Anthony LaPaglia

As Anthony LaPaglia plays him in Lantana, police detective Leon Zat is as harsh and abrupt as his surname. He is several things: a tough, angry cop, impatient with a dismal caseload; a middle-aged man, jogging through his chest pains, trying to get back in shape; an unhappy husband glumly trying to find some magic in an affair that's all grim haste and guilty furtiveness.

In short, he's a very human being. And typical of this actor, not one crying out for sympathy. We may come to care for Leon Zat, but slowly, almost grudgingly. We may come to care for LaPaglia, too, a 42-year-old Aussie now residing in the U.S., but on a similar basis--respecting his craft without necessarily adoring the craftsman.

Most of the time, that's all right with him. "I'm not a very fashionable actor," he says. "I know this. I've come to accept this in my life." He doesn't want to be typecast. "There are certain actors, they're the same person in different scripts--I just think, 'Aren't you bored?'" But he does have a specialty--lower-class characters who are inarticulate about their deeper, darker feelings. It is easy to respect the work that goes into these portrayals--and, indeed, LaPaglia won a Tony for his performance as Eddie Carbone, tragically haunted by incestuous feelings for his niece in the 1998 Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge. But these are not figures the public readily takes to heart.

This leaves LaPaglia in an ambiguous place. "I'm quite happy flying under the radar and doing work that I'm proud of. But there's another part of me that realizes that flying under the radar limits you." This is not the same as saying he wants for jobs. He's made about 10 movies in the past two years--he has trouble remembering exactly how many--and one of them, Sam Mendes' soon-to-be-released The Road to Perdition, which stars Tom Hanks and Paul Newman, is a high-profile enterprise. And, one imagines, a well-written one.

For it is writing, not big directorial names or fancy co-stars, that grabs LaPaglia's attention. He leapt for Lantana because of Andrew Bovell's script. Says LaPaglia: "A lot of writers...can write a lead guy, but they can't complete the satellite world around the main character. Andrew totally knows how to do that." So does Arthur Miller, and LaPaglia is close to putting together a film version of Bridge and dreams of doing Miller's After the Fall onstage. "It's never been very well received, but I had an idea that I think can make it work." Whatever that is, you may be sure it will serve the play, not the actor's ego.