The Envelope: Despite a villainous past, Michael Shannon makes quite the star (though no hero) in ’99 Homes’

When it comes to Michael Shannon, you’ve probably been misled.

Are you thinking of the emotionally disturbed friend in “Revolutionary Road” (for which Shannon received an Oscar nomination)? The murderous government-agent-turned-gangster in “Boardwalk Empire”? The alien genocidal megalomaniac General Zod in “Man of Steel”?

The cool guy who strolls into the restaurant at the Four Seasons is nothing like them. He cracks a joke about the menu (“Asparago … if I ever have a son … ‘Go forth, Asparago!’”) and knows a certain wine is made of dried grapes.

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Of course this guy could play Rick Carver, one of the year’s most intriguing villains: a slick, sharply dressed, system-gaming real-estate broker who pries people from their houses in director Ramin Bahrani’s Faustian “99 Homes.” The movie’s scenes of desperate homeowners being evicted are as brutal and visceral as anything in cinemas this year.

“I was surprised because one of the first conversations we had about the movie, [Bahrani] said, ‘I really think Rick needs to be a movie star, like Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise,’” Shannon reveals. “I think he was also thinking about getting the movie financed. I was shocked when I got an email from him a month later, ‘I think you should be Rick.’

“I think getting Andrew Garfield [as victim-turned-acolyte Dennis Nash] really helped in that regard. We’ve got Spider-Man and General Zod. That would have been awesome if he got really mad and started shooting webs at me.”

Bahrani, who already knew Shannon, saw him playing a fast-talking producer in the off-Broadway show “Mistakes Were Made.” Then Bahrani ran into him with his daughters, returning from vacation, sun-kissed.

Shannon says, “It’s hard for me to say about myself, but what he says is, ‘You looked so handsome.’ And my daughters bring out a different side of me. So all these things together made him say, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to see Mike do this part and surprise people?’ Because back in the day, I would have played” one of the evicted homeowners who snaps.

Every movie wants its villain to be complex, or so its makers are required by law to claim, but “99 Homes” actually achieves it. Even $1,000 suits can’t completely obscure Rick’s rough edges.

“Paul Newman would have killed this part,” Shannon says. “What I think of is ‘Color of Money,’ or ‘The Verdict.’ I have no problems with people comparing it to ‘Wall Street’; Michael Douglas is amazing in ‘Wall Street.’ But that’s a totally different thing — he’s a guy who has probably always been rich. That’s not Rick’s M.O., really. He didn’t go to Princeton.”

The “Wall Street” comparisons are likely fueled by the jaw-dropping centerpiece speech Rick delivers to Dennis. In some ways, it updates “Greed is good,” but its roots are in a deeper instinct:

“America doesn’t bail out losers,” Rick says. “America was built by bailing out winners. You go to church? Only 1 in 100 is gonna get on that ark, son. And every other poor soul’s gonna drown. I’m not gonna drown.”

“What’s painful about it to me is that these peoples’ lives — all of them, Dennis, Rick — are being affected by an unseen hand,” Shannon says. “You realize one morning you’re a pawn in a game and you can see the hand coming down to move you. What do you do? I want to have some control over my life, I don’t want to be a pawn. And I think that’s what Rick decided one morning: ‘I’m going to figure out how this works so that I can take advantage of it instead of it taking advantage of me.’”

Audiences, of course, root for fair play and justice. Shannon says, “When people ask, ‘Does Rick go to jail at the end of this?’ — Ramin says, ‘I don’t know, but none of the people who did this went to jail. They got bailed out.’”

The actor didn’t go to actual evictions (“That would be crossing a line,” he says), but he did visit vacated properties.

“Sometimes people leave things behind,” he says. At one, “it had been a young couple that had just gotten married, bought their first home. And in a few years, it had all gone up in smoke. They just left piles of stuff around the house. There was a photo album. I bent down and opened it — it was photos from their wedding. They just left their wedding album there. This is one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen in my life.”

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