Flaunt Magazine #109 (Fashion Issue) – Jeffrey Dean Morgan
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Here is the final article from the latest issue of Flaunt Magazine with actor Jeffrey Dean Morgan. Issue 109 is the fashion issue and yesterday I posted Chris Egan and day before Emile De Ravin all 3 are all known actors and after the movies they’ll appeared or have just recently appeared in I’m sure we’ll be seen alot more of the three in larger roles in the coming years.
Below is the article for Jeffrey Dean Morgan who people may know him from Grey’s Anatomy (Denny Duquette) then last year as The Comedian in Zack Synder’s The Watchmen and More recently The Losers next to Idris Elba but sometime this year his next movie will be Shanghai with John Cusack, Chow Yun Fant and Ken Watanabe.
Thanks to Steven of The Confluence for the 3 sample articles and if your interested in more information on the magazine print or online please check out there website and here’s the….Link.
Heres the links to the previous articles: Emile De Ravin – Chris Egan
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THE MOUNTING GRAVITY OF JEFFREY DEAN MORGAN
Taking time from his full plate of major studio roles, actor Jeffrey Dean Morgan muses on the slow, yet steady. Growth of a formidable career.
Jeffrey dean morgan’s dogs greet me at the entrance gate of his Mediterranean-style manse, their barks reverberating across the sleepy Studio City street. They scamper through the grass of the tidy front yard, wagging their tails with exuberance. Bandit, a feisty Shepherd mutt, hops up on his hind legs and offers me his paw, while Bisou, a thirteen-year-old Rottweiler mix, sniffs my leg suspiciously. It’s a clement Friday afternoon, upper 60s and the sunlight mellow, as Morgan appears, in a black t-shirt and full growth of beard, his silver necklaces tinkling as he scoops Bandit up in his arms.
“He’s an odd one,” quips the actor, stroking the pup’s shiny blonde coat (Morgan rescued both his dogs). “He’s very cute and handsome, but odd. Always trying to herd me around.” Morgan playfully shoos Bisou toward the front door—“She is all princess,” he tells me—and the four of us enter the house.
Morgan purchased the property 18 months ago, but he’s spent scant time actually living in it. After coming off Zack Snyder’s Watchmen (he played The Comedian, a gruff-and-tumble ex-superhero/mercenary), the fast emerging movie star was in Puerto Rico for three months shooting The Losers, director Sylvain White’s action-thriller adaptation of the beloved British graphic novel by Andy Diggle. In the film, set for an April release, Morgan plays opposite Avatar star Zoë Saldana as Clay, leader of a CIA special ops unit on a covert mission to hunt down the assassin that targeted the group for murder. “What they are doing is not conducive to having a big family,” explains Morgan of his character. “This is his family; he doesn’t have anybody on the outside.”
Since wrapping The Losers, Morgan has been working and traveling non-stop. He’s got several projects in the can, among them The Resident (in which he re-teams with Hilary Swank, his good friend and co-star in P.S. I Love You) and Red Dawn, a remake of the 1984 John Milius thriller starring Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen. At the moment, Morgan has just returned from a quick 30-hour trip to Texas where he met the real-life counterparts to his leading role in The Texas Killing Fields, currently in pre-production. He’s had no time to plant roots, and sleep has gone the way of the Dodo.
“As much as I love it, I’m kicking myself for buying this house,” says Morgan, leading me through the foyer. “Because I really don’t have to be here.” Still, Morgan’s stately abode is not a bad place not to have to be.
The place is pristine, bright and airy, bathed in natural light. In sync with its Mediterranean vibe, lily-white walls complement dark wood furniture; semi-circle archways divide rooms in the open floor plan, and heavy wood timbers stretch across the house’s high ceilings. On the kitchen table—spotless, as though the home’s occupant rarely enjoys a meal upon it—is a hardcover copy of The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt; on a coffee table are two loose-leaf binders filled with research material for Texas.
There are framed black and white photographs throughout the house, an ever-growing collection for which Morgan, a budding photographer, holds great affection. “They all mean something special to me,” he says. Among Morgan’s favorite prints are a silver gelatin of Jim Marshall’s iconic shot of Johnny Cash flipping the bird at San Quentin Prison in 1969 (a gift from The Losers producers Akiva Goldsman, Kerry Foster, and Joel Silver), and a 1952 Elliott Erwitt still of Robert Frank and his wife in Valencia, Spain that Morgan acquired in Sante Fe while shooting The Resident. “That to me,” he says, “is the most beautiful photo ever taken.” On a wall that curves around a stairwell hangs an array of crosses from all corners of the world—Mexico, Ireland, Germany, Australia, everywhere that Morgan has gone. “I love the symbolism,” he says of the crucifixes. “I’m not going to argue with anybody’s belief system. Spirituality—I’m big on that.”
Morgan’s backyard evokes the French countryside of a Henry Miller novel. There’s a small, rectangular fountain-fed pool—“I think I’ve been in it twice,” says Morgan, who designed all the outdoor landscaping—and a lush garden with close-cropped grass that borders the grounds’ periphery. Pink bougainvilleas climb the white stucco walls. Bandit laps up pool water while Bisou lays in canine repose on a wicker chair with striped cushions, sunning herself.
