ben Affleck, or it had to be me, and I’m
so happy it was me.”
In the film, Duhamel plays a fictitious movie star who, in an
effort to enhance his public image, agrees to hold a raffle and go
on a date with one of his fans. The role requires its actor to play
seriously a parody of a movie star.
“Most of the A-list Hollywood stars didn’t want to
make fun of themselves in that particular way,” said Douglas
Wick, one of the film’s producers.
According to Wick and producer Lucy Fisher, Duhamel’s
movie-star charm, coupled with his relative lack of star power,
made him appealing in the role. Best known for his work on
“All My Children” and the new NBC series “Las
Vegas,” Duhamel now must try to avoid becoming the character
he plays in “Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!”
“You get to a town like (Los Angeles), and it’s very
intimidating,” he said. “I have friends who’ve
never been here, and they get freaked out by it.”
Boasting a cast of up-and-coming Hollywood actors and actresses
that includes Kate Bosworth (“Blue Crush”) and Topher
Grace (“That ’70s Show”), “Win a Date with
Tad Hamilton!” may not spark stardom only for Duhamel.
Bosworth plays Rosalee Futch, the girl who wins the date with
Hamilton, much to the chagrin of her best friend Pete Monash
(Grace), who is ““ of course ““ in love with Rosalee.
“There’s two guys you can play as an actor,”
Grace said. “There’s the guy you want to be and the guy
you are, and that’s the difference between Tom Cruise and Tom
Hanks.”
Grace is perfectly happy with his character, much more of the
Hanks-ian Everyman variety than Duhamel’s Hamilton, which is
perhaps fitting. Acknowledging that he probably isn’t the
right person to play more glamorous roles, he brought part of
himself into his character.
Similarly, Bosworth sees herself as being very similar to
Rosalee.
“I took the best parts of me and put them into her,”
she said. “It was a great head place to be for a few
months.”
While Bosworth’s movie-starlet beauty may seem to make her
an unlikely candidate to play a small-town, wide-eyed girl in way
over her head in Los Angeles, Wick, Fisher, and director Robert
Luketic (“Legally Blonde”) all attest to her
down-to-earth likability.
“She’s completely unaware of what she causes when
she walks into a room,” Luketic said.
In a way, Bosworth’s relative star-power in comparison
with Duhamel’s fits the feel of the movie, even if it
doesn’t necessarily fit their characters.
Very satiric toward the glamorous Los Angeles lifestyle,
“Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!” seems to skewer
Hollywood more than it praises it. As Rosalee first arrives in town
and is driven to her hotel, she sees girls in bikinis, Segway
scooters, kids on leashes, dogs in car seats and children selling
lemonade at $9 a glass all outside her window.
“If you’re going to write this story, you’re
going to have to do those jokes,” said Victor Levin, who
wrote the film. “They’re waiting to be
written.”
That satiric tone is exactly what drove A-list Hollywood actors
away from the role of Tad Hamilton. But the movie may be stronger,
if also smaller, with a new face on the billboards.
“If you had a famous person in the movie, he would bring
his own shadow to that,” Levin said.