“I’m not a big fan of the ocean,” says Nick Stahl. “I’m sort of a land creature.” And yet, the soft-spoken young actor has been swimming in Los Angeles’ coastal capital – Hollywood – since roughly age 10. First there was a pair of TV movies, and then came his breakout role in The Man Without a Face alongside Mel Gibson at the mere age of 13. The fact that he stills lives in L.A. but longs for his land-locked home of Dallas suggests Stahl’s current conflicted state as a sought-after rising thespian: industry vet at only 21, but ready to try something different.

Indeed, Stahl is taking on new challenges: this summer, he plays the sick title character of Larry Clark’s killer Kids redux flick Bully, and in the fall, two stunning family dramas – Todd Field’s In the Bedroom and Christopher Münch’s Sleepy Time Gal – will solidify Stahl’s unique up-and-comer status. Before 2001, Stahl’s most memorable screen time came in his cutesy roles of pre-adolescence, an “evil brain-sucking preppy kid” in the teen flick Disturbing Behavior, and as a dying soldier in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line. “In the past few years, it seems that there is more content that I can relate to in the smaller films,”Stahl says of his recent journey into indie-land.

Bully may be the biggest stretch, however. Based on actual events, the film tells the story of Bobby Kent (played by Stahl, with menace and charm), a seemingly mild-mannered college-bound Floridian teen who beats and pimps his best friend and rapes his friends girlfriends, and is then murdered for it. “I was a bit intimidated by the character,”Stahl recalls. “All I could do was just let go. I was never an angry kid growing up, but I definitely witnessed kids like that. All I could do was just try to give in to that anger and let it out.”

In Sleepy Time Gal, Stahl is son to a single mother dying of cancer (Jacqueline Bisset). “I grew up with just my mom, so I could connect in that way,” he says. And for In the Bedroom, Stahl plays another collegiate-type with a bright future “who is blindsided by love,” he explains. “Before Nathalie [Marisa Tomei] comes along,” Stahl continues, “he was just a kid who had things figured out, then he becomes confused, a bit baffled, by his next step.”

Stahl’s own next steps are uncertain as well. He’d like to work with British director Ken Loach because, he says, “his movies don’t follow any particular formula,” just as Stahl himself rejects a formula life. “There’s definitely pressures in this town to do things a certain way,” he says. “I’m glad I went through that stuff. I had a publicist when I was younger and I don’t have one now and I don’t want one. I’m glad I went through that, saw what it was, and now I can say I’m doing things in my own way.”