From ‘Peaks’ to the ‘Gladiator’ Ring

When James Marshall began preparing for “Gladiator,” his boxing trainer didn’t know who he was. He had never seen the actor on “Twin Peaks,” playing the brooding, motorcycle-riding James Hurley. “After three weeks of our working out,” Marshall says, “this trainer told his family about me. They were all women--10, 16 and 23--and they kept saying, ‘Don’t hurt him! Don’t punch him! Make sure you don’t really hurt him!’ ”

Marshall laughs out loud as he tells this story. Yet he seems puzzled that women should want to protect him.

For now, Marshall, 25 and recently married, is too happy working to complain. The son of a former Rockette and a theatrical fund-raiser, he moved from New Jersey to Malibu at 15 when his father, William Greenblatt, began producing movies for Martin Sheen. After high school, Marshall started acting classes, intending to make it on his own. But four years of delivering pizzas instead of lines prompted him to go “the nepotism route and let my dad put me in an After School Special.”

Suddenly casting directors were calling. Now, Marshall has completed two more films--”Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me,” due in August, and “A Few Good Men” with Tom Cruise, to open this fall. Hopeful about his future, he is also practical.

“If worse comes to worst,” he says, joking about his “Twin Peaks” character’s possible fate, “I can go up to Seattle and fix motorcycles.”