British actress enjoys time with good ol' boys

At first, Claire Forlani was puzzled at being asked to play the girlfriend in a movie from the "Cannonball Run" school of comedy.

The script for "Beer for My Horses" was funny, but the actors were unfamiliar. "I said, 'I haven't heard of any of these actors. What have they done?' "

Well, Forlani was told, many of them aren't actors, but Toby Keith is a country-western singer, Rodney Carrington starred in an ABC series but is known for live appearances and best-selling comedy albums, and Ted Nugent is the Motor City Madman, a legendary hard-rock guitarist.

"Then I ended up just falling in love with all of them," Forlani said, not in the Oklahoma twang she affects for "Beer" but her natural British accent.

The director was a first-timer, and the actors bore little resemblance to Forlani's usual co-stars -- Gary Sinise on "CSI: NY," Daniel Craig in "Flashbacks of a Fool," Sean Connery in "The Rock," Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins in "Meet Joe Black" -- but that was the attraction.

"To be honest, that was kind of the pull. It was such a bizarro scenario. It was so bizarre, I kind of almost couldn't get my head around it, but I thought, 'God, this is really going to be an experience. This is a whole different culture, this is a different part of America that I haven't experienced.' ... and it turned out to be a positive."

Forlani moved to the United States from her native England 15 years ago and, in June 2007, married Scottish actor Dougray Scott. He recently played Teri Hatcher's suitor on "Desperate Housewives" and Moses in a new version of "The Ten Commandments" and has a string of movie credits from "Mission: Impossible II" to "Ever After."

Annie, Forlani's character in "Beer," helps to set the plot in motion. "This is a guy's comedy-road movie, and they need a reason to drive the story, and it's Toby's love for this girl," she says of Annie's return to town and, later, kidnapping.

Rack (Keith) and Annie were a couple in high school; she left for a career in the big city and has come back to Oklahoma to care for her ailing mother. "She missed home, and she actually missed him," Forlani says of Rack. "Life in the big city had brought home to her what home was, and he was a part of that."

Even though "Beer" was Keith's sophomore acting gig, Forlani found him a very companionable co-star. "I was actually amazed at how relaxed Toby could be. He's a really confident guy, but he's also humble," open to any ideas she tossed out.

"He is very in-the-moment and actually quite good at improvising ... I've worked with professional actors way less instinctive than him. It was a very nice surprise," Forlani said in a phone interview this week.

Although "Beer" required Forlani to have a gag around her mouth and her hands in cuffs -- "as an actor you get used to being uncomfortable, if you're not in freezing cold water in the middle of winter, then you're bound and gagged" -- she said this might have been the most fun she's ever had on a set.

"I mean, I didn't know how big all these guys were. I knew who Willie Nelson was, but pretty much everybody else, I didn't know. And so I was learning as I made the movie and there were all these wonderful iconic country-western guys who did cameos and Toby would be so in awe and he'd speak so highly of them and educate me."

The cameo players include Nelson, actor Barry Corbin and country-music outlaw David Allan Coe.

Downtime on a set can be drudgery, but this one brought songs and silliness. "They would sing, and then Rodney was always one joke after another, so it was hard to stay serious ... And then, once we got into politics, it was all over. Michael (Salomon, the director) would be screaming at us to get to set and act."

Forlani, who will be eligible to vote in her first U.S. presidential election this year, is taking a breather after working on four movies in a row.

One of them was "Shannon's Rainbow," an inspirational family drama written by Larry Richert and John Mowod and shot in Pennsylvania this summer. It stars Julianne Michelle as a grieving teen who discovers both the mother she never knew -- Forlani -- and love for a hobbled horse.

(E-mail Barbara Vancheri at bvancheri(at)post-gazette.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)