Vincent Kartheiser Acts Like...
By Brenda Sanchez
Raygun Magazine
"I'm an adult now"
After starring in a spate of family flicks, Vincent Kartheiser is ready to become a grown-up actor. He just needs to perfect his star persona. But he's practicing.
Vincent Kartheiser acts like a monkey. It's not what he's built his career on - wild eyes, bared teeth, gangly arms swinging, making chimpanzee sounds - but he's convincing. Acting like a monkey in front of the camera, as Kartheiser is, is something a person uncomfortable being photographed would do. Or something a person who wants to seem uncomfortable photographed would do. Either way, he's got the monkey act down.
Moments later, on the sidewalk, a block away from the camera and the publicist, Kartheiser is no more tame. He strides quickly down the tree-banked street, away from L.A.'s Sunset Boulevard and all its wild noise. His greasy hair, overworked by the stylist, is a mess. He fidgets with it. His blue eyes glow like backlit ice when the sun catches them. As he walks, his eyes flit nervously back and fourth between me and his scuffed boots. He admits he has only lies to tell me. Still, he wants me to hear them.
At 22, Kartheiser is in the holding pen between Teen Beat pinup and adult up-and-comer. It's like the puberty of the acting world. After roles in family flicks such as "Indian in the Cupboard" and "Alaska", his adolescence has proven a gritty one. It started in 1998, with his star turn as a junkie drug runner in Larry Clark's "Another Day in Paradise". The part took a bit of the rose off his cheeks. "At some point, you have to grow up," he says as he hocks a loogie at the nearest tree. "The earlier the better."
Kartheiser's most recent step towards professional maturity is as the inspired lead in "Crime and Punishment in Suberbia", a loosely adapted modern take on Dostoevky's classic novel. He plays Vincent, a high school outcast who stalks a teen queen, witness her murder her stepfather and subsequently fall from social grace, and ultimately guides her towards a kind of salvation. After seeing Kartheiser in "Another Day in Paradise", director Rob Schmidt immediately wanted him for the role. "Vincent's behavior is sort of weird to begin with," Schmidt says, "He has a kind of nervous energy that's unusual among young actors."
In the film, Vincent treads a line between divinity and madness; he's either a guardian angel or a blossoming psychotic. Kartheiser contends his character isn't crazy - he'd just seen some tough times and is honest because of them. "Being straight with yourself is the most important thing, that's what I thought I was doing when I made that film."
He expectorates, shoots again.
Kartheiser commutes between Minnesota and L.A., wrangling kids at his mom's day-care center one day, then running with his friends on the L.A. scene another. But, he declares, "I'm all Minnesota," as he launches into a rant about family, happiness and Sunday football games. "I really want different things for my career other than money and fame. I want other things from life." He lists love, serenity, anonymity. He doesn't want power. "And I don't want to direct."
Kartheiser's act is anti-cool cool; the young anti-star star. He's been acting since he was six and recently finished a film with James Caan and Kirsten Dunst called "Luckytown Blues", but complains he hasn't worked in years. He tells me again that he always lies in interviews, that Charlton Heston advised him to do that, and that he's checked out Heston in action at a urinal. I don't buy any of it.
"Most good actors are really kind of at a loss for who they are," he says. I buy that.
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