The Nifty 50 | Paul Schneider, Actor

This month, T celebrates the Nifty 50: America’s up-and-coming talent.

Twice early on in his career, Paul Schneider played characters named Paul — a sure sign that his unambitious, tortured Lotharios contained at least some element of autobiography. That was especially the case in “All the Real Girls,” the stark, smart Southern drama that Schneider starred in with Zooey Deschanel and conceived with his friend, the director David Gordon Green. “Some of those locations were 30 feet away from some of my first sexual fumblings,” he told The Times not long after the indie’s Sundance premiere in 2003.

For the 33-year-old Schneider, those salad days loom large. He was born in Asheville, N.C., and is part of a group of North Carolina School of the Arts graduates that includes Green, the actor Danny McBride and the director Jody Hill. Like Schneider’s peers — who in recent years have made mainstream films produced by, or at least connotative of, Judd Apatow — the actor has found unlikely success in comedy.

On NBC’s “Parks and Recreation,” Schneider plays a jaded urban planner who evolves along an arc similar to his character from “All the Real Girls” — an amiable, initially unapologetic womanizer whose ultimate redemption comes with significant bruises. Make that literal bruises, in the case of “Parks and Recreation”: Schneider’s character, Mark Brendanawicz, ended the first season by falling into a construction pit.

With his mischievous yet low-key good looks and an eye for cerebral, oddball dramas, Schneider has frequently found himself playing scene-stealing sidemen, in films like “Elizabethtown,” “Lars and the Real Girl” and especially “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.”

His performance in that western (as, yes, a gun-slinging womanizer) caught the eye of the great director Jane Campion, who cast Schneider in last year’s “Bright Star” as the bearded, burly Scotsman Charles Armitage Brown, the patron and friend of the poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw). For Schneider, the dramatic role was a departure, and an opportunity to show off the versatility he says is lacking in Hollywood. “I feel like, especially these days, there’s not acting anymore. … You cast a personality, and you plug that personality, unchanging, in this movie and that movie,” he said in September of his turn in “Bright Star.” “I think it’s a really great thing that some people don’t recognize me in that movie.”