It’s no surprise rugby has a place in the magical world of Hollywood - the game of unselfishness, honor, and determination fits in perfectly with the world of actors, producers, and “Luv Ya, Babe,” agents. OK, fine, maybe if we make the comparison of rugby players rolling around through the muck, does that sound better?

In fact, rugby sometimes makes hesitant forays onto the screen (who can forget Emily on Friends telling Ross that “you really don’t have rugby here” in America … what?!?!?!?). How many Baby Boomer players started in the U.S. after seeing Richard Harris in The Sporting Life? Various other actors great and beautiful have played or followed the game, including Sir Richard Burton, Oliver Reed, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Charlize Theron. Burton and Reed were not available to be interviewed for this piece, in large part because they passed away. Zeta-Jones and Theron have no such unimpeachable excuse.

Mark Thomas did talk to me. A delightful and engaging fellow, this former Welsh international (sevens) and teammate at Cambridge of Gavin Hastings and Rob Wainwright, Thomas moved to Hollywood to follow Burton’s footsteps on the screen. Within a few days of getting to LA he landed the role in Friends of a former boyfriend of Ross’s then-current English girlfriend Emily (current girlfriend … she was always English). Thomas is the one who, when asked if he’d just been playing soccer, said no, he was playing “RUGBY!”

“It was quite funny, really,” said Thomas, who played for Wales in seven-a-side 65 times, and also did some bobsledding for Monaco in the 90s (but then, haven’t we all?). “I had done some acting and I went to Hollywood, and the first casting call I got was for Friends, where they wanted a rugby player! So I’m on this top show, and playing a rugby player? I can do that.”

Thomas, son of rugby legend Clem, continues to act and produce. He will be a lead in an action movie coming out soon.

Thomas also pals around with plenty of rugby lovers in LA. He is from the same village at Catherine Zeta-Jones, and while he sees her sometimes, he sees her brother plenty more. Many Welsh and Australian Hollywood people get together to watch games (and perhaps reminisce about the ’78 Wales tour down under?).

“There’s a band of people from Wales and Australia here. There’s a whole bunch of people who work for Mel Gibson who love the game,” said Thomas.

Yes, there, picture that, Mel Gibson as a rugby player, half his face painted blue, bellowing “ruck ‘emmmmmmm!” “There’s a big Welsh contingent, lots of English guys as well. I see a lot of Kevin Lake, who’s a former Eagle.”

Among the rugby actors who might make a huge impact will be former England standout Martin Bayfield for a role in the upcoming Harry Potter movie. After 31 tests for England, the 6-10 Bayfield will be playing Hagrid, the giant gamekeeper of Hogwarts School for Wizards.

Bayfield will be famous soon to the pre-teen set, while teenagers are already swooning over James Orlando, a fullback at Berkeley and on MTV’s Road Rules.

“I’d like to do a show, or maybe just a few minutes to talk about rugby and get more young people interested,” said Orlando.

Perhaps the most famous avid rugby player in Hollywood is Billy Campbell (who did call me), who stars alongside Sela Ward in CBS’ Once and Again and was one of People’s 50 Most Beautiful of 2000.

Campbell, the heir to the Champion Spark Plug fortune, spent a good portion of his younger years playing rugby and bumming around, and now that he’s gainfully employed, he can still be seen pitching up for Santa Monica when his schedule allows.

When schedule allows is a common phrase at Santa Monica RFC.

“We’ve got lots of actors on the team,” said team general manager Danny Benjamin -the club’s roster also includes Championship Rugby host Max Bretos. “For some reason we get lots of character actors. At one time we had nothing but doctors and attorneys playing, now we’ve got actors, directors, and producers. The schedules can be tough - guys can be gone for weeks at a time. I know Billy’s off doing a movie. But we’re still doing pretty well.”

Santa Monica was third in Southern California behind OMBAC and Huntington Beach, and hopes for a Sweet 16 berth in a year or two. They also hope for a little of that big Hollywood money to come their way.

“We’ve got a couple of guys working on something,” Benjamin continued . “We have one guy who is particularly close to Steven Speilberg and is trying to get Dreamworks involved. Billy Campbell is trying to work on something, too. But you can’t sit around and wait for that to happen.”

No, that’s for producers.

Rugby has even infiltrated the beautiful people, strange as it my seem. South African Brett Shuttleworth, Natal U-21s and OMBAC, of whom no less than former Eagle skipper Brian Vizard said, "I can say without hesitation that Brett is one of the best rugby players in the country that I have seen in the past five years in U.S. Rugby."

Good player indeed, Brett pays the bills by posing in other people’s underwear. The Joe Boxer model, described in his official bio as "galvanically sexy and entrancing,” continues to use his rugby prowess as a way to add ruggedness to his well-sculpted appearance.

That’s when you start getting stories like this of Brett, when on May 18, 1999 his let arm was shattered into 29 pieces during a game in Denver. Sixteen bolts and nuts, plus some bone from his hip, were inserted into his arm.

The next evening he bravely appeared at a large celebrity charity bachelor auction event in California where he raised the most money for the charity by receiving the highest bid.

Now that’s coming through after an injury.

Shuttleworth is being touted as an up-and-coming acting talent, as well. That’s no fun, when even the pretty men are tougher than we are.

“It’s not like you drive around LA and see a rugby game going on,” explained Mitch Kapner, formerly of Manhattan Rugby Club in New York City and the man who wrote the Bruce Willis/Matthew Perry movie The Whole Nine Yards, and the action flick Romeo Must Die. “It’s this underground addiction - a religion, and people need to understand that.”

Now Kapner is still bent on putting together a good rugby movie.

“I’ve been looking for ways to portray rugby in a movie,” he said. “There’s a studio exec who used to play, and we’ve talked about it. If it happened, to work it would be something like Animal House goes rugby. It would be fun and true to the game. You wouldn’t want something like Hoosiers or anything where you shed the other teams in a bad light, and you don’t want something where, say, the NFL goes on strike and the Americans go play rugby and beat everybody.” (Or say aliens steal the talent from all the great rugby players and it’s up to Michael Jordan … err … Dan Lyle and his cartoon buddies to save the sport????) “No, that would denigrate the game, and I don’t want anything to denigrate the game.”

Well what about some kids get hold of a magic jersey and are magically transported into an international rugby test and charged with stopping Dan Lyle? Fanciful, right? Well watch “The Jersey,” a TV show on the Disney Channel, in the fall, because it will happen.

Thomas has thought about movie plots, too. He’s completed a rugby script and is working on another idea, because that’s the way they do things in Hollywood. But he runs into the same limitations that Kapner encounters, he loves the game too much to make fun of it.

“You want something that conveys your love of the game,” Thomas said soberly.

So will we see a rugby movie, like Animal House, or maybe Chariots of Fire? Who knows. Said Kapner, “but I would be very upset if somebody other than me did it.”