Nick Stahl, the smart kind of hot teenage actor

INTERVIEW – SEPTEMBER, 1998

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.”