Good Cop, Bad Cop

[March 19th, 2008]

Portland Police Sgt. Daniel Liu leads a classic double life. By day, he heads a joint task force of Portland and Multnomah County detectives targeting crimes against children. But starting this Friday, he can be seen nightly at Cinema 21 investigating a crime committed by a kid.

Gus Van Sant’s new movie Paranoid Park (see review, page 49) is filled with teenagers—skater boys and MySpace starlets—whose onscreen authenticity stems directly from their artlessness: Most of them have never acted before. But beside these angst-ridden amateurs is a stern, bulky police detective who is forging a second career by being exactly what he seems.

“I just bring to the camera what I bring,” says Liu, a 44-year old Portland native. What he brings is 15 years of patrolling Portland streets, experience that makes him a double threat: When directors hire him as an actor, they’re getting a police technical consultant thrown in. In Paranoid Park and this past winter’s Diane Lane vehicle Untraceable, Liu played cops and told his directors what real cops would do. (He informed Van Sant that police detectives work in pairs; later that day, Paranoid Park hired Liu’s former street-beat partner Rick Miller for the role.) “What that in turn does is make it easier for me,” he says, “because then I’m not going so far out of character.”

His fellow actors certainly find him believable. “When I found out he was a real cop, I was pretty scared,” says 16-year-old Gabe Nevins, who plays Alex, Paranoid’s accidental criminal. “ thought I was screwed.” The intimidation extended to Nevins’ mother, who met Liu at the movie’s premiere: “She came to meet me and she admitted, ‘I heard your voice and I cringed, ’cause you were the cop that was grilling my son.’”

Liu’s ken for acting started with a 30-second public-service announcement for D.A.R.E. in 1997. “I was just a cop with a whole bunch of kids around,” he recalls of his first gig. “We had a Camaro that was seized from a drug dealer, so it had all the fancy D.A.R.E. markings. I don’t remember what all the dialogue was, but it was just one of those ‘rah-rah’ kind of films.”

Liu kept taking roles in PSAs—a patient’s son in a video for the Oregon Medical Association, another police officer in [i]9-1-1: The Vital Link—and caught his feature-film break in the 2003 Tommy Lee Jones action flick The Hunted, which was shot in and around Portland. Liu played a uniformed officer, and was “bumped” up from an extra to a speaking part. His scene was cut from the finished movie, but it gave him admission into the ranks of the Screen Actors Guild.

With two major movies in his holster, and more on the way (he just finished auditioning for Tim Robbins’ The Heretic), Liu is used to being a minor celebrity within the police department. He is regularly asked by fellow officers how they can become actors, too—“I usually tell them to quit thinking about it, shut up and go pursue it.” He views his second job as a break from his first. “It’s so different from my police work, it’s almost therapeutic,” he says. “I never did think it was healthy to live your off-duty life still being a cop. The job is stressful enough as it is.” A cop who decompresses from his work by pretending to be a cop: Now there’s a juicy role.