Role Was Quite an Adventure for Clark Gregg

Ever since playing a motherly pre-op transsexual named Henrietta in the new film “The Adventures of Sebastian Cole,” actor Clark Gregg has developed a much greater understanding of women.

“I had been one of those people who sit in the car and say, ‘What can be taking so long?’ I will never utter those words again. Now that I see all that is involved [in dressing], it’s a miracle to me that anybody is ever ready at all. Also, having had a full body wax, I am a strong supporter of those who believe women are eminently able to handle anything in the military that men can.”

But the compact, blue-eyed actor, who will only say he’s in his mid-30s, acknowledges his heart sank the first time he saw himself in his Henrietta garb.

Though Henrietta resembles Stevie Nicks-meets-Kmart, Gregg had a “preconception of myself as a really fetching young Suzanne Pleshette. The mirror did not bear that out. But then there wasn’t anything that I went through I didn’t feel Henrietta had to deal with as well.”

Writer-director Tod Williams was equally shocked when he met Gregg for the first time. He had cast the actor, who previously had appeared in such films as David Mamet’s “The Spanish Prisoner,” from a videotape audition.

“I knew he was the right person, but I was kind of shocked when he appeared and he had, like, the world’s broadest shoulders and the narrowest waist and a super-hairy chest,” Williams says.

“He is a very masculine person. So when we first started putting dresses on him, I think he got a little depressed. I was a little stunned, too. We kind of got better at it.”

At the outset of “Sebastian Cole,” which is set in upstate New York in 1983, Henrietta is a macho, happily married man named Henry with two stepchildren. The family’s perfect world falls apart when Henry announces he wants to become a woman. After his teenage stepson Sebastian (Adam Grenier) tries to live with his flaky mother (Margaret Colin) and his self-absorbed father (John Shea), he returns to the most stable and understanding person he knows.

Gregg landed the role of Henrietta just a week before production began. He did manage to check out the scene at a couple of drag bars in L.A. before flying to upstate New York. “The people I knew who were transsexual or transvestite were very much performance-oriented,” he says. “This person is a mom. Her focus in life is being a mom.”

Because he had so little preparation time for his role, Gregg decided that he “might leave some of the discovery of what it was like physically and emotionally [to become a woman] to happen in front of the camera. It was something she and I went through together. I found for the most part it left room for us to go through that journey.”

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Since Henry felt trapped in another body and was attempting to discover himself as a woman, Gregg felt as “a man that meant finding my femininity. I didn’t have the first clue where to find it and I, with great trepidation, decided to see if I could discover it simply by doing it. I know that the most important thing for her was to be a good mom.”

Williams says Gregg brought lovability and strength to Henrietta. “The film is about identity,” he points out. “Paradoxically, Henrietta’s interior was rock-solid--someone who had the most clear sense of identity in the movie.”

The director points out Gregg had “no need to do this movie, to fly across the country and put up with our budget and limitations.”

In fact, Gregg has so many irons in the fire, it’s a wonder he found the time to make “Sebastian Cole.” Besides being a well-respected actor, he’s also a theater director and screenwriter. A founding member and former artistic director of David Mamet’s Atlantic Theater Company in New York, he’s appeared on the New York stage in such plays as Jez Butterworth’s “Mojo” and “Boy’s Life” at Lincoln Center. He also directed the New York and L.A. premieres of Kevin Heelan’s “Distant Fires,” which was nominated for the Drama Desk, Obie and Outer Critics Circle awards and won three L.A. Weekly awards including best director.

Gregg’s first screenplay, DreamWorks’ psychological thriller “What Lies Beneath,” is about to start production in Vermont. The film is planned as one of next summer’s big releases--Robert Zemeckis is directing and Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer are set to star.

“It just went kind of lottery-winner well,” Gregg says modestly.

“I always had so much respect for writing, having studied with [Mamet], that I held off writing as long as I dared,” Gregg explains. “I was terrified trying to do it.”

But when he encountered downtime in L.A. as an actor, he was bored enough to overcome his fear. “I wrote a script I hoped to direct,” the actor says. “It didn’t come together, but it got me a job at DreamWorks writing an original idea of theirs.”

He’s very aware his second writing job probably won’t go as smoothly. Though he’s still doing rewrites for Zemeckis, he points out he hasn’t been fired from “What Lies Beneath” and “there haven’t been any other writers. Harrison and Michelle and Bob have been tremendously inclusive with me.”

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Though Gregg owes another script to Zemeckis’ company, he’s not about to abandon acting. In fact, this fall he’ll be appearing in Mamet’s latest film project and he hopes to appear next year in the Atlantic Theater’s revival of Mamet’s “Sexual Perversity in America.”

“I can just tell that as much success as he has as a writer,” Williams says, “I have a feeling he’s happiest [as an actor] on a set, staying at a $15-a-night motel in upstate New York. You know what I mean? His heart is there in his acting.”