Thank This Guy for ‘Air Force One’s’ Safe Landing

Pssst! Richard Doyle is b-i-g, as in giant Hollywood close-up.

In case anybody hasn’t noticed--and, says the South Coast Repertory actor, “very few have”--he plays the backup pilot who saves Harrison Ford and the free world in “Air Force One.”

Doyle’s furrowed, square-jawed face fills the screen in the summer blockbuster from Sony Pictures Entertainment, which grossed $55 million in its first week out and tops the current box-office list in the trade magazine Variety.

The actor, who has been with SCR since the troupe began in 1964, guides Ford, who plays fictional U.S. President James Marshall, to a safe emergency landing as Ford pilots the rudderless presidential jet after it’s been hit by missiles.

“I was a last-minute addition to the script,” Doyle said Monday in a phone interview from his car on the San Diego Freeway. “Someone at Sony must have realized it would look peculiar that the president suddenly could fly a 747, in addition to all his other superhuman feats.”

Figuring they needed an Air Force One backup pilot to talk the president down by telephone from the White House, where the vice president, Cabinet members and generals have gathered, the producers put out word that they were looking for fliers with military experience.

When Doyle’s agent informed him of the audition, he told her he’d “flown all over Vietnam” not as a pilot, but as a soldier ferried around in small aircraft during the Vietnam War.

“I guess she took that to mean I could fly,” he said. Doyle, cognizant of what the producers were after, at the audition admitted he wasn’t a pilot. They put him on videotape anyway, for later viewing by the picture’s German director, Wolfgang Petersen.

“I think it was that honest moment that got me the job,” Doyle said, driving home to Santa Ana from Hollywood, where he’d been doing TV voice-overs. “All they really needed was somebody with a military bearing. And when it came right down to it, they needed an actor.”

In fact, despite casting real-life military types as nonessential characters to be seen at control panels, “they ended up firing a lot of guys they’d hired who actually were pilots,” Doyle said, because they were uncomfortable in front of the camera.

Doyle’s role was supposed to take a day to shoot, but Petersen kept him on the set for a week, Doyle said. For seven days in December, Doyle began work at 5 a.m. on Stage 25 on the Sony lot in Culver City and left at 6 p.m. to drive back to SCR, where he was playing the Ghost of Christmas Past in the troupe’s annual holiday production of “A Christmas Carol.”

“It was a peculiar thing,” said Doyle, who has appeared in several TV sitcom but in just two other major feature films. (He played a Catholic priest in 1984’s “Mass Appeal,” which starred Jack Lemmon, and a forensic pathologist in 1978’s “Coma,” which starred Michael Douglas.)

For an actor, stage and film work coexist “in a sort of detente,” Doyle continued. For dedicated theater actors “such as myself,” he said, screen and television jobs are to make extra money. “But occasionally you do get into a creative situation that lets you have fun. This picture was one of them.”

Doyle said that he and Ford, who met for the first time on the set, realized they had a common interest in motorcycles: Both ride BMWs. (Before becoming a star, Ford also once acted at the Laguna Beach Playhouse.)

Moreover, “working with [director] Petersen was a privilege,” Doyle said. “He has a real nice way with actors. I call him the maestro.” Doyle recounted that Petersen, who is famous for his 1981 submarine epic, “Das Boot,” would say in a German-tinged accent: “This is a wide shot, so we only need the fair acting. This is a medium shot, so we need the good acting. This is a close-up, so we need the very good acting.”

“When I did my scene,” Doyle said, “he would say, ‘Everybody must be quiet because Richard has to do the very, very good acting here.’ Then he would tell me that my face was going to be as big as the wall. There was a 40-foot wall, where they projected a video image of the scene right after it was shot.”

Doyle said he hopes to work with the director again. “He tends to use the same people over and over,” the actor said. “If there’s a role I’m suitable for in his next picture, I think he’ll call me.”