Strangers stare at Chelcie Ross, then quiz him.
“They’ll start out with, `Does your son go to Ogden Avenue School?’ ” said Ross, who lives in the La Grange area with his wife, mother-in-law and 11-year-old son. “Or they’ll say, `Oh, you go to my church,’ or, `You live next door to my sister.’ They know they know me from somewhere, but they just can’t figure it out.”
They’ve seen him in the movies.
The rangy, 6-foot-3-inch Ross has appeared in nearly 40 films, including “A Simple Plan,” the thriller that made the 1998 Top 10 lists of many major critics. In it, Ross is the empathetic but slightly edgy Sheriff Carl Jenkins, playing key scenes with Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton, who won an Academy Award nomination for his work in the film.
“A Simple Plan” director Sam Raimi said he “cast everywhere — New York, Los Angeles — for that (Jenkins) role, and I could not find the guy.” He chose Ross, after seeing his audition tape, because he wasn’t a familiar face.
“Chelcie came across as a good person (on the tape),” said Raimi. “You could believe him to be the small-town constable. And part of the suspense of the picture was going to be for Bill Paxton to be lying to his friend (Jenkins), not lying to a faceless big city policeman.
“Part of what’s so great about him is that he is invisible.”
For an “invisible” actor who has lived in the western suburbs for 20 years (where he currently serves as a 5th-grade room parent and carpool driver), Ross has managed to attract the attention of major directors, winning roles in Mike Nichols’ “Primary Colors,” Tony Scott’s “The Last Boy Scout,” and Andrew Davis’ “The Package,” “Above the Law” and “Chain Reaction. “
In the steamy thriller, “Basic Instinct,” he turns up in one of Hollywood’s hottest scenes. As police captain Talcott, he is one of four men (including Michael Douglas) in an interrogation room with Sharon Stone, who sits facing them — wearing no underwear — crossing and uncrossing her legs.
Ross didn’t have to go to acting class to know what to do. “Every heterosexual male in the country had lots of rehearsal for that scene,” he said.
In another tense scene in the basketball heartwarmer, “Hoosiers,” Ross played the defiant parent, George, who taunts the incoming coach, played by Gene Hackman.
“Chelcie got some recognition out of `Hoosiers’ and also `Major League,’ ” said veteran Chicago casting director Jane Alderman, who found Ross for the baseball comedy starring Charlie Sheen and Tom Berenger.
“I had a call late one night from the (“Major League”) producer, who said, `We need an actor who is a little bit over the hill, who is left-handed and is an excellent pitcher,’ ” recalled Alderman. ” `When?’ I asked. `Tomorrow,’ he said. Then I remembered Chelcie because of his acting and his humor and because I knew he threw with his left.”
Ross, who played college baseball, nailed the part of wisecracking pitcher Eddie Harris after reading and throwing the next day. ” `Major League’ was great fun and would have been more fun if I hadn’t been 47 years old, because I was in pain, baby,” said the actor. “We had a guy who had been a trainer for the Milwaukee Brewers and I was his pet project–keeping the fossil moving. I’d throw hard, ice down my arm, then they’d say: Warm it up again. I’d do that three times in a (shooting) day and have linguine for an arm.”
The Carl Jenkins role in “A Simple Plan” also turned out to be physically taxing. In the movie’s climactic scene, filmed in far northern Wisconsin, Ross had to play dead, face-down in the snow, for three full days of shooting.
“I dug a little place where my face could go so I had a breathing hole, which also did me the favor of masking my breath so no steam would escape,” he said. “I’d get down on my hands and knees, and when they were all set up and about to say `Action,’ I’d (lie down) and the snow wrangler would come out and dress the snow around me and we’d go.”
The 56-year-old Ross, an Air Force brat who attended 27 schools before enrolling at Southwest Texas State University, said he feels as though he’s been “sneaking up on this (acting) thing for a long time.”
