Untraceable About The Cast

In Burnett’s script, Jennifer Marsh, the FBI Special Agent at the center of Untraceable, became a complex and sometimes contradictory character with equal parts vulnerability and toughness. “Marsh is a very intense, determined FBI agent,” says Lucchesi. “She's the mother of an eight-year-old girl, who she's raising with the help of her own mother. She's the breadwinner of the family and also a devoted mom. And because of that, she works nights. She comes home at six in the morning, wakes her daughter up and takes her to school.”

To capture the various facets of Marsh’s personality, from driven law enforcement agent to guilt-ridden single mother, the part required an actress of considerable range. Producer Koch says that everyone involved in casting the film was immediately enthusiastic about Diane Lane playing the role.

Gary Lucchesi remembers a conversation he had with director Gregory Hoblit early in the casting process. “Greg liked Diane and we thought she would bring a level of verisimilitude to the role. We had met female FBI agents and they’re interesting women, determined women and attractive women. Diane seemed to fit the bill very well.”

Hoblit says he has been a fan of the actress’ since he saw her in George Roy Hill’s 1979 comedy A Little Romance. “She was all of twelve years old,” he remembers. “We’ve seen her grow up and do some really remarkable work. There is always something very grounded and very real and authentic about her. She’s a genuinely a gifted actress and brings a lot of intelligence and integrity to what she’s doing.”

Lucchesi notes that the role of Special Agent Marsh, a tough cop who struggles to leave the gritty reality of the job at the office and stay connected to her family, would more likely have been played by a man in the past. “But it's now Diane Lane instead of Harrison Ford or Mel Gibson, as it would have been a few years ago.”

Diane Lane found the idea of a female-driven thriller irresistible. “I like smart movies where the woman is at the helm of figuring it out and not just a damsel in distress prototype. And I was fascinated by the whole cyber-crimes division of crime. I’m so naïve, you can’t imagine. I literally thought that computer viruses just spontaneously occurred, like viruses that we know in the world. It never occurred to me that people would maliciously invent harm and send it out into the universe like an arsonist or something.”

Actor Billy Burke, who plays Eric Box, a Portland police detective who joins forces with Marsh, calls Lane “one of the coolest people I've ever worked with.”
Director Hoblit admits that before Burke walked in the room to read for Fracture, a movie they worked on together just prior to Untraceable, he had never even heard of the actor. “He did a great job with a role that didn’t have a lot of dimension to it. He had a presence and an honesty that is hard to find.” After appearing in Fracture for Hoblit, Burke appeared in Lakeshore’s Feast of Love. He didn’t know he’d landed the role in Untraceable until about a week before the shoot.

“In my experience, it's rare that people who say they want to work with you again actually give you the job,” says Burke. “I read the script and I knew that it was good and I wanted it. So when they said sit tight, that's what I did—for about two and a half months.”

To prepare for the role, Burke immediately began spending time with a pair of Portland detectives, who invited him to accompany them while they worked. “They have been really informative,” says the actor. “I like to spend time with people and sort of steal their demeanor, get the sensibility of their lifestyle. These are two very laid back people. They bite off a whole lot, and they take their time chewing it. They don't make too big a meal out of every single moment.”

That quality ended up being the heart of Box’s character. “He is brought in to work on it from the street level in Portland,” says Burke. “He's been around for a while and it’s hard to surprise him. When we start to get into the meat of the story, I think he brings the sort of stability to the chaos that's going on.”

One of the biggest thrills for Burke was the opportunity to do his own stunt driving. “I got into this business because of people like Burt Reynolds,” says the actor. “When I was a kid, I would think, ‘That guy looks like he's having so much fun. That's what I would like to do.’ And when I learned that Burt Reynolds liked to do a lot of his own stunts, I said, ‘Me, too.’”

Daniel Liu, the police officer who plays Burke’s partner in the film says the pair developed a strong sense of camaraderie during shooting. “Billy understood when we walked through a set that I was going to cover whatever he didn't see,” says Liu. “I had his back, he had my back.. In all the scenes that I did with Billy, he would ask, ‘Is this how you guys would do it? What would you do if this happened?’ I didn't expect that attention to detail when I started the project. Billy wanted it to look right and he nailed it every time.”

Lane foresees a big future for Burke. “He is funny and smart and sexy, and he’s a movie star. He’s very professional and very on it. I mean, he would nail it in one take.”

