Munching a raspberry scone on the set of Unanswered Prayers, the new Lifetime original film premiering Nov. 29 and based on the 1990 smash by country music superstar Garth Brooks, Eric Close happily recounts the first time he met the singer.
“Back in ’92, I was working on a soap opera on the NBC lot and I was friends with a person who worked on the Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” Close recalls. “So I used to hang out with her and I got to meet a lot of the guests. Well, Garth was a guest on the show one particular evening and I was new in the business and a huge, huge Garth Brooks fan. So here I am hanging out in this room with Garth for, like, an hour just talking about life and about music. It was just one of those great moments in life.”
Eighteen years later, when the former Without A Trace star’s team approached him about starring in the first film based on a Brooks tune (and executive produced by the singer who spent time on the set), “I said ‘I’ll do it!'” Close laughs. “They said, ‘Well, do you want to read the script the first?'” and I said, “No! I’m going to read the script. But I’m doing this.”
In keeping with the ballad’s storyline, Close plays Ben Beck, a former small-town football star turned happily married father who’s life is upended when his high-school flame Ava (Damages‘ Mädchen Amick) returns to town and stirs up long-repressed yearnings in Ben.
“My character had a scholarship to UVA and he got injured so that dream went away,” Close explains. “He ended up coming back to this small town and working for his wife’s family business. Now they’ve been married for quite a while and the economy is not doing great and here’s a guy who’s at a point in his life where he wonders, ‘What if.’ What if I had been with this other girl that I loved and we went off and traveled the world? What if my football career hadn’t been cut short? What would my life have been like? He has to go down kind of a dark road before he realizes he’s got it pretty good.”
But this is not a film about infidelity stresses the actor, whose parents have been married 45 years and who calls his own wife of 15 years his best friend. “It’s a really cool story because it deals with a lot of issues that a lot of families are dealing with — financial pressures and broken dreams and disappointments — but this movie really looks at how you deal with those disappointments and how you can turn those things into positives.”
Close gives the example Ben’s relationship with his own boy. “Ben sees a lot of himself in Jesse and sees his son doing things and making decisions that take Ben back to his own teenage years and cause him to reevaluate how he is as a father — and the pressures he’s putting on his son to be a great football player. He comes to realize that his son may have different dreams than he had and that he needs to encourage and support him in those dreams and help him to become his own man.”
