Steve Dupree
Actor, Bartender, Engineer, Man-About-Town

The Merits of Theater:
"I enjoy theater quite a bit, but for the most part, it doesn't pay and it requires a huge amount of time. But of all the things I've done, it's the most fun. The gratification is immediate. The audience laughs or cries or yells or boos depending on what you do. Of course, the delayed gratification of a movie or commercial can be nice, too." Dupree adds, with wry amusement: "I walk outside and there's a check in the mailbox for no apparent reason."

Pigskin Prognostication:
A devoted follower of University of Tennessee football, Dupree shrewdly prophesied that UT would vanquish previously unbeaten University of Georgia a few weeks back (on the Dawgs' home turf, no less). His prediction was issued only a day after the shattering announcement that All-World Tennessee tailback Jamal Lewis would miss the rest of the season with a knee injury. In the wake of the news, few gridiron pundits allowed the Vols so much as a prayer against the inexperienced but talented Bulldog squad. The Big Orange proved worthy of Dupree's faith, winning decisively at 22-3.
"It's a shame what happened to Jamal," Steve opined, the Wednesday before the Vols' trip to Athens. "But in some ways, he was the last executive on a blue collar team. At times, I think they relied on him a little too much. I think his injury will spur the rest of the team to circle the wagons and get the job done."

The Printed Word:
A voracious reader, Dupree is currently re-reading (for the third time) Conversations With God, a curious tome wherein the author, Neale Donald Walsch, purports to have engaged the Almighty Himself in a pointed metaphysical dialogue, with his own pen alternately serving as the means of petition and the vessel of divine response.
"I'm not one to take very much as Gospel, but I think he's telling the truth. A lot of questions I have about life and the universe are addressed.
"I'm always reading or dabbing at reading any number of things. I've been fascinated lately with T'ai Chi and eastern religions. They seem more consistent to me overall than their western counterparts. Of course, several members of my family really hate it when I say that."

by Mike Gibson

In the midst of an unusually quiet lunch-time rush at Knoxville's Bistro, the towering, suspender-clad African-American gentleman taking his seat at a corner table seems singularly conspicuous standing among the stiff-collared attorneys and artsy downtowners who comprise the café's regular clientele.

Conspicuous, perhaps—looming above the diners at no less than 6'4", he carries well over 200 pounds on his expansive frame—but not at all out of place. Within the space of a few minutes, no fewer than half a dozen people have approached the table and hailed him with an effusive greeting, a few familiar words, a vigorous slap on the arm. Everyone, it seems, knows Steve Dupree.

"Tell Dino it's for me," Dupree says to the waitress, placing an order for the restaurant's Wednesday sea-bass special, which is prefaced by a piquant serving of chicken Florentine soup. "If he wants to spice up the soup a little bit, that's okay with me."

Affable, well-spoken, sprucely-attired in a tan button-down, black slacks, and the aforementioned suspenders, Dupree is a veritable '90s Renaissance Man; a staunch individualist; a tireless truth-seeker; a jack-of-all-trades. A U.S. Navy veteran, former construction worker and engineer, his current undertakings include high-profile stints as a bartender (most recently at Cumberland Avenue's late, lamented B&H Performance Hall) and customer service rep/"pseudo-computer guru" at the O'Hanlon Group downtown, avocations which ultimately serve as support mechanisms for his ever-evolving acting career. His thespian endeavors reached a new plateau a couple of years ago when he landed a small but memorable role in The People Versus Larry Flynt—as Rudy, a funky photographer employed on one of Flynt's infamous Hustler magazine shoots.

"One of the things I might be irritated about is that almost no one recognizes me from the movie," Dupree says with a resonant chuckle. "All the people I know were already aware, and they were generally complimentary. But almost no one out of the blue says 'Hey, you were in that movie I watched last night.'"

Born in Old Knoxville General Hospital, the 43-year-old Dupree still lives in the East Knox neighborhood where he was raised, off Vine Avenue near Cruise Street, just up from the Phyllis Wheatley branch of the YWCA. "Until they shut it down a couple of years ago, I could hear the bells from my old elementary school from my porch on a quiet day," he says, dousing his freshly-arrived soup with generous portions of Tabasco. "The hot sauce just adds flavor," he notes in passing. "It's really not that spicy."

Dupree counts himself number five of nine children, a brood that produced two sets of twins, including Steve and brother Thomas. The Dupree clan endured more than its fair allotment of hardship, as his father, a Methodist minister and postal employee, died of a heart attack in 1963 while his mother was pregnant with the couple's eighth child. A nurse at St. Mary's "for about 100 years," Eloise Dupree raised her cubs wisely and courageously, even adopting a ninth child before Steve was grown.

