Jason Patric: On the trail of the elusive actor

It was one of those slate gray mornings at the beach in Santa Monica, California, the kind of overcast day when anything can happen and usually doesn’t. I was killing time inside an old roadhouse near the corner of Pacific Coast Highway and Entrada Drive, skimming the racing forms, sipping a cup of lukewarm coffee and waiting for an actor named Jason Patric to show up. The smell of burning bacon on the grill mingled with the scent of a vagrant sea breeze as Dooley Wilson crooned a ballad on the jukebox. That’s when Patric walked in. He didn’t have the pretty-boy looks you’d associate with most serious young actors, but he was an actor, all right. I could read all the signs: He had the slow, deliberate gait … the piercing blue eyes … the scraggly whiskers that went beyond stubble but stopped short of a full beard. He wandered into the place like he had just rolled out of bed. His aquamarine short-sleeved shirt was wrinkled, with a small rip above his heart. It was hardly a stylish outfit, unless you consider Salvation Army a designer label.

He may dress like an unemployed actor, but the 24-year-old Patric has been knocking around Hollywood for years in obscure plays and mostly minor movies. Who could forget him as the futuristic roller-skating hunk in Solarbabies? Or as the Russian tank driver in The Beast? Odds are better you caught him in The Lost Boys, that sappy teen-vampire flick in which he defanged a bat pack led by Kiefer Sutherland.

Now Patric has found a role he can really sink his teeth into. He plays an unbalanced drifter in After Dark, My Sweet, a thriller based on the pulp novel by Jim Thompson. It’s the kind of movie that grabs you by the lapels and hurls you into its subterranean world of borderline psychopaths and boozy dames.

Giving Patric the once over as he sat down in the roadhouse and ordered a tuna sandwich, I couldn’t help thinking that he seemed born to play a haunted soul. He had that look in his eyes that’s somewhere between a squint and a stare — he sizes you up and ignores you at the same time. Instead of letting him get the upper hand, I decided to buttonhole him. I wanted to know what made him tick, why he wanted to get into movies in the first place. It wouldn’t be easy.

“I don’t want to give answers,” Patric said with a disarming smile. “I’m not here to make message films or propaganda — just to pose questions. That’s the only important thing. Illuminating the struggle.”

Tough talk coming from a guy who got his start in a rollerskating movie. Only don’t let his resume fool you. Patric is nothing if not totally dedicated to his work. That much is obvious from his latest performance, as Kevin “Collie” Collins, a washed-up boxer and escaped mental patient who becomes entangled in a kidnapping scheme hatched by a seductive widow (Rachel Ward) and a sleazy ex-cop (Bruce Dern). The film clearly belongs to Patric, who transforms himself into a fighter searching for some meaning to his confused and disturbing existence.

Patric almost warmed to discussing his role in After Dark, My Sweet. A question posed over lunch about Collie’s inner demons allowed him to unleash an eloquent monologue about the “nobility” of the character, his “animal instinct,” his “poetic sadness” and the “musical quality within him that he keeps going and churning.” Yeah, sure, he obviously had some pretty deep insights into this fictional Collie. But when I prodded him about his own life story, he suddenly clammed up tighter than a thief without an alibi.

“I don’t want to talk about my family and stuff like that,” Patric warned in a tone more firm than testy. “It just doesn’t matter, you know? It doesn’t pertain. It’s just interesting food for thought, but cheap. It’s an extra paragraph, and once you get it, it’s an identification. I don’t want that. It’s the character or the work that’s important. The ultimate would be just to be able to play your characters and never have to say anything.”

Apparently, I’d touched a raw nerve. Most young actors in Los Angeles are shameless publicity whores, content to yap endlessly about their lives. But Patric appeared painfully private. You won’t spot him feeding at the usual industry watering holes. His home is a rented bungalow with old furniture in unfashionable Hollywood. He’s never guested as a VJ on MTV or bantered with Letterman. And there’s no way in hell you’d find him squawking about the rain forests on Entertainment Tonight.

I told Patric I just wanted some simple personal facts, but no dice. A routine background check had yielded meager information. His last interview before this year was in 1987, when he spoke to a weekly L.A. actors’ trade paper to promote Beirut, a play about sexual disease he performed at a local theater. Even then, he revealed little about himself.

Three years haven’t changed him much. During lunch, he winced any time a probing question came up about his past. Unfortunately for Patric, he has the kind of lineage that’s hard to ignore. His father is Jason Miller, the playwright who won a Pulitzer Prize for That Championship Season and appeared as the priest Father Damien in The Exorcist and the current Exorcist III. His mother, Linda Miller, is an actress, while his grandfather was larger than life — the late comic genius Jackie Gleason.