09.25.00

DIANE SAWYER
Well, Scott Speedman, actor, created a kind of sensation in the TV series Felicity, and now he is poised to do it again. He is in the new movie Duets with Gwyneth Paltrow. So recently we thought we’d give you a chance to learn more about this young man everybody’s talking about. We sat down and discussed karaoke, movies and the career he almost had as an Olympic athlete.

So I’m reading here from People magazine, which says you have an “irresistible smoky vulnerability.” Would you do something smokily vulnerable, please?

SCOTT SPEEDMAN
I don’t really know what that means.

DIANE SAWYER
What’s your favorite compliment anybody’s ever paid you?

SCOTT SPEEDMAN
Sincerity, probably, honesty. If I can be honest, that’s all I want to do, just try to be honest.

DIANE SAWYER
Duets.

SCOTT SPEEDMAN
Yeah.

DIANE SAWYER
How did you get the part? How did that happen?

SCOTT SPEEDMAN
It was — it was pretty simple. I mean, they’d been trying to find that — that role for a little while. Everyone was in Vancouver and I walked into the casting director’s office and we just put a couple of scenes down on tape and we sent it up to Bruce Paltrow and he cast me off the tape. So...

DIANE SAWYER
We’re going to give everybody a chance to see a clip now. This is Maria Bello in it with you, and she’s meeting you for the first time and you were coming off the serious blues.

SCOTT SPEEDMAN
Yeah.

DIANE SAWYER
Serious aftershock...

SCOTT SPEEDMAN
Yes.

DIANE SAWYER
...of being — of being dumped...

SCOTT SPEEDMAN
Yes.

DIANE SAWYER
...in a romance.

SCOTT SPEEDMAN
Yes.

(Clip shown of Duets)

DIANE SAWYER
I wish we could see the gyrations here. Is this too painful for you?

SCOTT SPEEDMAN
It’s hard. I mean, I don’t know. I still haven’t gotten used to watching myself on the screen.

DIANE SAWYER
There’s never anything you look at and say, “I’m pretty good?”

SCOTT SPEEDMAN
Yeah, sometimes. Sometimes I watch a scene on dailies. Sometimes I get dailies and watch and I say, “That was pretty good there,” and “That was nice,” and, yeah. But it’s hard to watch the whole thing.

DIANE SAWYER
You got here in an unusual way. We were talking earlier about the fact that you really started out as an athlete.

SCOTT SPEEDMAN
Yeah. Well, I grew up in a family of athletes. And...

DIANE SAWYER
Swimming? Swimming, I know.

SCOTT SPEEDMAN
Swimming was my primarily — my primary sport, but I was also a runner. And swimming really took over when I was about 11, at a really young age.

DIANE SAWYER
You could have been at the Olympics right now instead of talking to me.

SCOTT SPEEDMAN
Well, that was my first goal was to go to the Olympics. And I got really injured and kind of fell into acting in an odd way after that.

DIANE SAWYER
Which is how?

SCOTT SPEEDMAN
Well, a girlfriend of mine dared me on a show called Speaker’s Corner in Toronto, which is this thing you pay a dollar for and you can tape anything — anything you want to do, like, you can talk about politics or anything you want. And I — I said I wanted to audition for Batman Forever, which is this Batman movie.

DIANE SAWYER
Well, funny you mentioned it. I don’t know how it happened, it’s just this amazing coincidence, but we have a tape.

SCOTT SPEEDMAN
Oh, no.

DIANE SAWYER
Speaker’s Corner. What year is this? How long ago? How long ago?

SCOTT SPEEDMAN
I was 18. I’m so embarrassed.

DIANE SAWYER
Here it comes. You think you were in pain before, buster.

SCOTT SPEEDMAN
Oh, no.

(Clip shown from Speaker’s Corner tape)

SCOTT SPEEDMAN
Oh, my goodness. That’s so funny.

DIANE SAWYER
And this worked.

SCOTT SPEEDMAN
Yeah, I don’t know how. Did you see that? I don’t know how that worked.

DIANE SAWYER
Do you mind if I say “No, I don’t know how.”

SCOTT SPEEDMAN
I have no idea. I have no idea why they called me, why they wanted me to do this. So funny. I’ve seen that once before and I have no idea why they called, really. I have no idea.

DIANE SAWYER
I noticed in Duets you don’t sing.

SCOTT SPEEDMAN
I don’t sing.

DIANE SAWYER
You say you don’t sing. We all think of course, suddenly it’s going to be Pavarotti, here.

SCOTT SPEEDMAN
I know. We filmed a scene at the end of the movie where I do, but it was just as a joke.

DIANE SAWYER
Do you sing?

SCOTT SPEEDMAN
No, I’m an awful singer. When I was in theater school, I had to sing and nobody skipped the days I had to sing. Nobody was late. Everybody showed up right on time. It was really embarrassing. I’m an awful, awful singer.

DIANE SAWYER
You’ve never done karaoke?

SCOTT SPEEDMAN
No. No. No, no, no.

DIANE SAWYER
Not even after margaritas?

SCOTT SPEEDMAN
No. No. No. I was — when we were in — filming in Vancouver, Huey Lewis — we’d sign him up for his own songs, and he’d get up in front of this packed, packed karaoke bar and sing his own songs, like, “I Want a New Drug” and “Power of Love.” It was amazing. Nobody had any idea what was going on. And he got up there, and slowly people started to realize what was going on. That was amazing.

DIANE SAWYER
What you do for fun...

SCOTT SPEEDMAN
Yeah, that was great.

DIANE SAWYER
...in Toronto.

SCOTT SPEEDMAN
That was so — that was great. Yeah.

DIANE SAWYER
Scott Speedman. And the movie is Duets.