Small, Good Roles Suit Him Just Fine : Movies: Bradley Whitford, who appears briefly in several fall films, says a breakthrough part would be nice but that he’s more interested in quality.

You may not know Bradley Whitford’s name yet, but if you’ve gone to the movies this fall, chances are you’ve seen a lot of him.

Whitford, 34, has had small but pivotal roles in several of the season’s highest-profile films, including “My Life,” in which he plays Michael Keaton’s down-to-earth brother; “A Perfect World,” in which he plays a hyper FBI agent; and now in “Philadelphia,” in which he plays law associate Jamey Collins, who may or may not have sabotaged the career of fellow lawyer Tom Hanks.

But even with roles in such heavy-hitting films, he has not lost any of his awestruck feelings about his Hollywood idols. He speaks with reverence about “Philadelphia” director Jonathan Demme (“I mean, Jonathan Demme is wonderful “); being introduced to Clint Eastwood, the director of “A Perfect World,” he says, was “like meeting the Washington Monument.”

With these three films, momentum is picking up for the Juilliard alum. But he is wary of labels like up-and-coming.

“I did a play with Kathy Bates in New York right when I got out of school, and I thought, ‘Wow, this is it.’ And it wasn’t it. Then I got a part in ‘Presumed Innocent,’ a big movie. And that wasn’t it. So I’m skeptical.”

He also played the lead in “A Few Good Men” on Broadway. Right, one more role that didn’t lead to “it.”

Over the past several years, he has worked steadily, if rather obscurely, in small movies or roles, among them “Adventures in Babysitting” and “Revenge of the Nerds Part II” and more serious fare such as Penny Marshall’s “Awakenings” and Martin Brest’s “Scent of a Woman,” in which he played Al Pacino’s disgruntled nephew.

“I was not familiar with his work prior to casting him,” Brest recalls. “But on his shoulders lay the responsibility of verbalizing 30 years of resentment against (Pacino’s) character. It was sort of like throwing somebody into a thespian cockfight. And Brad did spectacularly for a character that had to go from zero to max instantly.”

Getting all revved up, then stopping on a dime is something the stocky actor has perfected to an art.

“Like with ‘Scent of a Woman,’ ” he says, “you’re not in the movie at all, then you show up and you tell Al Pacino what a (expletive) he is--and get thrown against the wall--then you’re done.”

His character in “My Life”--Paul Ivanovich, the man who stayed closer to his roots than his more successful older brother--is the largest role of the lot. “That part meant a lot to me,” he says, “partly because I’m a little brother and I’ve gone through some of the same difficult conversations.”

On the set, though, there was a twist to that drama. “With Michael Keaton lying there dying of cancer for six hours a day, the situation was ripe for parody. And you do things in really bad taste”--like aping Keaton’s late-chemo hairdo.

The set of “Perfect World” was fairly laid back. “Sometimes you didn’t know if the camera was on. Clint wouldn’t say, ‘Action,’ he’d say, ‘OK, go ahead.’ And then at the end he’d say, ‘OK, enough.’

“He was really great because he talked to the actors about their careers and how attention comes and goes. Five years ago, he said, the critics thought he was a moron and now they treat him like Gandhi.”

The “Perfect World” role was certainly the most physical; Eastwood lands an uppercut on Whitford’s Bobby Lee near the end of the film, and otherwise demure criminologist Laura Dern knees him in the groin.

Whitford--a nice Quaker boy from Wisconsin who now lives with his wife, actress Jane Kaczmarek, in Los Angeles--has learned to tap into a brand of macho-free testosterone. “Brad is like Mr. Perfect,” says director Joel Schumacher. “He should run for office: He’s great looking and he’s charming. Every day on the set of ‘The Client,’ he would come in with four or five new jokes. I don’t know, he must have had the joke hot line.”

It’s nice that he’s working steadily, but where’s the breakthrough role that will make Bradley Whitford a household name?

Thomas Fink, the character he plays in “The Client,” “still falls into the lapdog-to-the-stars category,” Whitford admits. “But even Meryl Streep is pissed off about her career.

“I would much rather play a good, small role in a good movie,” he says, “than the big role in a piece of crap.”

In other words, he’d rather be in “Philadelphia.”