‘Lost Capone’s’ Pasdar: It Took a Few Breaks to Get Where He Is

Adrian Pasdar’s career began quite literally by accident.

The 25-year-old actor, who stars in Monday’s TNT movie “The Lost Capone,” was a literature major at the University of Central Florida when he got in a car wreck that sent him through the windshield.

“It took me a while to recupe,” he recalls of the 1983 incident. “I finished out the school year and moved back home to Philadelphia, where I did a lot of odd jobs, like paving driveways. I also worked backstage at a theater building scenery.”

It was on this job that he had his second accident--he cut off part of his left thumb. “At that point,” he says, “with the workman’s comp, I was able to live at the YMCA in New York and study at Strasberg”--the renowned Lee Strasberg Institute, that is. From then on, all of Pasdar’s accidents have been lucky ones, beginning with his first acting job, a small role in “Top Gun.”

“Yeah, everybody hates me for that,” he jokes. “I was really fortunate to get it as my first role. I could’ve ended up in a B horror film, being eaten by an 18-foot mechanical monster.”

Pasdar now has nine motion picture roles to his credit, including the lead in “Torn Apart,” a Romeo-and-Juliet story set in the Middle East being re-released Sept. 14.

On stage, he’s starring in “The Secret Sits in the Middle” at the 3rd Street Theatre in Los Angeles, and he’ll appear opposite Justine Bateman in “Love Letters” the week of Sept. 18. Not bad for an actor who once was so broke he had to live at LAX’s Tom Bradley International Terminal.

“That was when I first came out here to do ‘Top Gun,’ ” he explains. “I even had my own pay phone there, where everybody knew they could reach me.”

Pasdar lives by the beach now and does a lot of reading in his spare time--which, hopefully, will cause him no greater harm than an occasional paper cut.