Making a War Story During Wartime

Art sometimes imitates life.

While the Gulf War was raging last year, Arye Gross was in the wilds of Utah shooting the anti-war film “A Midnight Clear,” based on William Wharton’s acclaimed novel about his experiences during World War II.

In the drama, Gross plays Stan Schutzer, his squad’s lone Jewish member, who is sent on a dangerous mission to gather crucial intelligence on the Germans.

The actor admits it was strange to be playing make-believe war before the cameras while people were dying in the Gulf.

“But then if I had been doing anything . . . if I was doing a Feydeux farce onstage somewhere during the Gulf War, it would have felt strange,” he adds.

“The thing is we would work and do these scenes in the movie, come home at the end of the day and feel a little depressed and empty, like we had given everything. But people at war don’t get that break at the end of the day. You don’t get to go back to your hotel room.”

The last year has been a productive one for Gross, who made his film debut in the 1986 comedy “Soul Man” and has appeared in “Tequila Sunrise,” “Coupe de Ville” and “For the Boys.” He stars in the comedy “The Opposite Sex,” which opens May 8, and also will be seen this summer in the Columbia comedy “Hexed.”

Gross, though, struggled a long time before he got “Soul Man.” A former member of South Coast Repertory and Luis Valdez’s El Teatro Campesino, Gross admits that “my acting career was going nowhere” and that he had turned primarily to producing theater.

He was in pre-production on Steven Berkoff’s “Kvetch” at the Odyssey Theatre when he read for “Soul Man.”

“(The producers) brought me in nine times over two months,” he recalls. “They didn’t want to make it easy. I think they thought if he can do this, then why hasn’t he done anything else before?”