Page 113 - The Book For Men Fall/Winter 2023

PATRICK DEMPSEY HAS PUT IN HIS SEAT TIME — TO USE A RACING expression for the seasoning a driver gets with each hour spent behind the wheel. The 57-year-old multi-hyphenate actor, producer, team owner, and driver with more than 35 years of experience in the entertainment industry (from playing lovestruck young men in Can’t Buy Me Love and Happy Together to the most handsome doctor on television in Grey’s Anatomy, and the romantic lead in Enchanted), is now widely recognized in motorsports as an accomplished competitive racing driver and owner of Dempsey Racing. Those divergent career laps converge in Dempsey’s latest project, Michael Mann’s Ferrari where he plays Ferrari driver Piero Taruffi, the winner of the fabled and tragic 1957 Mille Miglia race that becomes the dramatic centrepiece of the film.
Dempsey first read the script more than a decade ago and knew he had be a part of it, keeping tabs on its development ever since. And better than most actors, he knows what it takes to play an endurance racer, as he actually is one.
Dempsey spoke with SHARP shortly after the Venice Film Festival, where Ferrari became the first high profile production to land a star-studded red carpet since the SAG-AFTRA strike began on July 14, thanks to an interim agreement between the guild and independent production companies such as Neon, who are not members of the AMPTP. The contract, as star Adam Driver explained at the press conference following the premiere, affirms that Neon has agreed to the terms of the guild’s current proposal. Dempsey strikes a diplomatic tone
about the whole business, especially when asked if agreements like this one might help break through the stalemate. “We have to realize,” he says, “that it’s not any one person who makes a movie. It’s a collaborative effort. It’s like a sports club. You need teamwork and you need support. And I think these are the issues we need to find common ground [and] to move forward and remove the ego, because people are really hurting.” A working performer who used to live paycheque to paycheque before superstardom, Dempsey is most concerned for those who are still in the early years of their careers: “people who are just beginning, or the industries that are supporting the film industries: they’ve already had a hard time with COVID, and now it’s just absolutely devastating.”
As anxious as he is about the state of the industry, Dempsey is ecstatic about the launch of the film, a labour of love for both him and Mann — you can find photos of them together at racing events as far back as 2011 — finally brought to fruition. That delight comes through in his voice when he talks about being sold from the moment he read the script, which follows beleaguered ex-racer and company owner Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) in the summer of 1957, as the threat of bankruptcy collides with his domestic strife and the recent loss of his son on the verge of the Mille Miglia, a thousand-mile race across Italy. Beyond Mann’s gift at dramatizing Ferrari at several professional and personal crossroads, Dempsey was struck by the opportunity to help recreate this gold- en age of racing. “I found this period in motorsports history from the fifties through the early sixties the most romantic, and certainly the most deadly
“You feel the danger. It was real. It was palpable."
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