Patrick Swayze happily working 12 hour days shooting “The Beast”

There were some interesting things revealed about Patrick Swayze and how he’s doing in a new NY Times story. Swayze is busy filming “The Beast,” in which he plays Charles Barker, an undercover F.B.I. agent with dark secrets, a character the actor later described as “someone who’s dying inside, someone with a death wish.”

It’s kind of an ironic character for a film star, who was given a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer less than a year ago. Here he is now putting in 12-hour days as the lead in a television series. And he’s very aware that what he is doing right now is beyond what anyone believed would be possible 10 months ago. Pancreatic cancer, experts say, has only a 5 percent five-year survival rate.

“I do find myself, at the end of the day, riding home sort of catching myself with a smile on my face,” he said. “I’m proud of what I’m doing.”

He’s not the only one. Executives at A&E and Sony Pictures Television, the network and production studio behind “The Beast,” are, as Zack Van Amburg, the co-president of Sony’s television studio, put it, “feeling relieved and validated.”

Swayze, has not seen as a regular on television since the mini-series “North and South” in 1985, so it was a big coup for A&E, in landing a true film star. “We were thrilled he was doing it,” Mr. DeBitetto said. “He’d been in all these iconic movies.” That list includes titles like “Dirty Dancing,” “Ghost” and “The Outsiders.” And having turned down television for much of his career (“I thought I was DeNiro”), Swayze said, “If I’m going to do television, I wanted that ‘North and South’ experience. I wanted something that’s going to challenge me on a constant basis.

All was well for Swayze during the pilot shooting in December, except for a minor but persistent case of indigestion. He concluded the shooting and went home, still feeling nagging stomach distress. “Then all of a sudden real symptoms start showing up,” he said. “You see it in the mirror and you go: ‘O.K., better go get checked out.’ ”

Initially, Mr. Swayze said, “I had gastro-intestinal pain and just did a little tweak.” But that led to the biopsy: “Hello, goodbye, welcome to my world.”

A&E received the finished pilot of “The Beast” last January. That was when Mr. DeBitetto the president of A&E, received a conference call at his home at midnight to inform him of Mr. Swayze’s grim diagnosis. Still, Mr. Swayze said, he wanted to work. He called Mr. DeBitetto. “He told me he was going to beat this,” Mr. DeBitetto said.

In conversations with the Sony executives, “a mutuality of opinion” was reached, Mr. DeBitetto said. They would wait to learn from his medical team from Stanford University if initial treatment would somehow provide some hope. They knew Mr. Swayze would undergo traditional chemotherapy, augmented by an experimental drug called Vatalanib. Soon the news began to hold promise. It appeared that Mr. Swayze fell into a small percentage of patients in whom the disease is more controlled. Then his doctors sent word: he was going to be cleared to go to work.

Mr. Swayze allowed doctors hired by A&E to consult with his physicians. They discussed the schedule, and whether Mr. Swayze, still undergoing chemotherapy, would both be able to keep up and not become so debilitated that it would affect his appearance.

For Mr. Swayze, the prospect of playing another part in front of cameras had a therapeutic appeal, he said. (click below to continue)
“How do you nurture a positive attitude when all the statistics say you’re a dead man?” Mr. Swayze asked. “You go to work.” Not without help, however. His chief support has been Lisa Niemi, his childhood sweetheart and wife of 32 years.

When the executives in charge of “The Beast” announced in June that they were starting production with Mr. Swayze as the star, they faced many questions because of his announced diagnosis with Pancreatic cancer.

“There was a lot of disbelief,” said Jamie Erlicht, Mr. Van Amburg’s co-president at Sony. “I genuinely think people thought we were crazy.”

The show now, about halfway through its 12-episode order, is on schedule. Mr. Swayze, 56, said he had managed to put 20 pounds back on since the low point of his weight loss as he fought the disease, relying on “muscle-building shakes.”

So far, he has missed only a day and a half of work.

Mr. Swayze said: “I’m still fine to work, I haven’t changed — oh, I have changed, what am I saying? It’s a battle zone I go through. Chemo, no matter how you cut it, is hell on wheels.”

“His doctors continue to be encouraging,” Van Amburg said. “His scans have been clean and clear. But they always couch things in caution. They tell us things like: ‘He should be fit to work, as far as we can tell today.’ ” He added, “They have never said he’s cured.”

In “The Beast” Mr. Swayze will be back in front of the public weekly, starting in January. Where things will go from there, no one can be sure yet, though the production executives are already talking about a second season — with Patrick Swayze.

That is certainly in Mr. Swayze’s plans as well.

“There is probably that little bird that flies through your insides and says, ‘I sure would like to make a mark in life,’ ” Mr. Swayze said. “I’ve made a pretty decent mark so far — nothing to scoff at. But it does make you think: Wait a minute. There’s more I want to do. Lots more. Get on with it.”