"Welcome
to the O.C., bitch!" No, we're not dissin' you, gentle readers.
That's just the line Chris Carmack made infamous on Fox's teen soap,
The O.C., where he played semi-reformed bad boy Luke Ward. While
the popular 23-year-old actor has moved on, Luke-aholics aren't
yet ready to let him leave his signature role behind. Sometimes,
they really freak him out.
Carmack's based
in Southern California, where TV viewers live right in the midst of
show business. Surely they're sophisticated enough to tell him and
his soap character apart? "You give them too much credit,"
Carmack grumbles to TV Guide Online. "I can't even tell you the
amount of people I've met who think my name is Luke and that I do
live in Orange County. So don't put it past anyone. If somebody calls
me Luke and expects me to engage in conversation with them... Oh,
those poor souls are mistaken."
Ouch! Well tonight,
Carmack does another sexy badass turn in The Last Ride (8 pm/ET
on USA Network). "This is quite a different character than
Luke," he points out. "He's not a hotheaded, jealous
boyfriend type. Granted, he's got his immaturities, but he's
more of a soft-spoken, quiet rebel type."
And whereas The O.C.
called for the occasional choreographed fistfight with Benjamin
McKenzie — not exactly scary — Last Ride required
some seriously perilous stunts. The film's producers were loath
to let their star risk his pretty-boy hide, but he fought to
keep a stand-in from doing too much of the fun stuff.
"There's
always danger, no matter what the stunt is," he says. "The
director saying 'If something goes wrong, you'll get hurt' is different
from 'You're probably gonna get hurt, one way or another.' I'm not
[about] to do a stunt where you drive off a loading dock in a car.
You could hurt your spine doing it and break your back. These are
the kind of stunts that I don't want to be part of!
"But there's
another stunt where a car is speeding at three of us. The stunt driver
brakes and skids out in front of us," Carmack notes. "They
didn't want me to do the stunt, so they had a stunt double stand in
— and my stunt double is a foot shorter than me. He was standing
next to two actors that I had other scenes with, and in those, I was
visibly taller than them! The incontinuity of it would just not be
good. So I finally had to convince people to let me do it."
Speaking of iffy ventures,
any chance Carmack will do Fox's upcoming O.C. spinoff series? "Would
I do the spinoff? I don't know who's involved or what it's called
or what it's about," he laughs. "I imagine if I haven't
heard anything of the spinoff, they're probably not planning on having
Luke in it."
