Jason Lee considers himself lucky to be sitting in front of me at Canter's deli, crunching on a salad. Only yesterday, he and a fishing buddy were stuck for hours in the mountains outside of L.A. when their SUV went off the road.
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"It was definitely scary," he tells me, "but I don't think it would have gotten to the point where my friend and I had to eat each other." Lee's hiply sardonic, hang-loose style set him refreshingly apart from the glam troop of young actors emerging from hit TV shows. He does, in fact, come from somewhere else entirely--he's a former professional skateboarder who got into acting on a whim.
"I was curious about movies," he says, "the way you might wonder what life in the army's like." Lee's breakthrough performance two years ago as the caustic but charming comic book artist in Kevin Smith's indie favorite Chasing Amy so impressed Lawrence Kasdan that the writer/director wrote the role of a computer-software genius specifically for him in the ensemble comedy Mumford. The actor's current hirsute state--shaggy hair and mountain man's free-flowing beard--is for his rock-star turn in Cameron Crowe's upcoming film about an American band circa 1973 [ed. - Almost Famous]. Meanwhile, Lee will be on-screen this fall as a demon named Azrael in Kevin Smith's controversial religious satire Dogma, which stars Alanis Morissette as God, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon as genital-free renegade angels and Chris Rock as a troublemaking disciple.
"I don't see it as controversial," Lee says. "It's a Kevin Smith movie, with his fast, witty dialogue. I'll work with Kevin Smith for the rest of my life. That's my position on it." Acting, according to Lee, turns out to be a lot like professional skateboarding. "The more you do it, the more confidence you get. Then you're controlling it, instead of it controlling you." That goes for choosing projects as well. Lee says he'll try anything, except for certain stuff he's offered all the time. "My agent knows I'd rather not work than do any of those Gen-X-kids-on-the-edge movies. You know: teenybopper mayhem, two guys in a car full of diamonds, on the road, and they pick up a waitress or a stripper and blah, blah, blah. I'd rather work for established directors who are at least trying to say something."
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Joshua Mooney