Small role in movie shines a bit of spotlight on Jack Reynolds, who has lived 39 years on dialysis Dec. 21, 2013 Written by KYLE MUNSON desmoinesregister.com
Shortly after John “Jack” Reynolds’ kidneys were crushed, so were his hopes.
He was just 4 years old in June 1956 when a farm accident nearly killed him: A 100-gallon barrel of water tumbled off a trailer, steamrolled over him and squashed his abdomen.
During Reynolds’ two months in the children’s hospital in Des Moines, singing cowboy and movie icon Roy Rogers happened to pay a visit.
The farm boy from rural Carlisle was wheeled into the playroom, still tethered to medical gear, yet eager to meet his childhood hero. But he got lost among the roomful of cute, sick kids.
Rogers “walked right by me, and he didn’t hardly look at me,” Reynolds said.
Reynolds, now 61, has survived on dialysis for 39 years — longer than anybody else in Iowa and probably many other states and countries.
Last year, he won his first paid, speaking acting role in Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska.” So bittersweet, belated recognition from Hollywood arrived, thanks to his unlikely showcase in a film that has become a top Oscar contender.
Payne is the Omaha native and idiosyncratic, Oscar-winning filmmaker who has directed the likes of George Clooney (“The Descendants”) and Jack Nicholson (“About Schmidt”).
“Nebraska” stars Bruce Dern as Woody Grant, a cantankerous, derelict man who returns home in a misguided attempt to claim a $1 million prize that in reality was routine junk mail. Will Forte of “Saturday Night Live” fame co-stars as Grant’s hapless son.
Dern won the best actor prize in May at Cannes. “Nebraska,” shot in black and white, has been nominated for five Golden Globes, including another best actor nod for Dern. Oscar nominations will be unveiled Jan. 16.
Reynolds portrays Bernie Bowen, one of Grant’s old friends in his fictional hometown of Hawthorne, Neb.
“Everybody’s saying how Woody Grant’s a millionaire!” Reynolds remarks to Dern on the street in a scene from the film.
“That’s no big deal,” Dern responds.
“No big deal? Jeez. A million here, a million there. Well, the newspaper’s going to do a big write-up on you!”
Tethered to dialysis three days a week
Reynolds never expected his own write-up. He’s lived a bachelor life in the same apartment in Carlisle for 37 years.
He spends four-hour sessions plugged into a whirring mechanical kidney to filter his blood — tethered as he was at age 4.
Three days a week he treks to the renal clinic on the ground floor of Iowa Methodist Medical Center and leans back in the chair. Decades of massive blood flow have transformed Reynolds’ right forearm into a bumpy topography, as if a fat snake had burrowed beneath his skin.
The farm accident didn’t put him in this chair until he was 22 years old. It was the week before Christmas in 1974 when he was hit with what he thought was a severe case of the flu.
On Christmas Eve, he finally staggered into the hospital. The gift he received was the news that he had suffered renal failure and would require dialysis for the rest of his life. (Intestinal trauma from Reynolds’ accident prevented him from qualifying for kidney transplants.)
“My God, my God, my God,” he thought to himself. “My life’s over.”
Yet after just a week’s worth of dialysis, he began to feel better.
Remarkably, he’s been hospitalized just twice in the last 39 years due to complications from his condition. But now that he’s older, Reynolds tends to crawl out of the dialysis chair utterly fatigued. He aches and worries how brittle his bones might have gotten.
He has no choice but to clamp down on his diet, including no more than eight cups of fluid per day. (He sheds five pounds of water weight during each dialysis.)
Through the years, he has supplemented his disability income with a series of part-time jobs.
He has sold tractor parts. Delivered everything from flowers to radioactive isotopes. Worked the phone as a telemarketer.
The farm where he grew up, now tended by his brother, remains a refuge.
