Greg Kinnear: No More Mr. Nice Guy

He's known for personifying the sweet, handsome everyman, but now Greg Kinnear is shaking up his image by playing Bob Crane, the sexually obsessed, slightly deranged star of "Hogan's Heroes."

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Greg Kinnear is acutely aware that after seeing Auto Focus, in which he plays out the tragic rise and fall of "Hogan's Heroes" star Bob Crane, few moviegoers could possibly ever look at him again in the same way. "In fact," he says, scrunching one eye and grinning playfully, "some who've seen the movie aren't entirely sure they even want to shake my hand."

Perhaps that's not so surprising considering that, in director Paul Schrader's new film, Kinnear goes right for the groin in playing the TV star of the hugely popular WWII prison camp comedy. Crane's life took a fatal nosedive once the series was canceled after six seasons. He had straight-arrow good looks, political conservatism and family-man ethics, but in the past few years it's been revealed that he was in fact a relentlessly sexual outlaw who entangled himself with a thousand women in all sorts of erotic smorgasbords, many of which he photographed and videotaped. Hollywood insiders weren't shocked when in 1978 he was found brutally murdered in a motel room.

Auto Focus is strong, sad stuff and, as a career move for Kinnear, marks a bold about-face for an actor who, in an era of attention-grabbing movie stars, has enjoyed a relatively non-showy stardom. In person, Kinnear emits the same wry, faintly disreputable breeziness that propelled him from his three-year stint as the host of TV's "Talk Soup" to scene-grabbing roles in Sabrina and As Good As It Gets (for which he was Oscar nominated), good work in You've Got Mail, Nurse Betty, The Gift and We Were Soldiers, and occasional side-trips into what have become known pejoratively as "Greg Kinnear roles" in Loser and Someone Like You. But these days, Kinnear, nearing 40, seems primed to show deeper stuff underneath.

"I was never the class clown," he says, "or the person who got the most notice. And that's transferred into my career. I've been lucky in a short space of time to have worked with great directors and actors. Like many actors, there have been lots of frustrations in terms of opportunities. But reading the script for Auto Focus, I thought, 'Wow, something to really sink my teeth into.'"

Was he at all afraid to delve into such dark territory? "Sure," he says, "I had a split-second of, 'Do I want to open this door?' because as thrilling as it was to consider doing, it was also a little frightening. After that split-second, though, it was just something I desperately wanted to do."

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