Morse's taxicab confessions

He only plays a taxi driver on TV, but like many once-struggling actors, "Hack" star David Morse has logged time behind the wheel of a cab.
While doing theater in Boston in the 1970s, Morse drove a cab "for a little bit," he said.

In one ride he recalled for reporters this summer, "I actually drove up to Mass General one day, and you go through the cab line... .I came up to the front and out the door comes a woman with two broken legs, just being released from the hospital.

"She gets into the back of the cab with a great deal of effort on my part. And she lies down in the back of the cab...and asked me if I could take her to some place way on the other side of Boston, and then announces to me that she has no money, by the way," he said.

"So I took her."

The incident, according to "Hack" creator David Koepp, inspired the opening of the show's Oct. 4 episode, in which guest star Fisher Stevens, playing a gambler with the soul of a con artist, got into Mike Olshansky's cab with two broken legs and ended up scamming him for much more than the fare.

Morse may not be out of story lines, though.

"There's other things that happened," he said. "I got chased through Roxbury by a carload of guys who were trying to rob me. It was really a high-speed chase through the worst part of the city, and I had to do one of those sliding-across-the-intersection-and-lose-them kind of things."
No doubt he'll get to use that, too, someday.

Ellen Gray