LUKE GRIMES ROCKS L.A.
Hollywood’s next ballsy leading lad is a god-fearing ohio boy at heart

By John Ortved

Five minutes after I finished interviewing Luke Grimes, the phone rang. “John, it’s Luke. We kind of quit on the music thing. Jeff Buckley is my ultimate favorite. I just wanted to get that in there.” Duly noted. During the hour-long chat with Grimes, from his home in Los Angeles, we’d only gotten as far as his appreciation for Band of Horses before moving on to his own band, Mitchell’s Folly, and then to something else, and then to something else again. While Grimes isn’t what you would call scattered—the guy has roles in three films next year—he has a 24-year-old’s knack for being focused on everything at once—his career, his band, his friends, and his family all seem to be, at any given moment, his one and only passion.

Engaging you with his friendly drawl, good ol’ boy colloquialisms, and looks that have no doubt slayed their share of corn-fed midwestern girls, Grimes is a charming mess of contradictions. He’s laser-guided about his work, studying tapes of stutterers to master his upcoming role as a speech-impeded baseball star, and yet it’s after one p.m., and he’s just rolling out of bed. He’s a small-town kid from Ohio, but has zero qualms about approaching Cameron Diaz and Drew Barrymore at Teddy’s and asking them, “Either of you want a piece of this?” On the phone, Grimes takes swigs from a jug of water, as he attempts to fight his hangover. What was he doing last night? “Celebrating.” Celebrating what? “Friday,” he says. And he laughs.

Grimes’s current life in L.A. is a far cry from where he started. His father is a pastor at the Landmark Christian Church in Dayton, Ohio, where Luke, the youngest of four, grew up. “My whole upbringing was very sheltered and Christian. I went to Christian schools and church three times a week, church camp, the whole thing,” he says. “My whole family got married in their teens.” And yet here he is, in the artifice capital of the world, following his passion, which recently involved a bathtub make-out scene with another of Hollywood’s hot young things. “My parents are really supportive,” he says. “I told my mom I wanted to go to acting school and they took out a mortgage on the house to send me.”

After attending the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, he made his way to Hollywood, where, at the age of 20, he’d found an agent and a manager but was paying rent by working at a movie theater. “One night I had a few too many and I just went in there, took my work shirt off, walked out, and never came back.” Soon after, he booked the upcoming release All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, starring Amber Heard and a smattering of his fellow up-and-comers. On IMDB the film is labeled with the keywords Teenage Sexuality/Texas/Slasher Flick/Psychological Horror/Anorexia. “I think someone said, ‘It’s somewhere between The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the Paris Hilton sex tape.’ I really don’t like that quote,” he says. “It’s a throwback to a ’70s slasher film, definitely, but there are elements of a Larry Clark movie, where it’s really honest about the way teenagers behave.”

Grimes will finish off next year with Assassination of a High School President, playing opposite Bruce
Willis and Mischa Barton, where some foul play has taken the life of its student body president. But first, he has a bigger role in the much smaller War Eagle, where he plays Enoch (the stutterer), opposite Brian Dennehy, who actually told Grimes he was leading man material. Enoch, for those who don’t know their Old Testament, is a man chosen for his piety to walk with God. Dennehy may have simply understood good casting. If Grimes does see himself as a leading man, his conversation doesn’t betray it. “All the adults in my life were people who were always looking inward, and I’m really glad I grew up that way,” he says. “Money and status weren’t the things that were important in my house.”

Five minutes after he called me the first time, Luke called again. Would I mind not mentioning the name of the girl in the bathtub? He wasn’t being squeamish about the nudity, or careful about embarrassing his costar. The identity of the girl in the bathtub, it turns out, is a twist in the plot. He didn’t want to ruin the ending.

All the Boys Love Mandy Lane is out in April 2008 from Senator Entertainment