Cooper shares 'Seabiscuit' character's stoicism

ARCADIA, Calif. -- Chris Cooper fills one of the thousands of empty seats at the Santa Anita race track, lights a cigarette and doesn't hurry to say anything.

The July sun has baked the air over the grassy infield to about 95 degrees and a few hulking silhouettes in the haze are the only evidence of the surrounding San Gabriel mountains.

The 52-year-old actor, revisiting the location for an interview, spent six weeks here filming scenes for "Seabiscuit" shortly before winning an Academy Award in March for his supporting role as a wild-eyed orchid poacher in "Adaptation."

Makeup artists aged Cooper with white hair and wrinkles to play Tom Smith, the legendary thoroughbred's brusque trainer, a former cowboy who, after watching the automobile carve apart the open range, found a new place for his equestrian know-how at the race track.

The actor, who played the stern military father in "American Beauty" and a villainous spymaster in last summer's "The Bourne Identity," said he shares a stoicism and passion for nature with the late Smith.

"If you think about it today, I bet you that you couldn't pinpoint a time in the last five years of your life where you found absolute silence -- and not some humming engine, or something flying overhead," said Cooper, who grew up in Kansas City, Mo., but worked as a young man on a cattle ranch owned by his family.

"I mean, frankly, it hadn't happened to me in the last 15 years. But it happened when I was working at the ranch, in the evenings, or in the afternoons, throughout the day. But what would you hear? You'd hear birds, you would hear the cattle. You would hear something completely natural. Take a minute to think about that and realize how rare that is today."

"You know," he says, followed by a long pause. "It's not like I'm some hippy-dippy naturalist or anything. But really, it's lost."

"Seabiscuit" co-stars Tobey Maguire as the hot-headed, half-blind jockey Red Pollard, and Jeff Bridges as the boastful horse owner, Charles Howard.

The best-selling book on which the film is based, Laura Hillenbrand's "Seabiscuit: An American Legend," suggests Smith, who had little tolerance for people, was gentle and nurturing with his horses.

"One big choice I made was in the voice," Cooper said. "I found a voice that is much more highly pitched than mine and I tried to put a quality to it, a softness to it, that I hope the viewer would translate as a part of his sensitivity to the animals that he was working with."

In real life, Cooper chooses his words so slowly and carefully he almost sounds frustrated, as if he's told you this before and is telling you again for the last time. Often the words seem like a surprise to him, too.

As for his recent Oscar win, the actor responds with signature austerity.

"It's just wonderful," Cooper said. "Nothing has changed very much. There's no need for it to. It turned out the way I hoped. My life was OK the way it was before the Oscars and it remains OK."