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SWAYZE'S BEST ACT: JUST GOING TO WORK

 
Published Oct. 30, 2008

CHICAGO - On a film soundstage here, a tense scene was unfolding, with the actor Lou Diamond Phillips, playing a rogue cop, holding a gun aimed at the head of another actor, who stood tall, unflinching, his face and frame thinner than in his glory days, but still handsome, his hair concealed under a tight-fitting black beret.

"Go ahead, you'll do me a favor," said Patrick Swayze in the voice of Charles Barker, an undercover FBI agent with dark secrets, a character the actor later described as "someone who's dying inside, someone with a death wish."

There was no heavy-handedness in the line of dialogue, intended or accidental. Nothing about the scene - one of the many Swayze is filming on location here in the course of making a new police drama called The Beast - suggested anything other than that professional actors were at work.

But of course something quite out of the ordinary was taking place. A movie star, who was given a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer less than a year ago, was putting in 12-hour days as the lead in a television series.

Partly, what was happening comes down to a work ethic for Swayze. In his first interview since his return to acting after receiving the diagnosis in January, Swayze said, "I just love to work hard."

But he was aware that what he is doing right now is beyond what anyone believed would be possible 10 months ago. Pancreatic cancer, experts say, has only a 5 percent five-year survival rate.

"I do find myself, at the end of the day, riding home sort of catching myself with a smile on my face," he said. "I'm proud of what I'm doing."

He's not alone. Executives at A&E and Sony Pictures Television, the network and production studio behind The Beast, are, as Zack Van Amburg, the co-president of Sony's television studio, put it, "relieved and validated."

The show, about halfway through its 12-episode order, is on schedule, said Bob DeBitetto, the president of A&E. Swayze, 56, said he put 20 pounds back on since the low point of his weight loss as he fought the disease, relying on "muscle-building shakes."

Filming has certainly been a test, starting just two weeks after A&E received the finished pilot of The Beast in January. That was when DeBitetto received a conference call at his home at midnight to inform him of Swayze's grim diagnosis. A&E had been enthusiastic about what it had seen in the pilot: a tough, atmospheric character piece about a veteran FBI agent, Barker, paired with a partner, Ellis Dove (played by Travis Fimmel), assigned to become his confidant while also informing on him.

Even better, for A&E, was the coup in landing a true film star, Swayze, not seen as a regular on television since North and South in 1985.

For Swayze, the prospect of playing another part in front of cameras had a therapeutic appeal, he said.

"How do you nurture a positive attitude when all the statistics say you're a dead man?" Swayze asked. "You go to work."