For The Funny Of It

But all the pretty boys aren't doing just drama anymore. In fact, the very pretty Dave Sheridan (left) may be even more of an anomaly than Rosenbaum. The 33-year-old actor-writer came up through Chicago's fabled Second City group and his self-created MTV reality show "Buzzkill," and is already getting big-money offers after screen-grabbing turns in Bubble Boy, Corky Romano and, especially, Scary Movie, in which he did a dead-on parody of David Arquette's character in the Scream flicks. He's ready to show off more of his comedic chops in his first big starring role--_Frank McClusky C.I._--which he cowrote. The comedy's a send-up of TV cop show cheesefests like "Knight Rider" and "Magnum, P.I." Despite the project's anarchic intentions, he worries whether the finished movie may turn out to be what he calls "a feathered fish." He explains: "In one scene, I'm playing cards with a dog and Dolly Parton, so my character is very sweet and likable in a Jack Lemmon-y way, and the next moment, I'm jerking off watching porn while doing surveillance. So, some of it is very Disney family-oriented and some of it is edgy, wacky stuff. The original idea had things like a chase scene on the Venice Beach boardwalk that parodied the shooting style of William Friedkin's The French Connection. In the end, the studio executives made a lot of suggestions and all they had money for was a camera on a stick. Scene for scene, lots of the movie is really funny, but who knows whether anyone's going to 'get' me."

Getting Sheridan is worth the effort. Not that he's an easy read. Under the cover-boy looks lurk piercing smarts and a fuck-all spirit. Check him out as a mullet-sporting, bare-chested convenience store nut job in Ghost World, a persona he perfected in his stage show Dave Sheridan's America, and you come closer to what he can do when let loose. It's just as easy to speculate how hilarious he might have been as a vain supermodel in, say, Zoolander. "Studio executives say, 'You're a good-looking guy, why do you want to play that down?'" he says. "It's a little like someone saying, 'Hey, Mike Myers, why put on that shaggy wig and bad teeth to do Austin Powers?' I want to play characters. Guys I love in .movies are people like Peter Sellers, John Belushi and the young Jack Nicholson."

Happily, Sheridan will have plenty of chances to help audiences "get him" in the next year. Among the movies he may star in is a Miramax film centered entirely around the character he played in Ghost World. "I'm definitely going to try to stretch in cool movies," he says. And what about his looks and sex appeal? Says the guy who was convincing as the fiancé of Marley Shelton in Bubble Boy, "I can make my genetic gifts funny, too. Hey, maybe I can do a male spin on what Sandra Bullock did in Miss Congeniality."

_______________________________________

Pages: 1 2