His first experience onstage was in college. “I had to do a required humanities course in my junior year, which meant that somehow I had to do a project in art or music or dance or theater,” said Ross, who speaks with a slight Texas twang. “The guys in my jock dorm said all you had to do was `go on over to the the-ATE-er, and you nail some boards together, and you get your credit.’ “
Instead of nailing boards, Ross bumped into a director who heard his deep, resonant voice (which you can hear now in commercials for Spearmint gum, Eggo Waffles and Bosch power tools). She promptly cast him as the lead character in a play she was doing called, “Noah.”
“The guys in the dorm razzed me about this little adventure,” said Ross, “but here was where I got grabbed by the Adam’s apple. They came to see me, and said `God, man, wow! You can really do that! Where’d you learn to act?’ And then I was hooked.”
After college, he served four years in the Air Force, winding up in Vietnam “at a wonderful time–1967 and ’68,” as an Air Force intelligence officer who briefed Gen. William Westmoreland. He later turned down a Pentagon assignment, left the service and went back to Texas to get a master’s degree at the Dallas Theatre Center. It was there that he met a producer and was cast in his first film, “Keep My Grave Open.”
“It was awful,” said Ross, who appears in a final scene peering into the grave of a psychotic murderer named Karen. “My first line on film was, `Nice place to be dead in, Karen.’ Then I walked off with a shovel over my shoulder as the credits rolled.”
In the early ’70s, he came to Chicago, where he played Oberon in a rock-musical version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Ivanhoe, did some TV work and tackled other stage roles. “One of the reasons I fit into the Chicago theater scene when I first came here is that I was such a visceral actor,” he recalled. “There was not any subtlety involved. It was all about macho and spit and muscle.”
He’s played several “macho” movie roles, including a “colonel from hell” in “Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey,” and nail-chewing Notre Dame coach Dan Devine in “Rudy.”
Said the actor, “I have the size and the voice and the dour Scots features to be the cliched jackass authority figure–the guy who is so overbearing that you want him to fail. You want to find the thread you can pull to make him come apart because he’s just so damned right.”
But he also bounded gleefully through the Macaulay Culkin comedy, “Richie Rich,” as the goofy security guard, Ferguson. “All my son’s friends know me as Ferguson,” said Ross. “They think I’m cool, but that’s because they’re only in 5th grade.”
Davis, the former Chicagoan who directed “The Fugitive,” said he has cast Ross in three action films because “he has a kind of maturity and intensity that I really like. He’s able to improvise and at the same time, he’s very disciplined.”
With such kudos, why doesn’t Ross move his family to Los Angeles and go for the gold?
He said he has thought hard about it. “It’s like my friend (actor) Ron Dean has said, `Being a movie actor in Chicago is like being a whaler in Iowa. Don’t very many come by and you throw your harpoon every time one does.’ Of course, if you’re in L.A. you multiply by 100 the chances you get. But those are the imponderables. I have had so many talented friends–really talented actors–go out there and fall off the west end of the world.”
For now, at least, Ross has decided to stay on firm ground in the western suburbs while he tries to land the next part. “I’m an old-fashioned, family-oriented kind of dope,” he said. “There’s something about living in a little town, with a nice little private Lutheran school I drive my son to in the morning, that feels right to me.”
CHELCIE ROSS ON FILM
“A Simple Plan”(1998)
“Primary Colors” (1998)
“Chain Reaction” (1996)
“Richie Rich” (1994)
“Rudy” (1993)
“Amos and Andrew” (1993)
“Basic Instinct” (1992)
“The Last Boy Scout” (1991)
“Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey” (1991)
“The Long Walk Home”(1990)
“Major League” (1989)
“The Package” (1989)
“Above the Law” (1988)
“The Untouchables” (1987)
“Hoosiers” (1986)
“One More Saturday Night”(1986)
“The Big Score” (1983)
“On the Right Track” (1981)
“Keep My Grave Open”(1971)
