Good Roles a Luxury Eric Roberts Can Afford : Television: After a stint of working just for money, the actor is back in Showtime’s ‘Love, Cheat and Steal.’

“I feel silly,” says Eric Roberts, who is hanging by his neck until he is bored. He swings this way and that in the dingy prison cell set, suspended by a coiled sheet encircling his neck and tied to an overhead pipe. A few feet away, camera and makeup problems are briefly delaying the shooting of this jailbreak scene from Showtime’s “Love, Cheat and Steal,” premiering Sunday.

“Twist, Eric,” the director says to the dangling actor. So Roberts does the twist in midair. Then he does the jerk, followed by the funky chicken. An actor has to find his kicks where he can.

In the scene Roberts is preparing, he uses the old faked suicide gag to lure a guard into his cell so he can beat him up and escape. It’s another Roberts movie in which he employs his unusual facial architecture and lean, hard body to create a villain more shiver-making than he has any right to be.

“This guy is in jail because his wife (Madchen Amick) snitched on him while she was driving getaway on one of his heists,” Roberts says during a break from miming asphyxiation. “She put the screws to him, and he’s been doing seven years hard. Now he’s about to set out on his quest for illegal justice,” which will involve confronting Amick’s new sugar daddy (John Lithgow).

The story is one of those neo-noir scenarios that have become a TV and film staple in recent years, as filmmakers search for a way to put ambiguous characters on screen without repelling audiences.

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Action and violence have dominated Roberts’ vehicles recently. Back in 1985, in “Runaway Train,” he earned an Academy Award nomination playing a mild-mannered young con who tagged along when violent Jon Voight broke out. Now it’s Roberts playing the sadist.

One reason Roberts has moved away from playing what he used to call “lover-type” parts, he discloses, is that “Uncle Sam let me know in 1989 that I had a terrible accountant and I was in trouble with the tax shelters he’d put my money into. I had one accountant who was foolish and another who robbed me. It took me a while to get out from under both of them. Now I handle my own money, and I do OK with it.”

To pay his tax bill, he says, “For the last 3 1/2 years I’ve been working for money. Up until I made ‘Rude Awakening’ (a 1989 flop in which he played a hippie who returns to New York after 20 years in Central America), I was proud of every movie I’d made.”

His filmography included “The King of the Gypsies,” “Star 80,” “The Pope of Greenwich Village,” “Raggedy Man” and “The Coca-Cola Kid.” Since his TV debut in the soap “Another World” in 1978, he has starred in such small-screen productions as “Miss Lonelyhearts” on PBS and “To Heal a Nation” on NBC. He won awards and applause when he replaced John Malkovich on Broadway in “Burn This” in 1988.

But then, he says, “ ‘Rude Awakening’ put a dent in my career. I wasn’t proud of anything I did after that until ‘Final Analysis’ last year (playing Kim Basinger’s unhinged husband). Now I’m finally back to where I can afford to do good roles no matter what they pay. Everyone must forgive me for that period.”

Roberts’ frank admissions and boyish appeal for forgiveness are typical of his untethered, kinetic personality. Even at 36, he sometimes seems like a hyperactive kid. On his breaks from hanging around on the “Love, Cheat and Steal” set, he grabs bag after bag of potato chips and wolfs them down, even though lunch is imminent. He often calls home to his wife, Kelly Cunningham, and their 2-year-old daughter, Emma.

Roberts is a constant worker, piling up credits in out-of-the-way media like Italian television, independent art films and straight-to-video action movies. Among recent performances he doesn’t disavow is “By the Sword.” It had “a wonderful script, a great performance by F. Murray Abraham, terrific fencing, fantastic sets, a great climax, but it’s also got some lessons in how not to direct a movie.” So it never found a distributor.

For TV’s USA Network, Roberts made “The Voyage,” directed by John Mackenzie. “It was about greed and deception, and of course I played the heavy. Rutger Hauer played the good guy for a change. He and his wife are on a trip on his yacht, and I come along for the ride. We made it in Malta with a Maltese crew, eating Maltese food and living in Maltese Winnebagoes. It wasn’t extraordinarily comfortable to make, but it’s good.”

What did Roberts mean by “of course I play the heavy”? He answers, “It’s a fact. In eight out of 10 films I play the heavy. I’ve made 17, 18, 19 films. I think I’ve played five good guys, and all the rest are questionable.

“I guess I started to get stuck with being the heavy in 1982 after ‘Star 80.’ I kept trying to dodge it. But I’ve got to make a living. So I decided to have fun doing it. Now I’ve stopped worrying about the good guy-bad guy ratio.”