Leatherheads – A Screwball Comedy about the Early Days of Professional Football

(March 17, 2008) – Academy Award winners George Clooney and Renee Zellweger match wits in Leatherheads, a quick-witted romantic comedy inspired by the stranger-than-fiction beginnings of America’s pro-football league in 1925. Clooney has double duty on the film, serving as one of the stars and the director, working from a script by first-time screenwriters Duncan Brantley and Rick Reilly.

Long before the days of Superbowls, Astroturf, multimillion-dollar paychecks and staggering endorsements, some men played football only for the love of the game. They were rough, crass, foul-mouthed and hardheaded. They were Leatherheads.

Clooney stars as Dodge Connolly, a charming, brash football hero who knows that this burgeoning sport is currently attracting, at best, a smattering of loud, drunk fans who can’t conceive of paying top dollar to attend an event. His games are free-for-alls that devolve into fisticuffs, and the situation is quickly deteriorating. But the captain is determined that it’s possible to guide his team and league from bar brawls to packed stadiums.

After the players lose their sponsor and the entire league faces collapse, Dodge convinces agent CC Frazier, played by Jonathan Pryce, to secure his rising college football star, Carter “The Bullet” Rutherford, played by John Krasinski, who is filling stadiums with every game-for his ragtag ranks. Dodge hopes his latest move will help the struggling sport finally capture the country’s attention. While all looked hopeful, Dodge doesn’t realize his fight has just begun.

Choosing the comedy’s principal actors fell into place fairly quickly for Clooney.

Zellweger, who plays sportswriter Lexie Littleton, caught in a love triangle between Carter Rutherford and Dodge Connolly, was one of the first actors to come onto Leatherheads.

“She handles this rapid-fire dialogue brilliantly, and we knew she could play this feisty, smart character with savvy, sexiness and sophistication. What’s so great about Renee is that she also captures Lexie’s vulnerability, which comes into play when she has doubts about what she’s doing … and when she starts to fall for Dodge,” the producer Grant Heslov said.

Zellweger was attracted to the part because she found Leatherheads to be “the kind of movie you keep your fingers crossed for.” She responded to the fact that “it’s a throwback to those great old romantic comedies where the dialogue is sharp and witty, the story is compelling and interesting and the characters are full of color.”

The actor adds that what appealed to her about Lexie was the fact “she’s witty and smart, clearly a sharp girl who thinks on her feet. Lexie’s a bit of a spitfire, ahead of her time-but I also appreciated that she was very likable and, at the end of the day, has real integrity.”

Zellweger offers, “We discussed the dialogue, the scenes, what the subtext was and how it worked in the story. But we didn’t over-rehearse; we never blocked out the scene to a great extent or ran lines too much. With these lines, that was easy to do, as there were pages and pages of dialogue. There was homework and memorization every night. But it was addictively fun, because the lines were so rich and we could take them in so many directions.”

Krasinski came next, cast as football star Carter Rutherford. Producer Heslov felt that Krasinski understood Carter’s conflict as a war hero who might not be as valiant as first reported. The screenwriters had created a decent fellow not merely caught up in the hoopla of celebrity but, in fact, trapped by it. Heslov states, “We always saw Carter as basically a good guy-an innocent, smart man who got in over his head. John really got that and played it beautifully.”

Although Krasinski, best known for his work on the hit television series The Office, had been in a few feature films, he was impressed by the Leatherheads script. He says, “I read the script eight months before shooting, and I just loved it. I said to my agents, ‘This is the best script I’ve read in a long time. Let me know who gets it.’ But I met with George in his office, and we just talked; I didn’t audition, so that was amazing. About a month later, I went on tape. Two days later, they called; it was surreal.”

Krasinski had an affinity for the character caught between the worlds of war hero and football player, and agreed with the filmmakers’ take that Rutherford’s instant fame would make anyone more complicated. “We thought the key to him was that he had to be a really good guy who had a bad hand dealt. It’s not like he’s an evil person who’s been manipulating the situation and using his fame. He’s just a guy who got stuck with this. I focused on his innocence when I read the script, and it seemed like that’s what George honed in on too.”

Offered Clooney: “Jonathan makes it easy because we know exactly who this guy is the minute he walks in the room. CC is slicker and smarter than we are, which Jonathan is; he’s smarter than anybody else in the room and has interesting instincts. And he’s also a professional who knows exactly what’s needed in the scene. When actors understand that, it makes it really easy to direct.” He laughs, “It’s embarrassing to act in scenes with him, but it makes him easy to direct.”

Pryce, an award-winning Welsh actor, was cast to play Carter’s manager, the suave and cunning CC Frazier, a man with an equal eye for the ladies and the almighty dollar-initially somewhat of a mentor for the impressionable college player. Clooney and the producers wanted a Svengali who was smooth and sophisticated, a slick operator, but still not too oily. They felt the actor really knew how to walk that line.

Pryce describes CC as “a guy who sees what he wants, goes in and gets it. He also thinks he has a chance with Lexie … with any woman. It doesn’t matter who it is!”

The performer found inspiration for CC in agents who had previously represented him; he relished the opportunity to channel them. “I’ve had agents in America who were CC figures, who had the eye on their main chance and couldn’t understand why I would want to play Macbeth for the Royal Shakespeare Company when I could do a movie-however crap the movie was,” Pryce states. “It was more important to make some money. Mercifully, those agents are in the past, but it was a lot of fun to play CC, where I could draw on their ruthlessness.”