Josh Lucas on reuniting with Sweet Home Alabama director almost 20 years later

Josh Lucas has reflected on the “joyful” experience of making Sweet Home Alabama as the film approaches its 20th anniversary and shared his happiness at reuniting with its director Andy Tennant for his latest project.

The actor, 49, shot to fame in 2002 in the romantic comedy opposite Reese Witherspoon, about a New York fashion designer who returns to her small home town to finalise a divorce from her first husband, only to realise they might still have a future together.

Lucas has now reunited with Tennant on the film The Secret: Dare To Dream, based on the 2006 self-help book The Secret by Rhonda Byrne, about a mysterious handyman whose belief in the power of positive thinking comes to the aid of a young widow, played by Katie Holmes.

He told the PA news agency: “I was absolutely sceptical at first but part of my relief came from the fact I had worked with Andy and I know him and I know what he’s been through in his life and he’s had some hard, complicated things in his life, like most of us have, but particularly he’s had a big hard ride.

“I knew the reasons why he was making the movie and adapting the movie and his belief in it and so I knew that he was coming from a genuinely really beautiful place.”

He added: “I hadn’t seen or spoken to him much in almost 20 years but what struck me was how much we had grown and changed and how much we both had been through some similar difficult things, both career-wise, life-wise, and that was our attraction to the movie and our attraction to the story we were telling.

“This isn’t a light little romp, which I think is the joy of Sweet Home Alabama, this is a much deeper attempt to talk about, in a positive way, the way life can be very hard.”

Reflecting on the legacy of the rom-com that first brought them together, he said: “I think we are both struck by it, I knew when that movie came out it was a life-changer for me and I do think Andy had a sense of that as well.

“His career exploded immediately in terms of the big movies he was doing with huge movie stars.

“That movie allowed us to go through some of the great joys and some of the real pains we went through, they were connected in some way.

“What we both have found in our life is that the Hollywood world was something we more and more shied away from, that we were both people that the more we went through success in Hollywood, the less we were impressed by it and the more that our personal lives and our families and the things that we were going through, with our children in particular, were the things that mattered the most.

“I don’t necessarily equate the experience to the success of the movie any longer. I have definitely done movies that were really not pleasant to make that were very successful and I don’t look back on those experiences the way that I do with something like this or definitely with something like Sweet Home Alabama, where the making it was quite joyful and that is the memory.”

The Secret: Dare To Dream is available to rent now on PVOD.