‘Novocaine’: Jack Quaid has his action hero moment with new movie
Jack Quaid stars as an action hero who can’t feel pain in the action comedy “Novocaine,” also starring Amber Midthunder.
Given his parents, Jack Quaid could have been called “You’ve Got Mail” or “The Right Stuff” by his middle-school classmates, if they were clever cinephiles. In reality, his nickname back then was much worse.
In Quaid’s new action movie “Novocaine,” his character Nate Caine is a guy who, because of a rare genetic condition, cannot feel pain. At a bar on a first date, he runs into an old bully who reveals to his crush Sherry (Amber Midthunder) that Nate was called “Novocaine” in eighth grade.
Sherry think it’s pretty cool. In reality, Quaid, the son of Hollywood icons Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid, “wasn’t too proud” of his actual eighth-grade nickname.
“All the middle-school boys called me ‘Jackoff,’ just to get under my skin,” he says. And unlike “Novocaine,” it’s “definitely not a good superhero name.” (Quaid recently shared a picture of himself from those days on his Instagram.)
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Things were better in high school, when he could have been called “Mr. President.” He and a friend were co-presidents of a Bad Movie Club that met at lunch every Tuesday to watch “classics” such as “Troll 2.” His adoration for bad movies continues today. “There are certain things about a great bad movie that I think sometimes top true cinematic art,” says Quaid, adding that flicks like “Mega Snake,” “Samurai Cop” and “The Room” “live rent-free in my head. I just love them so much.”
Quaid had to wait till he was an adult to get his favorite nickname: His “The Boys” co-star Karl Urban calls him “Quaido.”
“It just makes me sound like a smuggler in the ‘Star Wars’ universe,” Quaid says, “and I’m all about it.”
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