For the role of Special Agent Griffin Dowd, Marsh’s FBI cyber-squad partner, the filmmakers chose Colin Hanks. “We had seen his work in Jake Kasdan's movie Orange County and we thought that he would add some humor to the movie.”

Hoblit had seen some of Hanks’ work over the years and liked it. “There is a certain sweetness about him that makes you feel Marsh can really trust him and in a certain way, he was like a son.”

Hanks’ character is part of a younger breed of FBI agents who came of age with the Internet, says Lucchesi. “He’s in his late 20s. He's funny and irreverent. And he loves his work.”

He’s also an avid online dater, a detail added by screenwriter Allison Burnett, who met his wife on the Web.

Hanks appreciated the irony of Dowd’s multifaceted relationship with cyberspace. “Griffin's got a doubly weird sense of humor, considering he patrols the Internet for bad guys and it’s also his main source for meeting people of the opposite sex.”

Hanks, whose other credits include King Kong and the upcoming action comedy My Mom’s New Boyfriend, enjoyed the breezy rapport that Agents Griffin and Marsh share. “These two people spend long hours stuck in front of their computers together,” he says. “There has to be some sort of witty banter between them to keep them going.”

With Marsh’s workplace family complete, her real-life family began to take shape, as well. Mary Beth Hurt was cast as Marsh’s mother, Stella. Hurt was happy to once again trade lines with Lane, with whom she had worked on the New York stage many years earlier. “Diane and I did ‘The Cherry Orchard’ at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater when she was twelve and I was 28. To get to work with her again is wonderful. The way that things come around again is one of the nicest things that happen in this business.”

For Lane, working with Hurt again was like family reunion. “It was like cheating, having somebody that you know from so long ago,” she says. “Mary Beth gets it. She has seen it all and done it all. And I have great admiration for her self-knowledge and how much of herself she brings to her work.”

Hoblit calls Hurt “a grand dame. My only regret is that there’s not more of her in Untraceable. I look forward one day to being able to make a whole movie with Mary Beth Hurt because she’s really talented and just a joy to work with.

Hurt says she was drawn to the human, rather than the technological, elements of the story. “I was interested in the idea of a family with multiple generations of single mothers and what happens with that relationship; how it works out.”

Hurt points to a scene that embodies a parent’s worst nightmare. Early one morning, an exhausted March sends her daughter Annie to watch television while she sleeps in. She suddenly realizes that the killer’s website is broadcasting live from right outside her house—and Annie has gone missing. According to Hurt, there’s nothing contrived in the reactions of Marsh and Stella as they frantically search for the little girl. “There is just a great piece of blocking in that scene. As we come tearing down the stairs in our pajamas and run outside to find Annie, I come down in front of Diane. And when we reach the landing, she just pushes me back and goes first.”

Most of Hurt’s scenes involve her character’s granddaughter, Annie, played by Perla Haney-Jardine. The fourth-grader’s personality and commitment as an actor impressed Hurt immediately. “She's a doll—a really sharp little doll. Unspoiled, bright, unself-conscious and very thoughtful, you know. She is able to follow direction, and do what she needs to do.”

Adds Koch: “Perla is as much a pro as Diane and Mary Beth. She is very smart and sincere. Perla's got it, and she doesn't need to be pushed.”

Haney-Jardine beat out a number of other talented young actresses after auditioning several times for the filmmakers. “All I knew about her was that she had been in a Tarantino movie or two, she had been in Spiderman,” says Hoblit. “I loved her. I just thought she was really amazingly honest in what she was doing. And she and Diane just bonded like that.”

Because of Untraceable’s mature subject matter, the young actress has never read the whole script. That might actually work to her advantage, observes veteran actress Hurt. “Perla's asked me certain questions that made me realize she doesn't know what the film is about. It's not a bad way to approach an acting job, because your character doesn’t know what's going to happen next.”

For her part, Haney-Jardine seems unaffected by her early success and her costars’ praise. “It's just been really fun and I kind of like getting to know everyone,” she says. “That's usually my favorite part, just working with different actresses and actors. Mary Beth is really fun to work with and she gave me a lot of good advice. Sometimes she would say ‘How about if you try this?,’ and I would I try it and it would turn out a lot better.”

Lane, a former child actor herself, also couldn’t resist giving the youngster some motherly advice. “One day I said, ‘I feel like I could do that better,’ and Diane said, ‘Well, you know the biggest room in the world is the room for improvement.’ Now my mom says it all the time and it’s getting kind of annoying.”