"All the siblings have been pretty successful; we've got Ph.D.'s, lawyers, clergymen in the family now," says Dupree. "My sister Ava is acting and producing in L.A. Thomas and I ended up being about as non-identical as twins can be—different in thought, word, deed, and appearance. He's a Pentecostal minister in Augusta (Ga.)

"Needless to say, one of the best things our family does is argue; we take a subject and pick it apart. It can be pretty tough on the uninitiated."

Steve's own career wanderings steered him through 10 years in the Navy, a few seasons of construction work, and miscellaneous odd jobs before he buckled down and used his leftover G.I. Bill benefits to fund an Associate's Degree in Engineering Technology from Pellissippi State. Upon graduating, he embarked on a nine-year sojourn as a field service engineer for a medical diagnostics company, a position he would finally relinquish when the considerable demands of the business clashed with his renewed commitment to acting.

"It was taking up too much of my time; if one of my clients needed something over the weekend, I had to leave," Dupree remembers. "It was a pain in the ass just to plan a date, and I decided that if I was going to really make a go at acting, I'd better go after it now."

Dupree can't even remember how his acting career began ("To me, that's like asking 'How'd you get into breathing?'"), only that his dramatic inclinations evolved from church plays and family singings to school performances and community theater to a role in the Clarence Brown Lab

Theatre production of You Can't Take It With You in 1983, which he pursued and accepted only at sister Ava's behest. "She really badgered me into it, but from then on, I've been involved pretty seriously."

Dupree eventually signed with a local agent, performed in a handful of University of Tennessee productions, a Budweiser commercial, a Hooter's ad, an Unsolved Mysteries segment, a couple of extra spots on I-40 Paradise...

"What I've learned most is that it doesn't matter how good you are as an actor," Dupree says. "That's an almost completely irrelevant concern. I had to grasp the fact that getting a role or not getting a role is not necessarily a statement about my talent. A lot of it boils down to luck, or whether or not you have the right 'look.'"

That lesson would eventually serve him well, when his agent landed an audience with the casting director for the offing production of The People Versus Larry Flynt, a movie that would chronicle the adult life and epic First Amendment court battles of the skin-magazine mogul. Dupree survived an initial screen test in Nashville and a subsequent Memphis audition in front of director Milos Forman, and would eventually spend three more days in West Tennessee shooting his most prestigious role to date. "I could have had more screen time, but I had machines to fix," he sighs, perhaps wishing he had departed the world of medical technology sooner.

"It was my first time in a project that large, and it was kind of a 'heads-up' when you look up and see someone you've seen on TV doing the same thing you are—trying to impress the director," Dupree recalls. "That's when you realize you're in the big leagues.

"The experience also reaffirmed some stuff I already knew, that movie people are real people too. I got along well with Woody Harrelson (the movie's lead), and there were no blow-ups with (leading lady and controversial rock singer) Courtney Love. They were all pretty much regular folk. It taught me that it can happen to me, that there's no law in the universe that says I can't be successful."

Since the Flynt breakthrough, Dupree has appeared in "a little bit of everything"—local theater, voice-overs, a Cyberflix CD-Rom—and suffered through some painful near-misses with larger projects, including a potentially lucrative A&E voice role and a spot opposite Tom Cruise in a production to be filmed in Tennessee. "I didn't get them, but that's okay," he says with an easy shrug. "I definitely feel there will come a time when those roles will come to me. I'm trying to concentrate more on voice work, because there's a lot of it out there and less competition. Ideally, I'd like to pay my bills with voice work and earn bonuses by appearing in movies."

Having swallowed the last morsel of a flaky fish soufflé (another spicy treat, crowned with a pungent ring of red peppers), the imposing thespian drains his second Bass Pale Ale draught and begins a thoughtful discourse on various Dupree fixations (his oft-ridden 1981 Harley-Davidson Sturgis, his homebrewing proficiency, the two full-grown bull mastiffs he raised from pups...) when a second wave of socializers interrupt his post-meal reverie. The last of the well-wishers, husky local sports lawyer and former University of Tennessee swimming star Don Bosch, seizes Dupree's over-sized hand in his own meaty paw and lands yet another resounding buddy-slap across the actor's ample shoulders.

"I was watching The People Versus Larry Flynt just the other night," the jovial attorney booms. "I looked up in the middle of it and said 'Damn, that looks just like Steve.'"

With that, Dupree makes his way to the exit and the refreshingly temperate pleasures of a breezy autumn afternoon, pausing only to muse, with a sly grin, "I guess that marks one more step up the ladder."