Smallville's Tom Welling finds that kryptonite's a piece of cake compared to Steve Martin and the scrambled-egg gun in his big-screen debut Cheaper by the Dozen.
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As the teenage Clark Kent on the WB's hit series Smallville, Tom Welling has had to contend with everything from horny prom dates to home-wrecking tornadoes to mind-altering kryptonite. But it , wasn't until his first feature film, the contemporary retelling of the beloved 1950 classic Cheaper by the Dozen, opening in December, that Welling had to face down one of modern Hollywood's most dreaded and menacing weapons: the hydraulic scrambled-egg gun.
"There's a scene where a bullfrog jumps onto the family's breakfast table and splatters eggs everywhere," says the 26-year-old actor, relaxing in his trailer between scenes on the Vancouver set of Smallville. "Well, imagine sitting there and about five feet away is this guy with the scrambled-egg gun. You know you're going to get blasted, but you have to act like you're not." It was especially harrowing, Welling reveals, for his teen-queen costar Hilary Duff, who plays one of his 11 siblings. "Hilary actually has a phobia of scrambled eggs," he says, laughing. "She thinks they're really disgusting."
For Welling, a former construction worker and high-school soccer star, taking a little protein in the face was a small price to pay for the chance to work with comedy all-stars Steve Martin and Bonnie Hunt, who play his beleaguered parents. "Steve is such a great guy," gushes Welling, who plays the couple's oldest son, Charlie, a high-school golden boy who loses his popularity when his football-coach father relocates the family. "One day, in between shots, Steve and I snuck into this gymnasium that had been blocked off and shot hoops. We spent the rest of the day trying to sneak back. He kept getting me in trouble, doing that." So who's the better ballplayer, the 6-foot-3 Welling or the considerably shorter Martin? "I don't know how to answer that, really," Welling defers. "He was?"
Growing up in upstate New York and later Delaware and Michigan, Welling often daydreamed of hobnobbing with movie stars, but he didn't take acting seriously until he moved to Los Angeles after a few years of steady modeling work in New York and Europe. "I loved the traveling, but I wasn't very good at modeling," admits Welling, who got his first on-camera experience in commercials for Verizon and 7-Up. "I found it boring and stiff. When I came across acting, where you can move around and speak, I could identify with that a lot more than standing still while someone clicked a shutter."
Less than a year after landing in L.A., Welling booked his first acting role, as Amy Brenneman's much-younger boyfriend on Judging Amy. "I didn't know what I was doing," confesses Welling, who shared his first screen kisses with Brenneman, "but Amy just created an environment of complete comfort for me." Though he was only slated to appear in three episodes, fan response kept him around for six. Then came the lead in Smallville, a part that he had resisted for months. "All they were saying was 'Superman in high school,' and that wasn't appealing at all," recalls Welling. "Ultimately, they explained that it was going to be Clark trying to be normal rather than Clark flying around saving people. Then they let me read the script, and after that it was something that I really went after."
That's when things went a little crazy. "It was quite an experience to be in Times Square and see myself about eight stories high on a poster for the show," he recalls. "That definitely took me aback." Now his anonymous days are pretty much over. "When you can't walk down the street without somebody striking up a conversation, it becomes a little odd," he admits, "but without those people, we wouldn't have jobs." So who's been his most surprising admirer? "Jeff Bridges," says Welling excitedly. "He started pitching me story lines for Smallville and talking about characters he'd like to see introduced. It was pretty wild."
Though Welling spends nine months a year in Vancouver on the series--"Sometimes it's isolating, like being in a submarine"--he hopes to continue to make inroads in Hollywood and is already looking at possible projects for his next hiatus. In what little downtime he has, he likes to indulge in his favorite new addiction, golf, and spend time with wife, Jamie, whom he married in July 2002. "We fell in love five years ago, before all this happened," he explains, "so a lot of this is just a bonus that's creating a great life for us. We don't have the trappings of 'He's got this' or 'She's got that.'"
So does Welling have grand plans for his career after Smallville? "While we were making Cheaper by the Dozen, Bonnie and Steve took me out to dinner for my birthday, and one piece of wisdom they both agreed on is that in this business, there is no secret knowledge. Everybody's made it or not made it for completely different reasons. You have to do what you feel is right for you and stick with what you believe. That's what I'm trying to do."
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Dennis Hensley