From Rough Cut 1997

Billy Crudup is currently appearing on Broadway in Chekhov's Three Sisters, opposite film luminaries Lili Taylor, Amy Irving and Jeanne Tripplehorn. At the cineplex, Crudup is appearing opposite three similarly formidable screen sirens as sisters in Inventing the Abbotts.

Crudup's Jacey Holt, who believes the Abbott family cheated the Holts out of a fortune, seeks revenge by targeting for seduction each of the beautiful, eligible Abbott daughters. Jacey's 1950s rebellion against class rigidity lets the 28-year-old Crudup give the sort of smoldering, brooding, James Dean-ish performance from which movie heartthrob careers are born. (With the Russian-style goatee he's grown for his stage role, he looks like this month's Johnny Depp, or at least this month's Skeet Ulrich.)

After the small roles Crudup (rhymes with "screwed up") had in Sleepers (as a murder defendant) and Everyone Says I Love You (as a hunky college student), he'll have his next big shot at stardom with the lead role in Pre (the second movie about runner Steve Prefontaine).

When did you know you wanted to be an actor?

In second grade, I played Uncle Sam in a Fourth of July spectacular. I just wore a mask and said the Pledge of Allegiance. But I dug that everybody was looking at me. And I was always the class clown. There was an ease with which performing in front of people came to me, and also an excitement. When it came time to pick a profession, I didn't know what else to do. I was left with no choice.

Did you draw on personal experience with your own two brothers for the relationship between Jacey and his brother, Doug?

I try to use my imagination more than my actual experience. You can find parallels, but it makes it difficult to distinguish the character as a separate entity from myself. So I tried to take it mostly from the screenplay. Jacey and Doug's relationship is very complex and very interesting. If you're in a relationship with someone who's a polar opposite of what you are, you can just shut them off without pain, but with a parent or sibling, you're stuck with them.

Did you and your brother ever have a knock-down, drag-out, porch- smashing fight like Jacey and Doug?

Uh, no comment.

What appealed to you about the screenplay?

The time period was very interesting to me. It was before the sexual revolution but after the industrial revolution. Having grown up in the '70s and '80s, I only think of the '50s in terms of clichéd sitcoms, Leave It to Beaver, the nuclear family. I didn't remember a lot of stories about class struggle and how that must have informed suburban communities.

Were you nervous about your first lead role, in Pre?

When I was an undergraduate, I always played smaller roles, like the role I'm playing now in The Three Sisters. I don't have any vision of playing leading-man parts necessarily, just roles that are interesting. There was something interesting to me in Steve Prefontaine, that arrogance, that sheer will, the capacity to push yourself further than even you thought you could go.

What do you think Jacey and Steve Prefontaine have in common?

They both had a chip on their shoulder, and much of their life was about trying to prove that they had the capacity that they most feared they didn't have.