Lucas Black with Chadwick Boseman.jpg

In the new movie "42," Lucas Black and Chadwick Boseman re-create the famous scene where Pee Wee Reese put an arm around the shoulder of his teammate Jackie Robinson in Cincinnati. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Lucas Black was a four-sport athlete for the Speake High School Bobcats in north Alabama – playing football, basketball, baseball and golf – but he was born much too late to know anything about, or to have even heard of, Pee Wee Reese, the Brooklyn Dodgers shortstop Black plays in “42,” the new movie about Jackie Robison’s groundbreaking rookie season with the Dodgers.

“No sir,” Black says. “Not at all.”

Reese was a teammate of Jackie Robinson, who broke baseball’s color barrier and opened the door for future generations of minority ballplayers when he started at first base for the Dodgers on April 15, 1947, a date that Major League Baseball now recognizes as Jackie Robinson Day.

Later in that ’47 season, when fans in Cincinnati , mercilessly heckled the black Robinson with racist taunts, the white Reese, who grew up in neighboring Kentucky, walked up to Robinson, stood beside him and put an arm around his shoulder.

That gesture of friendship has since been immortalized with a statue of Reese and Robinson, arm wrapped around shoulder that stands outside the home ballpark of the minor-league Brooklyn Cyclones.

Black and actor Chadwick Boseman, who plays Robinson in “42,” re-create the scene in writer-director Brian Helgoland’s extraordinary movie, which opened nationwide Friday. The movie’s title is a tribute to the number Robinson wore with the Dodgers, a number that has since been retired by all of the teams in Major League Baseball.

“I read the script, and as soon as I got finished reading it, I just did research online to find out more about (Reese) and to find out more about Jackie, as well,” the 30-year-old Black says. “I had obviously heard of Jackie Robinson.

Black also read “Jackie Robinson: An Intimate Portrait,” which was written by Robinson’s widow, Rachel.

[Chadwick Boseman talks about playing Jackie Robinson]

“I read that and got some information out of there about Pee Wee,” he says. “That was a fun learning experience to learn about the Brooklyn Dodgers and the character and the time period.”

And what did Black learn?

“Pee Wee Reese had such a significant part in helping change baseball by accepting Jackie as a ballplayer and as a friend and making a public gesture toward Jackie,” he says. “So I felt there was a little responsibility there to put that on film, and to show that side of my character and how he felt toward racism.”

Black played catcher, shortstop and centerfielder on the Speake High School baseball team, and shooting “42,” he says, brought out that competitive streak in him.

Previously, Black appeared in a couple of other sports movies -- playing a high-school football star in the movie version of “Friday Night Lights” and a professional golfer in “Seven Days in Utopia.”

“It’s a lot more enjoyable just because you get to reminisce about the days when I used to play, and then you get the experience of being on a team again with the actors and have that camaraderie with the players,” he says.

“I know we are not really competing, but you still want to make plays and have fun and show out a little bit,” he adds. “So any time you get a chance to do that, it’s obviously fun. And I’ve been lucky enough to do that in front of a camera and get paid to do it.”

So, while making "42" fit Black like a glove, learning to field a ground ball with the smaller glove that ballplayers used back in the 1940s was a big adjustment, he says.

“It took me three or four days to get used to that glove,” he says. “I sent a picture to people back home of me catching a line drive, and they thought we were playing with softballs because the ball looked so big in the glove.”

The period baseball scenes were filmed at three famous old minor-league ballparks in the South -- Engel Stadium in Chattanooga, Luther Williams Field in Macon, Ga., and Rickwood Field in Birmingham.

It was not only Black's first trip to Rickwood, but also the first movie he's made in Alabama.

“I was real proud that we shot some of it in my home state and kind of proud to be able to work in my home state in a film,” he says. “I had been working in the movie industry since I was 10, so I was glad to finally be working at home a little bit.”

Black, whose parents are Larry and Jan Black, made his movie debut in "The War" with Kevin Costner in in 1994, and two years later, he made his breakthrough with Billy Bob Thornton in "Sling Blade."

Black and Thornton later worked together in “Friday Night Lights” in 2004, and Black appeared in the 2000 film “All the Pretty Horses,” which Thornton directed.

Thornton was an early mentor to him, Black says, but more recently, he and Robert Duvall have become buddies. Black and Duvall appeared together in "Get Low" in 2009 and in "Seven Days in Utopia" in 2011.

“I talk to Robert Duvall now more than anybody,” Black says. “He calls me a lot. He’s doing a film with Billy Bob in the near future, and he told me they talk about me and that Billy Bob sent a message for me.

“I met (Duvall) on ‘Sling Blade’ first, but I was a little kid. I didn’t have a scene with him, but I did get to meet him and got to speak with him.

"But 'Get Low' was the first time I had worked with him as far as having a scene with him and (having) a pretty significant character relationships with each other," Black goes on. "Then 'Seven Days in Utopia' was right after 'Get Low,' and we were pretty much in every scene together.

“So it was kind of cool to be able to do two (films) back to back with him, to be able to watch him do two different characters and learn from him. I feel like our relationship grew as friends a lot quicker that way, too. We stay in touch.”

Black now lives in Columbia, Mo., where he met his wife, Maggie, who was a student at the University of Missouri when he was in Columbia making the 2004 indie film “Killer Diller.”

The couple has a 21-month- old daughter, Sophie Jo, and a son due in August.

“I’ve been fortunate to be able to do the films I’ve done and not live in LA,” Black says. “Most of them have been pretty good films in my opinion, and I’ve worked with good people. I’m happy with that. I don’t see myself living in Los Angeles anytime soon.

“I look at the audition process the same way,” he adds. “I just control what I can control as far as doing the best I can do in the audition and then whatever happens happens. If I get the part, good. If I don’t, I don’t. I don’t really take it to heart.

“Fortunately, my wife and baby traveled with me on ’42,’ and we’ve done that on the last three films I’ve done. That’s always nice and makes it more convenient for all of us, me especially. So we’ve learned to make it less strenuous on ourselves.”

Black comes home to spend about three or four months a year in Alabama, where his parents and brother and sister still live.

“It’s scattered out -- a week here and a week there,” he says. “But I predominantly stay in the South usually in the winter because the winters in Missouri are pretty rough for an Alabamian.”

Email Bob Carlton at bcarlton@al.com