Alex O’Loughlin has the “Right Combination” in “The Back-up Plan”

That The Back-up Plan is not your average rom-com has already been mentioned by viewers who have attended screenings and of course Alex O’Loughlin fans are fully aware that he is far more than just a pretty face. He also has a special on-screen magic and delivers amazing performances.

A broad movie audience will get to see this for themselves when the film opens on April 23rd, but nevertheless, it is gratifying to see a respected trade publication like Film Journal International posting an excellent article about the movie. Alex O’Loughlin, Jennifer Lopez and first-time feature director Alan Poul share their experiences in this lengthy, well-written piece that gives insight into how the film came about. Moreover, Alex fans get to learn how he became involved in what is his first major US feature:

Which leads us to O’Loughlin. The Canberra-born, Sydney-raised graduate of Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) signed on after Poul. “The script was floating around, various drafts of it, for a while,” O’Loughlin remembers. “I read it while they were still doing rewrites of it, but it read well. I was shooting a pilot in Pittsburgh for [the 2009 CBS medical drama] ‘Three Rivers,’ and I got a call saying [Poul] wanted to sit and talk with me. He was in New York, and so he flew in and we met at the Pittsburgh airport at one of the hotels.”

“I flew to Pittsburgh to meet Alex because he was shooting the pilot for ‘Three Rivers’ and I went kicking and screaming,” laughs Poul, “because I was like, ‘Make him come to me!’ And they were like, ‘No, he’s shooting 15-hour days in Pittsburgh, you’ve got to go there.’ I met him at the Pittsburgh [International] Airport Hilton, and we spent a couple of hours together, and I fell in love immediately. I felt like, ‘This is the guy.’”

Prudence demanded he continue looking, but when O’Loughlin was done paddling up “Three Rivers,” which ran eight episodes, Poul took him to visit Lopez to get her approval.

“Alan and I drove out and met Jennifer and Marc and the family at their house in Long Island,” recalls O’Loughlin, “and we all got along well. I guess she’d met with a bunch of different people for this role but she decided that I would be appropriate for it and we would play well together. We sat and we all just chatted. A lot of people think chemistry is strictly sexual and it’s not the case,” he says. “I have chemistry with my mates, you know? It’s about two people who have a common interest in one another, who get each other, who understand each other’s rhythms, who can riff each other, who can make each other laugh—all that sort of stuff. And so we had that right away; we were laughing and the talk was easy.”

“You hope that the chemistry is going to be right on film,” Lopez says of the leading-man search process. “Fortunately for us, it was. Alex is very talented and he has an incredible future ahead of him as an actor.” As for others who’d been up for the part, “I don’t think there was any crucial ingredient missing with the other actors per se,” she reflects. “I just think that Alex had the right combination of things that the director and I were looking for.”

Alan also gives his view on how The Back-up Plan differs from other movies in its genre:

Poul acknowledges the surface similarities to Knocked Up—”I could run away from that but I can’t hide from it”—but says that that predecessor film “has very much a male voice; it’s very much from the guy’s point of view. And what Kate [Angelo] did was cover a lot of the same territory without making it girly and sweet, and retain some of the same embracing sense of honesty and occasional vulgarity but from the woman’s point of view.”

And having any point of view is a rarity in romantic comedies today, he laments, when, as critics point out, so many of them devise highly contrived and convoluted pseudo-obstacles to romance, and force adults to act like 13-year-olds.

“I don’t want to sound pretentious, but when you go back to [filmmakers like] Blake Edwards or Billy Wilder for inspiration, you see that the romantic comedy was a really elevated genre. In classic Hollywood, it represents a lot of the best films and a lot of Hollywood at its finest. And I feel that in recent years, there’s been a tendency to kind of downgrade the genre by using words like ‘rom-com’ or ‘chick flick,’ both of which I hate, because it should be a film that can be enjoyed by men and women both and where plot and character are not just an afterthought to get things started. In this film, yes, we do have obstacles to the relationship, but it’s not that somebody has to rob a bank by midnight. They’re emotional obstacles. We all know how a romantic comedy is going to end—the point is you need to believe the journey moment to moment as it goes along.”

Read the full article: “Back up on the big screen: Jennifer Lopez returns in Alan Poul’s pregnancy comedy”

Thanks to Susan for the heads up!

[tags]alex o’loughlin, alex o’lachlan, , the back-up plan, jennifer lopez, alan poul, cbs films[/tags]