Josh Lucas

Overview

Born
June 20, 1971 · Fayetteville, Arkansas, USA
Birth name
Joshua Lucas Easy Dent Maurer
Height
5′ 11½″ (1.82 m)

Biography

Family

Spouse
Children
Parents
Relatives

Trademarks

piercing blue eyes

Trivia

He is the voice on the Home Depot commercials.
Was injured severely enough to be hospitalized twice during the filming of Poseidon (2006). First, co-star Kurt Russell accidentally hit him with a flashlight in the right eye during an underwater swimming sequence and the resulting cut required 16 stitches and several days off. The second and more serious injury occurred on the next-to-last day of filming when Josh fell 15-20 feet and tore ligaments and muscles in his left thumb, which required a 5-hour surgery to reattach the muscle and 6-8 weeks in a cast. He is still undergoing physical therapy and rehab to get more movement back in his thumb.
Born in Arkansas in 1971 and christened Joshua Lucas Easy Dent Maurer. His parents lived on an Native American reservation, and they named him based on things that happened there. His birth was so easy that the doctor hit his head on the bedpost and injured himself.
Also has two sisters. One of whom, along with Josh, is in the research and planning stages of starting up Mighty's Fast Food, a restaurant that will promote healthier fare and use of organic, local produce.
Josh has twice portrayed younger versions of characters played by iconic actors. He has played a young Paul Newman (Max Roby) in Empire Falls (2005) and Kevin Costner (John Dutton) in Yellowstone (2018).

Quotes

[regarding moving so many times as a child] I would lie in bed the night before a new school and decide who I was going to be. It would usually be based on someone I admired from the school before.
"I just feel like I really want to be someone who literally disappears in the role. I want to be so strong as an actor that people wouldn't say [for example] 'Oh, that's Ben Affleck.' To me, that's just boring. It doesn't interest me. My goal is to always have the ability at hand where I can be really good, as opposed to, eh, that's Josh Lucas." Interview with Steve Head, September 24, 2002.
(2015, on Undertow) It's a pretty amazing film. It's flawed and dark and troubled, but it's somewhat based on a true story that Terrence Malick had heard from a child. My understanding is that they found the child dead the day he had called Malick while working in a runaway shelter. Malick had worked on the script for years and then when he saw George Washington, he gave it to Green and we made this tiny budget movie I think really is Southern gothic at its best. The character was horribly difficult to play because he's a man who basically kills his own children. For me, it was a real artistic, psychological experience because I was trying to figure out what kind of mind could do this. Trying to figure out how to make that character anything other than what he could've been on paper: a violent monster.
(2015, on Glory Road) It's my favorite film of my career. There's multiple reasons as to why, but primarily it was the experience of making it. I had not only the real Don Haskins, who was a mentor to me before and after the film, but then I had people like Pat Riley as my technical advisor. And we had this group of actors, many of whom had never really acted before. They were basketball players who were doing some acting, and I was put in a position by the director of the movie to be the coach; to deal with them and coach them, and be, in a sense, in charge of the acting from these guys. Every day I felt this responsibility to do the Disney version of that story-the true story is much darker-but we were very much making a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, and that's what Don Haskins wanted. We had a lot of tools from a financial standpoint to tell a wonderful story of a breakthrough in American racial relations.

Then, the best publicity tour of my life was these guys on Jerry Bruckheimer's private airplane, going from one town to the other showing the movie. Every single night that movie would get a standing ovation. Then we would have this crazy party and we'd get back on Jerry's airplane with this group of basketball actors and go to the next party. And they would find girls.

There was a weird moment where we showed the movie in El Paso, Texas, to the real basketball players in the original story. And they did not like it at all. They felt like I completely missed how badass Don Haskins really was... I was really upset and sad about it. Then Don Haskins came to me and said, "Fuck those guys. You did exactly what I wanted you to do. You did the version that I wanted for the kids." And then all those guys really came around to the movie, and they felt like the movie existed on its own.
(2015, on J. Edgar) Look, I tried something when my career was really struggling: reaching out to people, to filmmakers I wanted to work with. I genuinely wrote a letter to Clint Eastwood saying, "Hey man, I'm a fan and I would be an extra in your movie." Because of it, through his casting team, asked me whether I would be interested in auditioning for the part of Lindbergh. Movies and life become a little more symmetrical when you start asking for and looking for connections. My grandmother was called a WASP. She was one of the first pilots in the United States. She flew with Amelia Earhart and was in love with Lindbergh. She flew in the war and commercially, so I felt there was a great symmetry for me to play this man. It's just one of those moments where it all started to make sense again. I think the movie is actually fascinating, because here you have one of the great rogue, Republican male figures of heterosexuality, Clint Eastwood, making this weird little gay love story. It's an eccentric film that's trying to tell this story of a clearly fucked-up man. I don't think Eastwood is going back and analyzing his movies. He's fearlessly creating, and has built himself an empire that allows him to jump from movie to movie to movie. I found him to be childlike and full of sparkle and joy of film.