LOS ANGELES -- He grew up riding horses and roping cows but when it came to playing a cowboy in the movies, country and western singer Tim McGraw wanted no part of it.
But that is exactly what he wound up doing for Flicka, because the movie about a wild girl whose ways are tamed by a feisty mustang made the ol' cowpoke want to cry.
"I said, 'No!
,' when the script first came. I didn't want anything to do with it. I didn't want to play a cowboy, being a country singer," McGraw said in his trademark southern drawl.
"But the more I read the script, the more I fell in love with it. And it made me cry and it made me laugh ..
. Even when I'd start rehearsing the lines with my wife (singer Faith Hill), I'd tear up and couldn't get through it. As much as I tried to say no, I couldn't talk myself out of it," he said.
McGraw, 39, grew up in Louisiana where he discovered at age 11 he was the natural son of Tug McGraw, a famous relief pitcher for the New York Mets and the Philadelphia Phillies.
He rose through the ranks of country singers in the 1990s to become a multi-platinum artist with hits like I Like It, I Love It and more recently, The Cowboy in Me.
In the past few years, he has widened his repertoire with a version of Elton John's Tiny Dancer, and he hit the charts in a duet with rapper Nelly, Over and Over.
He even undertook film acting in two supporting roles: a troubled father in 2004 hit Friday Night Lights, and a sheriff in low-budget film Black Cloud that same year.
Now McGraw is sitting in a farm home built for the set of Flicka and drinking a non-alcoholic beer. He wears a baseball cap turned backwards, flannel shirt, jeans, combat boots and enough necklaces to weigh down the head of a lesser man.
His look is one part cowboy, and one part city slicker, and McGraw has some concern his fans back in Nashville might think he has gone all Hollywood on them.
"The only way to quell that is to go out and try to be good. If you're good at it, and it works, that stuff is gone," he said.
In Friday Night Lights, McGraw earned critical praise for a small, supporting role that was mostly one-dimensional. For Flicka, he takes the bigger, leading role of a horse rancher named Rob McLaughlin who must show a range of emotions from strong-willed to warm-hearted.
"I saw Friday Night Lights and thought he was wonderful, but it was a small role," said Flicka director Michael Mayer.
"This is a character that has big changes, and meeting him I was really surprised at what an absolute love muffin he was."
McGraw said being a father of three girls helped him identify with rancher McLaughlin, and added that he wanted to make a movie he could take his whole family to see.
"There's not a lot of movies that are dramatic, but still kid-friendly: this is one of those movies," he said.
McGraw added that early in his career he was offered many roles in movies and on television because of his celebrity, but he never took them because he had plenty of music to make.
Now, however, acting provides him with a challenge that also is a natural extension from performing songs, he said.
"It's scary to try it, but I wanted to," McGraw said.
"It's also cathartic, acting ...
you get to do things and release emotions that you don't get to on an everyday basis."
Yet McGraw knows he still has a lot to learn. He rates himself only about 3.
5 on a 1-to-10 scale for acting.
"I'm working on the extra half to get to four," he said.
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