The Door Has Opened Wide

There’s a running gag in “The Impostors,” a screwball farce starring Stanley Tucci and Oliver Platt as bumbling, out-of-work Depression-era actors. Several times the pair’s profession is mentioned to new acquaintances. The response is invariably along the lines of, “Really? Would I have seen you in anything?”

It’s a great inside joke in a movie, written and directed by Tucci, that features a cast stuffed with character actors, from veteran Dana Ivey to such contemporary New York indie film mainstays as Lili Taylor and Steve Buscemi. You can bet that everyone in the film, which opens Oct. 2, has heard that conversation-stopper hundreds of times. For the most part, their names are not of the household variety.

But it’s a question that Platt, 38, may not be hearing much longer. With the accumulated recognition of a nearly 10-year run as a particularly versatile actor--”adaptable,” as he puts it--bobbing occasionally above the mainstream waterline, he’s now poised to pop full-fledged into public consciousness.

“Yes, this is definitely the planets lining up in some sort of way right now,” he says, his full frame reclined in a comfy chair in a Hollywood hotel room, his brown-socked feet perched on an ottoman.

“The Impostors” marks Platt’s first above-the-title role, as he and Tucci recall an earlier Stanley (Laurel) and Oliver (Hardy) playing hapless characters they first developed as friends more than 10 years ago. As a physical comedy part, it’s in keeping with many of his best-known appearances, from his screen debut in Jonathan Demme’s “Married to the Mob” to his role as Porthosin 1993’s youth-skewed “The Three Musketeers” to Warren Beatty’s manic campaign manager in this year’s “Bulworth.”

At the same time, a different side of Platt is featured in the recently released “Simon Birch,” in which he plays a good-natured, big-hearted father substitute--no pratfalls or comic facial takes. And he’s just finishing work on two other potentially high-profile films; he’s a pompous mythology professor alongside Bill Pulman and Bridget Fonda in “Lake Placid,” a comic killer alligator adventure written by “Ally McBeal” creator David E. Kelley, and he’s a gay architect in “Three to Tango,” a “comedy of mistaken sexual identity,” as Platt calls it, which also features Matthew Perry, Neve Campbell and Dylan McDermott.

Don’t ask Platt, who’s every bit as down-to-earth and engaging as he seems on screen, what it all means, though. He might keep you a long time. Fidgeting, he hems and haws, feints and obfuscates, generally side-stepping the matter.

“I don’t want you to think I’m avoiding the question,” he says, finally, stirring a foamy cappuccino in a china cup. “But maybe I am trying to avoid it. I really try to not think about it that way.

“The planets have lined up before,” he says. “ ‘The Three Musketeers’ and ‘Indecent Proposal’ came out in the same year. That was one bump for my career. And ‘Flatliners’ before that. I could count my big breaks on two hands. The good thing about having had that before is you learn how to enjoy it without investing too much in it.”

And enjoying it he is. Shooting “The Impostors,” he says, was the most fun he’s ever had doing a film.

“It was a very unusual situation,” he says. “Stanley’s one of my closest friends. And everybody on that movie, we all know each other. It wasn’t like going to work.”

“Simon Birch” was more like work--especially a grueling rescue scene in a very cold lake. But the rewards, though different, were also considerable.

“I watched ‘Simon Birch’ for the first time the other night, and usually--ask any actor--the first time you watch yourself in a movie is a totally unnatural experience,” he says. “You think about all the things that happened that day and, ‘Oh, they lost this piece. . . . Oh, that loop didn’t work so well.’ But watching it, I actually kind of enjoyed watching me being reserved and quietly eccentric and not, you know. . . .”

Manic?

“Yeah,” he says. “Don’t get me wrong. Nine times out of 10 those parts are more fun to play, the ones with all the aberrant behavior. But [“Simon Birch”] is such a nice script.”

Together the roles clearly constitute a breakthrough for which he is very grateful. But it’s not like he’s expecting to start getting offers for the same roles as Harrison Ford.

“I’m realistic,” he says, pushing his roundish face into a self-mocking mug that pretty much is stamped “character actor.” “A lot of people assume that [kind of stardom] is what everybody wants. But look at what I’ve got for a second. You know what I mean? I’ve got standing employment. I have interesting roles. I make enough money. And my fortunes don’t rise and fall to the same degree at all with every movie opening as those guys’ do.

” . . . I would like to think that I could parlay my little chips into a little heap that would allow me to, on a much more manageable level, be able to do the things I want to do.”

And that is?

“What I aspire to do is just kind of slowly take more control over the storytelling process,” he says. “And right now that takes the form of producing.”

He got his first taste when Tucci showed him the script for “Big Night,” a hearty tale of two brothers trying to make a go of an authentic Italian restaurant in a small New Jersey town in the late ‘50s. The 1995 film, in which Platt did not appear, was Tucci’s first turn as a writer-director, and he wanted old pal Platt involved behind the camera as a producer.

“I ended up really being a team member,” Platt recalls. “I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, but I learned a hell of a lot.”

Platt first got the acting bug as a child living a rather nomadic life while his father was in the diplomatic corps, with stints in various East Asian locales alternating with Washington duties. Early on, from move to move, he discovered an affinity with the theater people.

“I could always plug into the players and, crucially at that age, find a certain degree of acceptance there, guaranteed,” he says. “That’s a powerful thing.”

The power wasn’t strong enough, though, to counteract some of the rootlessness and the onset of adolescence, and he got kicked out of three high schools--once for “smoking pot in a bonsai tree nursery.” But he landed at the private Colorado Rocky Mountain School, where again theater gave him a solid foundation. From there he went to Tufts University, in part for its strong theater program, and stayed in the Boston area to continue learning the craft before eventually moving to New York. It wasn’t long before he was getting noticed, including by Bill Murray, who after seeing him in a one-act play recommended him to Jonathan Demme for “Married to the Mob.”

But as his career accelerated, he says, the sense of community that he sought in his first, youthful acting experiences retained the greatest appeal, not the celebrity. Where many actors pad their contracts with such perks as personal trainers, he says, he asks for plane fare for frequent trips home to New York to be with his wife and two young children. And the chance for experiences with his professional “family” as in “The Impostors” is more important to him than any Hollywood glory.

“There’s this tiny scene in [“The Impostors”] that’s one of my favorites in the movie on a very personal level,” he says. It’s a sequence where he and Tucci stand on a street plotting a scam they’re going to pull in a bakery. “You see, Stanley and I are like literally finishing each other’s sentences. It was the last scene shot on the first day, when we were losing the light. Stanley was nervous because the money people were there and he was just trying to be a good director and get his first day done.

“But when we looked at that scene later we said, ‘It’s so great!’--as much a memento or souvenir of our friendship, and of the fact that our friendship could show up on the screen that way.

“That’s the luxury of making a movie with your close friends like that.”