Actor Uses His Chops to Foil Carjacking : Crime: In the performance of his life, Stephen Penner disarms attacker on the street and then returns to his drama class.

The part of a street tough in this article is played by Stephen Penner, a mild-mannered Santa Barbara attorney and aspiring actor who unwittingly earned the lead role in a bit of Los Angeles street theater Tuesday night as he single-handedly foiled a carjacker.

Penner, 46, on a break from his once-a-week acting class, had bent down to put his checkbook back in his white Porsche 928 when he felt the cold steel of a .357 magnum revolver, the kind Dirty Harry used in the movies, pressing against his head.

“As I bent over, someone grabbed my right arm and said something, but I didn’t hear it and I thought it was my scene partner,” Penner said. “When I stood up I saw a .357 held to my right temple and the guy said, ‘Get in the car.’ ”

The man on the other end of the barrel wasn’t Clint Eastwood either, it was Raul Montoya, 21, of Los Angeles, and he wasn’t play-acting at all, police said.

In that moment, Penner said, he decided to take a chance.

“I hesitated for a moment and he repeated it, the barrel pressed against my temple. What flashed through my mind is, ‘If I get in the car, I’m dead. If I run, I’m probably dead. I made a decision and I went with it.”

Penner grabbed Montoya’s right wrist, forcing the gun first up into the air and then straight down as the men wrestled, kicked and clawed each other for control of the gun.

“As I was wrestling the gun from his right hand, he tried to turn it toward me and shoot me,” Penner said. “For a minute, I thought about running, but he would have shot me in the back.”

Penner got both hands on the gun and pulled it away from Montoya, whom he described as about his own size.

“I worked it free and turned it on him,” he said. “He started to come at me and I screamed for him to get away from me, and then he took off running.”

Detective Bill Speer of the Los Angeles Police Department understands why Penner risked his life and said it was probably the right thing for Penner to do because he was prepared to act. But he would not prescribe that course of action for everyone.

“It depends on a person’s mental outlook, physical conditioning,” Speer said. “Every situation is different and everyone will evaluate their own situation.”

For most of the more than 8,000 carjacking victims in Los Angeles over the last two years, the right move has been to comply with the person sticking a gun in your face.

“What answer might be right for him, might be wrong for a different person,” Speer said. “As a general rule, it is very wrong to tangle with someone with a gun when you are unarmed.”

When Penner returned to his class at Chelsea Studios, the teacher, veteran actress Arlene Golonka, said she was at first horrified by his story. Then she turned it into an acting lesson.

“He acted the whole thing out for us,” Golonka said. “I said, ‘Use it, use it,’ because it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

“He’s a mild, adorable person, and of all my students, I would never expect him to do this.”

Montoya was picked up by police about an hour after the attempted carjacking on Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood, authorities said, because he fit the description given by Penner.

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Montoya confessed to the crime, according to Detective James Gerardi of the North Hollywood station.

After Tuesday night’s ordeal, Penner’s wife, Lii, asked her husband to get rid of the Porsche. And she said she was not happy about his weekly sojourns to Los Angeles.

“We have three kids, but he’s just like that, he wants to be active, be out there,” she said, speaking from their home. “Unfortunately, Los Angeles is like that too, and that’s why we live in Santa Barbara.”

On Thursday, Penner was back in Los Angeles, seemingly unfazed.

“Hey, as long as I’m going to continue to go down to Hollywood,” Penner said before driving off to a commercial audition in Hollywood, “I’m going to need this car.”