Morse found Washington a bit nose-y

NEW YORK - The historic streets of Philadelphia may have been passed up for Virginia reproductions in the HBO miniseries "John Adams," but at least we can claim George Washington.

David Morse, the versatile Philadelphia-based actor who spent two seasons driving a cab here in "Hack" shows up in a white wig and a nose and accent not his own in the second of two episodes premiering Sunday.

Just know that he fought for the nose.

"I had to convince them," he said last month during an interview in HBO's New York offices.

Hired to play the father of our country just three weeks before he began shooting, Morse, who at 6-foot-4 already had the height more than covered, scrambled to fill in the rest of the picture.

"I just got every image of him that I could get, read like crazy, just tried to absorb, absorb, absorb," he said. "I read until the day I wrapped. I just did not stop reading."

First, there were "the teeth, obviously - over the course of his life, Washington had a lot of pain and [was] very self-conscious" about his teeth. "And he had his real hair, which he was very proud of.

"But it was that nose that kept impressing me. He really has the nose of a commander. It's very prominent. I didn't know how my face would stand up without it, and finally one of the producers agreed with me.

"And I was shooting a movie ["Passengers"] in Vancouver and they [took a cast of] my head up there" and sent it to Los Angeles, where the nose was built.

"I flew out to Richmond, where everybody was, and we did a test. I walked onto the set with the nose and everybody said, 'That's [it].' "

Paul Giamatti, who stars as Adams and did little more physically than shave his head for the role - so it would show when he removed his wig - agreed.

"Morse looks good," he said. "It's wild, isn't it? If you look at a portrait . . . he looks weirdly like Washington."

There may be portraits but there are no recordings, which made finding a voice harder.

Dialect coach Catherine Charlton "gave us a recording with [several] different people from the western part of England," where Washington's family was from, "and basically said, find the one that feels most comfortable, feels like the person you're portraying," Morse said.

"There's this one man, a very eloquent gentleman farmer," he said. "I just loved listening to him. But the problem was, it was very close to Irish. And it was the one thing that Catherine had to keep on me about, not slipping into the Irish."

But then he was hired to play an actual Irishman in the Broadway play, "The Seafarer."

"We had to do all the re-recording of Washington for some of these scenes, the looping. And now I'm doing an Irish accent, and I have to go back and do that," said Morse ruefully.

"I've said this before: It feels like you're doing a bad high school play with all your costumes and an accent that just doesn't belong to you yet," he said. "I really wish I could do that second episode again."

Any discomfort Morse feels with the product of all this work and worry is likely to go unnoticed by viewers: Washington was, the actor admitted, self-conscious about speaking in public, anyway, and there's undeniable impact in his first appearance.

Still, it's clear he prefers later scenes. "He comes back at the end of the fourth episode," when they deal with the question of who'll be president, "and at the end of the fourth episode, he's sworn in as president," Morse said. "In the fifth episode, you get to see now that they've created it, the dynamics between all these men" who, having founded a new country, now had to figure out how to keep it.

"He essentially had retired," Morse said. "He had gone to his farm and thought that was where he was going to end his life, being a farmer, which is what he wanted to be.

"And then he saw it all just going to pieces. And he knew there was nobody else who could unify the country, the north, the south, who had that kind of presence. Whatever it was, he knew enough about himself that he could fulfill that. Not that he knew how to do it, but he knew those guys . . . He just had to hold them together while he did it." *