Dennis Quaid devastated by close family connection to Texas floods
The 'Sovereign' star was born and raised in the Lone Star State and still has ties to the area. As Texans are dealing with deadly flash floods that claimed over 100 lives, the actor shared a personal story about the day the floods began.
His daughter, Zoe, 17, was working as a counselor at a camp approximately 75 miles north of Kerrville, when news began breaking about the flooding, Quaid told Fox News Digital. She'd been attending the camp since she was a young girl, and the night the flooding began, he wasn't able to get a hold of her.
4 Dennis Quaid's daughter, Zoe, was working as a counselor at a camp approximately 75 miles north of where the devastating flood happened.
Getty Images
'I heard about this as I was going to bed that night,' Quaid explained, 'and I tried to call her because I knew she was up there. I knew it wasn't near where the floods were, but I wasn't able to talk to her till the next day.'
He added that he 'didn't really get a lot of sleep that night.'
Quaid said his daughter and others at the camp were 'relatively safe up there,' but another girl at the camp lost her family in the floods.
'One of the girls at that camp lost her whole family who were camping in an RV, I guess, on the Guadalupe River, and they were swept away,' he said.
4 A view inside a cabin at Camp Mystic, the site of where at least 20 girls went missing after the flash flood.
AFP via Getty Images
Quaid and his wife, Laura Savoie, are also friends with the Hunt family. Clark Hunt, owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, lost a family member in the disaster, 9-year-old Janie Hunt.
'I can't imagine how that would … how devastating that would be,' he admitted.
'We just need to pray for people,' he added, naming the Kerr County Flood Relief Fund, a local fundraiser that's supporting relief and rebuilding efforts in the community.
'You think of those kids that night, and it just chills my heart. Do a lot of praying because there's a lot of people that need to be prayed for still.'
4 People view and examine the damage to the cabins at Camp Mystic.
DUSTIN SAFRANEK/EPA/Shutterstock
During his conversation with Fox News Digital, Quaid also spoke about his new film, 'Sovereign,' which is in theaters and available for digital purchase and rental today.
The film, inspired by true events, tells the story of a father and son, played by Nick Offerman and Jacob Tremblay, who consider themselves sovereign citizens, a group the FBI refers to as 'anti-government extremists who believe that even though they physically reside in this country, they are separate or 'sovereign' from the United States.' Quaid plays a police chief who crosses paths with them.
When asked about the responsibility Hollywood has when portraying these kinds of politically charged stories, Quaid said, 'I think if you just try to tell the story as it happened instead of putting something else on it. … For instance, I don't really want to compare this to Democrats and Republicans right now, or even ICE.
4 Many campers of the Camp Mystics remain missing after the Texas flooding.
CNN Weather
'Sovereigns are a different group. They're not even anarchists to the sense. They don't belong to anything. They don't have a driver's license. It's like they don't enter into a contract with the government, and so, therefore, they're not subject to any laws that they don't recognize.'
As for portraying characters with beliefs that differ from his own, Quaid told Fox News Digital, 'I play people from their point of view.
'[How] we think and our actions are governed to a large extent by the way we grew up. But is it genetic or is it the environment that we were in? And both of those things contribute.'
Quaid explained that since 'Sovereign' is based on a true story, he spent time speaking with the police chief his character was inspired by. And he said the writer and director, Christian Swegal, has a family member who is a sovereign citizen.
'This story, I think, is mythic, in a way,' he said. 'It's like something out of the Old West.'
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