With the Masters cranking up this week, we nabbed an interview with, who else? John Schneider.
The actor and country singer was among the first arrivals at a recent red-carpet event promoting Tyler Perry’s “Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor.” Unlike Kim Kardashian, who bypassed the locals and was whisked down the red carpet to a friendly E! reporter, Schneider stopped to talk, first to fans and then to the press.
What was he doing there? Schneider, who moved to Georgia as a teenager and graduated from North Springs High School, is now working with Perry on “The Haves And The Have Nots,” a drama Perry is developing to air on his buddy Oprah Winfrey’s OWN network.
And what does any of this have to do with the Masters? Well.
Schneider is of course best known for his role as Bo Duke, the dreamy country boy who with cousin Luke used to tear up the dirt roads of (fictional) Hazzard County, Ga. outrunning the nutty Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane in the orange race car known as The General Lee. Bubba Watson, winner of last year’s Masters, now owns the General. A University of Georgia alum, Watson bought the 1969 Dodge Charger at an auction in January 2012 for $110,000 and it must have been something of a good-luck charm.
With Bo in town and Bubba fixing to hit the links in Augusta, we figured the two of them would be getting together. Not yet, Schneider said. He was a good sport about that and other Hazzard-themed questions, though.
“Do I hope to hit a grand slam with something else? Yes,” he said. But landing another gig “as universally popular as ‘The Dukes of Hazzard’” has been a bit of a trick, he said. But hey, now that he’s hooked up with Atlanta’s filming community, anything’s possible.
“Do I think I’ll win an Academy Award? Probably,” he chuckled. “Then they’ll probably paint the (dern) thing orange.”
His new show, which debuts at 9 p.m. May 28, is about the wealthy and dysfunctional Cryer family. Schneider plays patriarch Jim Cryer, ” a powerful judge whose double-life, including tawdry affairs with high-priced escorts, puts his family and political ambitions at risk,” according to promotional material for “The Haves and the Have-Nots.”
But Schneider is bemusedly resigned to being known forever and ever Amen as a redneck whose car doors don’t open, and he sends his best to Watson over there at Augusta National: “It does my heart good to know that the clubs that won the Masters are in the trunk of the General Lee.”
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