Reynolds never has set foot in Hollywood. But he’s flown to Washington, D.C., a dozen times in the past eight years to meet with politicians as a board member and vice president of the national nonprofit advocacy group Dialysis Patient Citizens. (He’s one of more than 400,000 dialysis patients nationwide. That number is expected to double in the next decade as new waves of diabetes and high blood pressure patients plop down in the chairs next to Reynolds.)
Many factors helped land 'Nebraska' role
His roundabout path into movies began at a radio station in Indianola. He sought voiceover work and then veered into what was Iowa’s booming film industry.
He worked as an extra and as an unpaid supporting actor in local films. He began circulating a new head shot in search of jobs just a couple of weeks before the Iowa Film Office collapsed in 2009 thanks to a scandal sparked by millions of dollars in tax-credit fraud.
Finally, in the summer of 2012, he received the call from his agent, Steve Myers with the Peak Agency in Des Moines, to try out for “Nebraska.”
“I have a shot of tequila, and I go up to the audition,” Reynolds remembered. “I’m feeling good — I’m loose, you know.”
Reynolds initially read for a much smaller part but won the role of Bowen because he evoked the spirit of Frank Capra or Preston Sturges, said John Jackson, Payne’s casting director. Jackson is still based in Council Bluffs, where he was born and raised. Actors nationwide auditioned for the part.
“It really was everything,” Jackson said of Reynolds. “It was his attitude. It was his look. It was his ability to deliver the dialogue.”
Reynolds’ trip to Plainview, Neb., to shoot his scenes in November 2012 required his usual elaborate preparations for a day of dialysis in nearby Norfolk.
He didn’t recognize Forte, but Reynolds was well-schooled in Dern’s work and even discussed with the actor his appearance in a 1963 episode of “The Outer Limits” in which Dern’s character was killed by alien ants.
“That blew his mind,” Reynolds said with a smile.
On that sunny yet chilly November day, Reynolds and Dern and the other actors ran through the scene perhaps half a dozen times.
Reynolds’ 80-year-old mother, Pat, and his brother watched from down the block.
“I was so emotional about it that he could do something like that,” Pat said, “because he’s not had an easy life.”
Reynolds used a little method acting, imagining that he was speaking to a pal of his who died a decade ago who also happened to be named Woody. (Woody was a mentally challenged man who lived in Hartford, worked dishwashing jobs and lacked a driver’s license. Reynolds befriended him and would drive Woody to his favorite entertainment spots: strip clubs.)
Reynolds was incredulous to earn $185 per hour for “Nebraska,” about $3,000 total.
“Talk about being overpaid,” he said. “I would’ve done it for $10 an hour.”
His part escapes cutting-room floor
For months, Reynolds feared he had been cut from the movie because he wasn’t listed among the cast on imdb.com. But then last summer, he received an excited email from one of his legislative contacts in D.C. who had been shocked to see and hear Reynolds in the “Nebraska” trailer.
Reynolds, his mother and his brother, Mike, finally saw the film last weekend at Fleur Cinema in Des Moines.
“He was so quiet during the movie,” Pat said.
It was the proud mother who called to alert me to how her son had escaped the grind of his daily struggle in Iowa long enough to get caught up in the thrill of “Nebraska.” Pat suspected that her son “was ticking off the seconds he was on the screen” as they watched together.
Reynolds appears for no more than a minute. But for a man who has been forced to watch so much of his life drain away by the hour as he sits rooted to his chair in the clinic, that’s a very big minute.
“This just really only whetted my appetite,” he said of his good malady: the acting bug.
Fifty-seven years after Roy Rogers failed to notice him, Reynolds finally stepped into the spotlight — in a film, appropriately enough, that celebrates characters who all too often get overlooked.
Kyle Munson can be reached at 515-284-8124 or kmunson@dmreg.com. See more of his columns, blog posts and video at DesMoinesRegister.com/munson. Connect with him on Facebook (Kyle Munson's Iowa) and Twitter (@KyleMunson).
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http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20131222/NEWS03/312220054/-1/SPORTS_highschool_schedules_football.php/Munson-Small-role-movie-shines-bit-spotlight-Carlisle-man
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