In a 20-year career, actor Robert Knepper has played everything from Julia Roberts' husband in Woody Allen's "Everyone Says I Love You" (1996) to Robert F. Kennedy in "Jackie, Ethel, Joan: The Women of Camelot" (2001). But he didn't become famous until he created a murderous, racist pedophile named Theodore "T-Bag" Bagwell on the television series "Prison Break."
Since then, oozing charm and menace in equal amounts, Knepper has captured audiences worldwide. Not only is he starring in a big Hollywood film, "Hitman," set to open on Wednesday, but also he is rumored to be playing the next Bond villain, co-starring with Hugh Jackman in the "X-Men" spinoff "Wolverine" and starring in a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" (1963).
What a difference a sneer makes.
Four months before becoming television's baddest dude, the 48-year-old Knepper feared that he would have to give up acting to support his wife and 5-year-old son.
"I tried to get a job teaching theater at UCLA, but I didn't have the right credentials," he says by telephone from his Dallas home. "I did get an offer from UCLA Extension, but it only paid $50 a week."
Meanwhile the producers of "Prison Break" were looking for, as Knepper puts it, "a 240-pound, stupid Southern hick with a gold tooth and tattoos" to play a convict named T-Bag. Didn't sound promising for Knepper, who is a slim 5-foot-9 and sounds like George Clooney when he isn't putting on a Southern drawl, but he saw possibilities. When he went in to audition, he threw them a curve ball.
"I wanted to charm the pants off them," Knepper says. "It's like, when you go out on a date, you don't say over the first drink, 'Wanna go home and ...?' How far would you get that way? Or 'Here's what's wrong with me.' You don't talk about negative stuff - if you want to get beyond first base, you've got to charm. For me it comes naturally, because I am more interested in other people."
He got the part, and then had to convince himself that he could do it.
"The first season I took a pen and put 'xoxoxo' around the middle finger of my left hand," he says. "(I thought) 'If I can just feel tough, I'll be OK."'
It worked. Knepper's portrayal of T-Bag was one of the most talked-about performances of 2005, and two years later audiences still seem to love the character, even though he's the kind of psycho who will kidnap the woman he loves and slaughter the veterinarian who reattached his severed hand.
"When I get my Oscar someday, I'll thank 'Prison Break,"' Knepper says. "It's what started this whole new chapter for me."
Don't forget guys, Robert has a role in the new movie "Hitman" which opens in US theaters on Wednesday!