James Marsden: Marsden Attacks

Clued-in Hollywood types began noticing James Marsden a few years ago when he auditioned for Edward Norton's role in Primal Fear, read for Starship Troopers and came that close to a primo part in 54.

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Meanwhile, he imprinted himself on the skateboard set with his role as a regular on Second Noah, and now he's got the lead part in Disturbing Behavior, a youth-market scarefest about a kid whose family relocates to a small town off the coast of Washington where the teens are creepily conformist.

Given that the movie's director, David Nutter, is a regular helmer of The X-Files, we might as well ask whether there are any extraterrestrials in the film. "Um, no extraterrestrials, although I'm sure I look like one in plenty of the scenes," Marsden volunteers. "There's lots of special effects," he adds. Anything else? "There's a very ominous chair that straps your legs and your arms down, and puts this kind of neck harness over you. And there's a laser beam that does, like, brain surgery. It's lobotomical." And where are all the parents while this apparatus is in use? "They think it's just counseling or something," explains Marsden. "It's an 'Enlightenment Seminar.'"

The personal-growth claptrap that Disturbing Behavior seems to be having a field day with was in short supply where Marsden grew up--he hails from the suburbs of Oklahoma City. Did the Oklahoma-based movie The Outsiders, which starred the young Matt Dillon--whom the young James Marsden rather resembles--have an influence on this 25-year-old as he was growing up? "Me and my friends from Oklahoma quoted that movie every day," Marsden answers. "We would write in the yearbook, 'Stay gold, Ponyboy.' It's like a joke of ours."

Marsden's real-guy rural roots have held sway in his sense of style, too. "I don't get into the beanie caps or whatever--the toques," he says. "Or all the tattoos and piercings and bright orange scarves around your neck without a shirt on... I just don't see myself as part of that whole strung-out-on-heroin look. I think cool is a white T-shirt and an old pair of jeans and tennis shoes. Like a young Paul Newman look in The Hustler."

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Wolf Schneider