King James
On loving 's fast-food Macbeth, James LeGros.

By Dennis Harvey

Scotland, PA.

JAMES LEGROS THINKS – no, he's sure – that we've met before. "I don't forget faces ... I'll remember," he insists. "We did meet at some point." Well, actually, we didn't. This is either an honest mistake or a crafty ruse to win an interviewer over. But in any case it's funny, because LeGros is exactly the kind of steadily employed, almost well-known actor everyone knows they've seen somewhere before ...

Everyone should know better, since to really know James LeGros (and yes, I mean his work) is to love him. Let me count the ways, or at least a few: he was Rick, Matt Dillon's not-so-bright sidekick, in Drugstore Cowboy; Tommy, The Rapture's shirtless hitchhiking skank who delivered a jaw-dropping monologue before Mimi Rogers relieved him of his weapon in a sleazy postcoital motel room; Skippy, source of all Diane Lane-befuddling enigmas in My New Gun; Chad Palomino, the incredibly fatuous blond-tressed Hot Young Actor who seemed an awful lot like Brad Pitt in Living in Oblivion; John, the focus and definition of Floundering; and Chris, the sickly geek who pitched ever-so-awkward woo to Julianne Moore in the calamitous last stretch of Safe.

That's a lot of great small-to-large parts in a lot of good-to-great indie movies within a few (1989-95) years. If you've wondered where LeGros has been since, the answer is: all over the place – albeit less conspicuously. "The truth was I got offered better jobs [then]," he says. More recent projects such as There's No Fish Food in Heaven, Drop Back Ten, and L.A. Without a Map went straight to video, cable, or nowhere in particular. He's turning 40 in a couple of months and already has 50-odd features under his belt. "Oh god," he exhales. "As Milos Forman once said to me, 'That's not a résumé, that is an accident report.' "

Maybe so, but LeGros is like the guy thrown from the car into a nice, soft daisy field – under almost any circumstance he comes out looking good. He's in town to promote Scotland, PA., which is not a smashup and in which he actually has the lead for a change. He's Joe McBeth, a 1972 Pennsylvanian grill slave dragged semi-willing to the top of the local fast-food chain by an ambitious Lady McB., Pat (Maura Tierney). Several people die in order that the McBeths' burgers may reign supreme, however briefly. "We're not bad people," Pat rationalizes while plotting the latest mayhem, "we're just underachievers who have to make up for lost time." Her eventual source of out-damn-spot madness is a fry-oil hand burn.

Written by actor turned scenarist-director Billy Morrissette for his wife, Tierney, Scotland, PA. isn't perfect, but it does throw off the curse of bad modern-dress screen MacBeths. (Remember John Turturro's basement-Tarantino Men of Respect? It's OK, nobody does.) Driven by loads of vintage smiley-face Top 40 and an amusingly hideous '70s fashion sense (smell the Naugahyde! feel the fringe! roll those Yahtzee dice!), the film is droll and reasonably smart until the attempt to kinda sorta follow Shakespeare turns things a tad lugubrious at last.

The three hippie "witches" (Andy Dick, Amy Smart, and Timothy "Speed" Levitch) are a sketch-comedy idea that doesn't quite connect. On the upside, though, heirs to the late burger boss, Norm Duncan (James Rebhorn), are two perfectly disaffected longhair teens, one (Tom Guiry) the hopeful future king of Grand Funk Railroad, the other (Geoff Dunsworth) a budding 'mo enamored of Mark Spitz and Godspell. Then there's visiting police detective Ernie McDuff, a proselytizing vegetarian and terribly nice guy who is also extremely weird as only Christopher Walken can be. LeGros (who did some "terrible, terrible" Shakespeare back in his youthful stage days) is excellent as ever, whether horndogging after the old lady, degenerating into booze-soaked guilt, or just doing that mental-wheels-spinning-a-little-slow thing he does so well. Few actors are as deft or inventive at making slightly thick characters so likably transparent.

The movie is one he's particularly fond of, having endured career sloughs during which he was offered nothing but "a lot of shittier Drugstore Cowboys," plus the period after the Keanu-Swayze surfer pic Point Break when "I couldn't go to a ski resort or a beach without someone saying, 'Dude, you're the guy who jumped out of the plane!' " There's more amusement than chagrin directed toward the memory of Phantasm II, during the filming of which he suffered a silver-painted softball (chief FX for those floating-killer-orbs) being repeatedly thrown at his head and got hair singed off during an overfueled explosion stunt.

Elsewhere, he's had to ponder, "Do you do the great indie-picture part, or do you want to play the pencil sharpener next to the stapler in soft focus behind Mel's left shoulder? As a working actor who'd like his kids to go to college, you have to make very practical choices sometimes." Ergo the occasional check-please gig like Tony Scott's BSU (blow stuff up) epic Enemy of the State.

Not to mention Ally McBeal. Owing to a mysterious allergy to whatshername, I managed to miss LeGros's entire year-and-a-half stint as a lawyer who hit the wackiness peak when his total-babe girlfriend turned out to be a transsexual. "I hate to say this, but, uh, the show is kinda silly," he mutters. "I refer to it as my year that I ran away with the circus. It was just a very calamitous time, what with Robert [Downey Jr.] and all his travails ... Some days it was a drag, and ultimately it was sad. But hey, I'm a guy just like everybody else, and some days it was just flat-out funny. To be honest, all the craziness [on that set] was sort of the best thing about the job."

"As the man says, not every movie is a cappuccino movie," LeGros says, shrugging. "My career has been full of all these crazy times, and I always think, 'Now how the hell did I get here?' I feel lucky, actually. I've got this great job. It's an incredible privilege to do this and make a living at it." He counts working with Gus Van Sant on Cowboy ("one of the most heavily improvised movies I've ever worked on") as among his personal-best experiences, as well as The Myth of Fingerprints director Bart Freundlich's upcoming World Traveler.

In the indie film world – where, LeGros says, "like it or not, we're all tethered together" trying to buck the industry "old boys' network" and create "what they [audiences] really want, something that exceeds their expectations" – he's like the old studio-contract players of yore who seldom got first pick but always made the whole team look better. "I don't think I have a persona. I'm workin' on it," he says, laughing. "I just try to put myself in situations where I think I can be helpful." Every little bit of James LeGros does help, a lot.