By Sarah Goldsmith

Producers wanted a fat kid to play Gavin, the resident head-banging outcast of this month’s thriller Disturbing Behavior. At 5′10″ and 130 pounds, Nick Stahl was hardly a shoo-in. He wanted the part but wasn’t about to start stuffing his face to get it. “It’s not that I’m vain,” he says. Still, Stahl, 18, did a screen test; when he didn’t hear anything, he was convinced he was out of the running. “I was sure I didn’t get it,” he says.

In the end, the extra baggage was not an issuethe part was hisbut when Stahl was getting into character, he found that Gavin’s personal style clashed with his own. “He was into heavy metal and dressed in rags, kind of a Whitesnake look,” says the soft-spoken actor. “I hate that kind of music, but I had to learn to like it.” Stahl’s taste leans toward artists like Sarah McLachlan and Björk. As for clothes, his self-described style is “nothing very distinctive, just Texas casual.”

The Texas influence comes from Stahl’s hometown of Dallas, where he started acting in school plays at age four. He made the giant leap to films at age 13. And what a debut. He played opposite Mel Gibson in the 1993 drama The Man Without A Face. Gibson’s ultrarelaxed on-set attitude had a significant impact of Stahl. “We were filming this scene on the beach and there were these sand crabs crawling around. Mell asked me, “Do you like crab?” and then he reached down and popped one in his mouth and crunched it up,” Stahl says. “After that point there was no anxiety.” Stahl continued to work with Hollywood’s finestat 14, he costarred in Safe Passage with Susan Sarandon, and this December Stahl can be seen playing a naive soldier in The Thin Red Line (with ER’s George Clooney). Perhaps it was these steller credits that prompted Stahl’s Behavior costar, James Marsden, 24, to admit, “I wish I had what Nick has when I was 18,” he says. “He’s a real talent.”

Despite his experience in mainstream movies, Stahl still felt it was difficult to work on Disturbing Behavior because box-office expectations are so high. “There is a lot of pressure when you have to appeal to millions of brains,” he says. The Stepford Wivestype thriller tells the story of a town where parents are resorting to surgery to control their wayward teens. Gavin teams up with his friend Rachel (Katie Holmes) to try to persuade fellow student Steve (Marsden) that they must do something before another kid ends up on the operating table. Stahl felt he related to Gavin’s rebelious nature on a deeper level. “I put a lot of what I’ve been through into Gavin, you know. We both had not-so-great high school experiences.” Holmes, 19, on the other hand, who attended an all-girls Catholic school, had a little help from the director, David Nutter. “He drove Katie around to some rough neighborhoods so she could get a better feel for her role (as a tough girl),” says Stahl. “She really wanted to get it right.”

Although their characters are closely involved in the movie, Holmes and Stahl didn’t see each other off the set. “Katie was usually gone with her boyfriend,” says Stahl. And when was his last date? Stahl scratches his head, trying to remember. “I haven’t been on a date in a while because I’m busy. Yeah, that’s it, I’m really busy,” he adds with a coy smile.

By Laurence Dumortier
Source: FindArticles.com

Nick Stahl was twelve when he starred opposite Mel Gibson in The Man Without a Face (1993), as a fatherless boy who reaches out to a man hounded into isolation by people’s disgust at his badly scarred face. Poised and obstinate, Stahl’s character was the best thing about the movie, a kid who taught his superficial and loveless family a lesson about misleading appearances. Now eighteen, Stahl has continued in his own footsteps: In July’s teen thriller Disturbing Behavior, he was a lonely stoner bent on escaping the unnatural influence of a pack of computer chip-implanted high school jocks and cheerleaders. Even when the seemingly perfect clique succeeded at converting him to their robotic ways and Stahl’s character abandoned his reefer and army-surplus duds for milkshakes and loafers, he seemed out of place among the hunky boys and pneumatic girls next door. Stahl is too pale and skinny and his face reveals too much personality for him to blend seamlessly with the beautiful kids that Hollywood is now cranking out by the dozen.

Stahl says he was baffled by the aesthetically driven marketing of the film, which plastered every other billboard in L.A. with his airbrushed face alongside those of costars Katie Holmes and James Marsden. (”The poster made us all look alike!” he marvels.) But the actor seems determined to ignore the emphasis On physical beauty that actresses have always endured and that is now increasingly felt by their male counterparts. Stahl declares, “I try to avoid the sweet-ass roles. I don’t consider myself anything of the kind, and there’s no point in pretending I am.”

Later this year, Stahl gets gritty. In Terrence Malick’s much-anticipated World War II epic, The Thin Red Line, he plays an Iowa farm boy stuck in the battle of Guadalcanal and coming to terms with the reality of killing. Although he acted in the film with John Travolta, Sean Penn, and Nick Nolte, Stahl reserved his awe for the experience of working with the famously reclusive Malick: “He’s such an intriguing person. He can be quite abstract, but when he’s filming he’s incredibly acute. It wasn’t like any other film I’ll ever do, I’m sure.” Stahl has no fears of seeing his face on billboards for this movie, which is set for a holiday release. “I imagine the marketing will have to be more complex, there are so many characters and story lines,” Stahl says, then pauses. “I’m curious to see how they package this war flick under the Christmas tree.”