here's
a phenomenon in movies called the breakout, where an actor leaps from
relative obscurity into the public consciousness. Jim
Carrey in Ace Ventura, Steve
Buscemi in Reservoir Dogs, Kevin
Spacey in The Usual Suspects - those are the movies that
divided their careers into Before and After, between "That Guy"
and "Oh, him".You may not know Adam Beach's name just yet, but you've probably seen him somewhere in the last ten years - as the exuberant Frank Fencepost in Bruce McDonald's Dance Me Outside, as the buff hero of Squanto: A Warrior's Tale,
as Victor Joseph in Smoke Signals, and "That Guy" in Mystery, Alaska and Joe Dirt. He's recently played his first romantic lead, as an enigmatic artist in Helen Lee's The Art of Woo, which played the Toronto International Film Festival last year.
"I told Helen that I didn't want to be funny," the unassuming actor (and recent Gap model) says. "I just made a choice - everybody else has their scenes and their energy, and I just wanted to be straightforward and kind of thoughtful."
And now, having paid his dues in everything from independent films to TV (North of 60, Madison), the 29-year-old Manitoba-born actor is going to get his breakout. He's scored the pivotal role in Mission: Impossible II director John Woo's new film, Windtalkers, a World War II drama which also features Nicolas Cage, Christian Slater, Fargo's Peter Stormare and You Can Count on Me's Mark Ruffalo.
Beach plays Ben Yahzee, a Native American "code talker" who speaks an
unbreakable military code based on the Navajo language. Cage is the Marine
assigned to be his bodyguard and, if necessary, to preserve the code by killing his charge - a possibility both men must face at the Battle of Saipan. Beach, a Saulteaux who was raised on the Dog Creek reserve northwest of Winnipeg, had to learn Navajo for the role.
"There's a lot of drama, but also there's quite a bit of war-film action and everything," Beach says. "John Woo and Nic Cage taught me a lot about timing. John taught me the whole thing about not really giving 100% - saving it for the (big) moments and letting the audience think for themselves as opposed to giving them all the emotion. I'd never heard that before ...it's like they've given me 10 years of advice, and hopefully that shows in the film."
And then there was the action stuff.
"John's amazing," Beach says. "He knows what he needs. It's like, when we do a scene, we'll come in and say 'What else, John?' And he sits there and he goes, 'I need the hand, I need the belt.' It's like he already knows how he's gonna edit it. It's very cool how he does that."
And now that he's a war-movie veteran - having endured both the rigorous shoot and a week's training at a Marine boot camp in Honolulu to prepare for
it - Beach says he intends to switch gears again.
"I'd like to be a lawyer, I'd like to be a fireman, I'd like to be a guy living on the streets - just those images of people in society, as opposed to the whole thing of being a star. If you're doing good work, that automatically comes."
- Norman Wilner