We sit down at a Parisian-style patio table where Morgan lights up the first in a succession of three Merits. “I’ve been trying to quit for like five years,” he tells me, puffing casually on his cigarette. “I got one of those vaporizer things, I tried hypnotism, acupuncture, the patch—I’ve done everything.” He exhales a small cloud of smoke. “Is it just wrong that I love smoking?” he jokes. “It’s my only vice.”
To be sure, Morgan presents a striking juxtaposition, at once a reckless movie star with a cross tattoo on his arm and a soft spot for Harley Davidsons—“My favorite thing is riding those fuckers,” he says of the V-Rod, Night Rod Special, and Softail Cross Bones parked in the garage—and a gratefully humbled family man. “Whatever I do in my life,” he says, “I want my mom and my dad to be proud of me.” While Morgan remains mum on the specifics of his personal life—he’s divorced and was at one point linked to a high profile, also thrice-name star—he currently abides by two steadfast rules: “We don’t tattoo someone’s name on our body and we don’t get married.”
Not that there’s much time. “I’ve become a workaholic,” sighs Morgan, stamping out his second cigarette. “I love to work. It’s kind of the only place that’s comfortable.”
With his thick, artfully-tousled hair and dreamy light brown eyes, it’s easy to see what has filmmakers clamoring to cast him in upcoming projects. Indeed, a bit of noise has been made—not to mention amusing online galleries—of Morgan’s close resemblance to two other top-billing names; if Robert Downey, Jr. and Javier Bardem had a love child, Jeffrey Dean Morgan would be it. (By Morgan’s own admission, this is not a bad comparison.)
But with his own in-person charm and on-screen charisma (at six-feet-two, he’s also got a good six inches on Downey Jr.), Morgan is fast establishing himself as a distinguished leading man. “The material now—that’s my main focus,” he says. “Finding really great scripts and working with great collaborators. I gotta keep it going.”
It wasn’t long ago that Morgan’s career seemed to be going nowhere. The Kirkland, Washington native was in his early 20s when he came to Los Angeles on a lark, driving a friend’s U-Haul, no designs on acting whatsoever. He’d spent “less than a minute” playing basketball for Skagit Valley College in Mount Vernon, WA—“I wasn’t cut out for school stuff,” he half-laughs—and spent a few years running a small graphic design company, supplementing his income with coffee shop showings of his paintings. “I knew there was something I was meant to be doing,” Morgan wistfully recollects. “But I didn’t know what.”
In L.A., he met a casting agent who, taken with his rugged good looks, convinced him to audition. Straight away, Morgan landed his first acting gig, playing Sharkey the Killer Pimp in Roger Corman’s Angel in Red.
“I wasn’t very good at it,” recalls Morgan of his performance, “but I knew that I loved [acting] immediately. And I thought, sure, I got that job quickly. I got the impression that it was all going to be easy.”
It wasn’t. Morgan spent the next two decades scrambling for any part that he could get, living off unemployment checks in between small, guest-starring spots on such TV series as Walker, Texas Ranger and V.I.P. “At a certain point in my late 30s,” says Morgan, sucking on his third butt and running a hand hard through his hair, “I was like, ‘What the fuck am I doing? Something has got to change.’”
Then came Grey’s Anatomy.
“It just sort of blew up,” he marvels of his breakout role as the dying Denny Duquette and the storyline that sent nearly 30 million viewers into violent spasms of tears. “I wake up every morning and thank [Grey’s creator] Shonda Rhimes. That role gave me a career.”
Soon, Morgan was a sought-after small screen star, doing Weeds, Supernatural, and Grey’s all in the same year (famously dying in all three). “I jumped on it,” he says, a hint of urgency in his voice, like he’s afraid it all might go away. “I have continued to jump on it to the point of exhaustion. It took twenty years of barely surviving for everything to finally come together. I got lucky.”
But while his star is rapidly ascending, Morgan rejects all of celebrity’s superficial trappings. You won’t catch him parading down Robertson amidst the maelstrom of paparazzi perched outside The Ivy, and he doesn’t go to Katsuya. You won’t ever see him out clubbing. At 44 years old, Morgan is a grateful yet reluctant movie star, a guy who’d prefer a hike in Fryman Canyon with his dogs and a Deadliest Catch marathon on The Discovery Channel to a Hollywood red carpet event any day. Earnestly, he lets on that down the line, he’d like to own a little ranch house in Montana, on a ten-acre plot of land, a bunch of dogs running around.
“I love acting,” says Morgan, as Bandit pads over and rolls onto his back, a cue for Morgan to scratch his belly. “The star part is not my bag. It’s weird and you don’t get used to it. I’m not comfortable with it, nor do I want it. I want to be with people I care about and hang out with my dogs. Never in my days did I want to be a celebrity.”
And yet peering around the backyard, a gentle breeze bringing about tiny ripples in the pool, the sun warming the back of his neck and his dogs nuzzling up to him, Morgan has to admit, life is good, life is more than good.
“Every year I’m sitting in this seat,” he tells me, “and talking about everything that has transpired, and each year I don’t think it can get any bigger or better or more intense. And here I am saying I can’t imagine it getting any bigger or better or more intense. Where do I see my life heading?” He ponders the question momentarily, scratching his bearded chin. “More,” he says. “More…”
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