Hollywood.com Exclusive! Actor may have shared “trial run” flight with terrorists
The always-intense actor James Woods may have found himself near the center of the real-life drama that led to the terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center.
The 54-year-old actor was questioned by the FBI following his report that while on a commercial flight from Boston’s Logan Airport to Los Angeles one month prior to the devastating attack, he may have shared the first class section with the same box cutter-wielding terrorists responsible for hijacking American Airlines Flight 11.
The four men are now believed to have been enacting a “trial run” of their suicide assault on NYC.
According to Woods in a story confirmed by his publicist, he was on a flight back to L.A. after visiting his mother’s home in Boston. He was alone in the first class section, except for a quartet of Middle Eastern men who, in Woods’ estimation, were behaving bizarrely. The actor noticed that they never ate or drank, never spoke to the flight crew and only addressed each other in hushed tones. For the majority of the cross-country flight the men sat and stared stone-faced straight ahead.
Perhaps playing all those movie bad guys and killers gave the Oscar-nominated actor some kind of subtle insight: After picking up on the group’s odd demeanor and tense body language, Woods actually mentioned it to a flight attendant, who dismissed it, and reported it again to airline authorities on the ground, who didn’t seem to want to pursue it.
It wasn’t until about a month later, on the Wednesday following the attack, that Woods again called authorities–this time the FBI–to report his experience once more. This time, in less than 24 hours, Federal agents arrived on his doorstep looking to examine every detail of his story.
Although the agents didn’t share any information on their investigation with the actor, out of the thousands of tips the FBI received, they certainly seemed to take Woods’ tale extremely seriously. The actor kept his experience quiet until it was leaked to a New York Post columnist, who mistakenly reported that it occurred only one week prior to the deadly attack.
“I think it is prudent not to comment on this and let the FBI continue to do their job, which they seem to be doing superbly right now,” Woods said in a statement to Hollywood.com.
Laura Bosley, a spokeswoman for the FBI in Los Angeles, could neither confirm nor deny this report, but she did tell Hollywood.com that many individuals nationwide are coming forward with information and that the FBI is taking all these reports into account.
Woods recently starred in Scary Movie 2 and appears in the upcoming Drew Barrymore film Riding in Cars With Boys. He recently signed to play former studio head Alan Hirschfield in the film version of David McClintock’s book Indecent Exposure, which chronicles David Begelman‘s check-forging scandal while heading Columbia Pictures in the late 1970s.
