LOS ANGELES -- It's a role Tim McGraw signed to play for the rest of his life -- the husband of a steel-spined southern belle.
"I have a wife that runs everything at home," says the 42-year-old country star, who's married to Faith Hill. "So I think I could relate to Sean in a lot of ways."
In the new movie The Blind Side, McGraw co-stars with Sandra Bullock as Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, an upper-class conservative Memphis couple who took a homeless African-American teenager named Michael Oher off the streets, and helped him excel both academically and on the gridiron. Oher is now an offensive tackle for the NFL's Baltimore Ravens.
The movie, adapted from the non-fiction book by director John Lee Hancock (The Rookie), opened yesterday.
For McGraw, it marks another in his growing oeuvre of measured but memorable roles -- the fierce father of a high school football player in Friday Night Lights, the patriarch in the family film Flicka, a terrorism victim in The Kingdom and Vince Vaughn's brother in Four Christmases. There's not a vanity-driven star vehicle among them.
It's no surprise, then, that McGraw has no illusions about sidelining his music career to pursue acting. And why would he? His latest release, Southern Voices, shot to No. 1, he has sold more than 40 million albums, and the Soul2Soul II tour he and Hill headlined in 2006 remains one of the most successful in music history.
"I'm not going to give up music, because it plays my bills," says McGraw, who has concert dates booked for Calgary, Saskatoon and Winnipeg in March.
His commitment to music doesn't mean he takes filmmaking lightly, he insists.
"I thought I was serious about this particular acting job -- I tried to be anyway. I have to find things that fit in the time schedule I have. I only have a few months out of a year that I'm available to do something."
Besides, it's not like he doesn't have other commitments. He and Hill have three daughters: Gracie, 12, Maggie, 11, and Audrey, 7. And he credits his marriage for saving him, telling People magazine he would "be dead" if it wasn't for Hill.
"I would have partied too hard ... She's saved my life in a lot of different ways -- from myself more than anything. She's loved me through times when I didn't love me. I can go down a dark road sometimes, when you're not feeling good about yourself -- and she pulls me out."
But being a settled family man wasn't the only reason he could identify with Sean Tuohy.
"I wanted to capture the essence of Sean. I wasn't trying to imitate anybody. I wouldn't want to imitate Sean for anything," McGraw says.
"But I think I could relate to it in a lot of ways. We both grew up in Louisiana, I was an athlete, he was an athlete -- although I wasn't the athlete he was -- and also as a kid I remember watching him play for (the University of Mississippi). Growing up in Northern Louisiana, we'd see a lot of Ole Miss games."
Tuohy remembers the day the phone rang and he was told McGraw would be portraying him.
"John Lee called me in the office and his number comes up, but it's Tim on the phone," Tuohy says. "And he goes, 'Hey Sean, it's Tim.' Like I know who Tim McGraw is on the phone? I said, 'Tim who?' and he goes, 'Tim McGraw -- I'm playing you, what do you think about that?' and I said 'Well, if you do me one favour: if at some time in the movie you'll take your shirt off and walk around for 20 seconds, you and I are good.' If one person in Portland thinks I look like that ..."
