Barry Pepper

As Saving Private Ryan's scripture-spouting southern sharpshooter, Barry Pepper gave such a distinctive, powerful performance that when his character got killed, it was our cue that the whole troop would meet its doom, too.

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Where had this actor come from? Well, the 28-year-old Canadian with the rockabilly looks (he could be Elvis's nephew) first hit Hollywood in 1996 with a supporting role in the television miniseries Titanic. After that there was a supporting gig as an escaped convict in the action flick Firestorm. When he read the Saving Private Ryan script, he immediately wanted to play the sniper, and though his resume may have looked a little thin, he did have one advantage--he knew how to handle a rifle. On the small island near Vancouver where Pepper grew up, he'd hunted with his dad.

"I was raised with that whole mentality and I'm very comfortable around weapons," he says. "We never ate store-bought meat. It pisses me off that I have to go to Safeway and buy a cellophane-wrapped piece of steroid-injected beef and have that for dinner when I could have a whole freezer full of wild game."

Pepper won Steven Spielberg over and went to work figuring out his character. "Snipers were the 'black sheep' among the unit of men," he explains. "They were loved and hated by both sides, because getting killed by a sniper was such an instantaneous and almost unfair way to die. So what I did throughout the entire film was to try to distance myself from the group in a subtle way, without being an asshole." Pepper toted a gun again in Enemy of the State, this time as a National Security Agency field agent on the trail of pop icon Will Smith and revered non-movie-star Gene Hackman ("a silent genius"). And he'll be armed once again when he reteams with Tom Hanks to play a guard working on death row in a 1935 Louisiana prison in The Green Mile, which is, like writer/director Frank Darabont's previous film The Shawshank Redemption, based on a Stephen King story.

As for where Pepper locates himself in the current hierarchy of Young Hollywood actors, he seems to feel that he, like almost everyone else, dwells in the shadow of Leonardo DiCaprio. "When people feel that I am talented enough for that role that they don't need Leo, and they're not willing to pay his $15 million purse, then they'll come to Barry Pepper. And only then will I be doing my job right--when Leonardo DiCaprio is no longer their only option. It's an inspiration for me to work harder."

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Wolf Schneider