Country superstar Tim McGraw stars in the new film Flicka, which opens here Friday. McGraw had to be talked into playing a cowboy.

AGOURA HILLS, Calif. -- Just because Tim McGraw is a man of many hats doesn't mean they're all Stetsons.

On this crisp morning in California ranch territory, for example, the 39-year-old superstar singer arrives for interviews looking more beatnik than redneck, having traded his traditional countrified headgear for a black beret. (A look that, at last check, will get you shot in Texas.) Add to this the wire-rimmed glasses and goatee he sports, and it comes as less a surprise that he needed to be roped into portraying a rancher in the family film Flicka.

"I just thought right off the bat, 'No.' I didn't want to do it. I didn't want to do a part playing a cowboy wearing a cowboy hat. I wanted to get away from that," McGraw tells the Sun.

Eventually, he relented, persuaded to sign on by the screenplay for this update of the novel My Friend Flicka, as well as the opportunity to make a movie his three daughters -- ages nine, eight and four -- could watch. (McGraw's last significant role was in the darker Friday Night Lights.)

"As much as I tried to talk myself out of it, I just couldn't."

In the movie, opening Friday, McGraw plays the stern but loving father of Katy (Alison Lohman), a 16-year-old who befriends a kindred spirit, a wild mustang.

The film marks McGraw's largest role to date and, while he felt at home in the western milieu, he's yet to grow as accustomed to seeing himself act.

"It's kind of embarrassing. I don't mind a flash of it, but when I'm up there too long, I just start analysing everything I did wrong ... It was daunting to go out and take a major role. But ... I got to be clean-cut and kind of get out of myself a little bit."

A little, but not a lot. The Louisiana native "can't ever remember not riding ... My step-dad, he roped and rode his whole life and taught me how to do it from an early age. I rode in the high school rodeo, I rode bareback for a little while. I team-roped and calf-roped."

Both Flicka and Friday Night Lights deal with fathers and their relationships with their children, a topic especially close to McGraw, who is no stranger to paternal issues. Until he was 11, he believed his father was Horace Smith. Actually, Smith was McGraw's step-dad. His biological father was Tug McGraw, a famous relief pitcher for the New York Mets. He learned this after accidentally uncovering his birth certificate. The experience made him "always want to be a good father and then I became one. Now I've been one for nine years and that's what I am. I am a dad, first and foremost, before anything else that happens."

McGraw reaffirms he plans to enter politics -- possibly to run for governor of Louisiana -- sometime in the future, and he and his wife Faith Hill continue to aid the reconstruction of post-hurricane Katrina New Orleans.

"We're just figuring out where to put money so you're just not shoving a dollar here or there. And that's an ongoing process because something new pops up everyday ..." says McGraw, who was among those who blasted the Bush administration for botching its handling of the disaster.

"Just because you're an artist doesn't mean you're not a citizen anymore."

He'll next be seen in 2007's terrorist thriller The Kingdom, directed Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights) and co-starring Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Garner.

"I play a husband whose wife is killed in a suicide bomber attack. I only had a couple scenes because I was working so hard, I had to fit it in, but it was pretty intense ... I like heavier (roles). I can't see me doing a romantic comedy."

Especially since the kiss he shares with Maria Bello in Flicka, "wasn't (his wife's) favourite part of the movie."

Is Hill looking at scripts to get back at him for the cinematic smooch?

"Not if I get to them first."

More Artists