His Season to Bloom

As he walks into the Tropical Cafe on Sunset Boulevard, a neighborhood hangout near his home in L.A.’s Silver Lake district that serves up Cuban sandwiches, flaky pastries and strong coffee, heads immediately turn. People see that malleable, guy-next-door face and feel they know him, but aren’t sure why.

Standing 6-feet-2 with bushy hair and a beard to match, 34-year-old actor John C. Reilly might be mistaken for a reclusive astronomer, an undercover narc or a wandering soul just off a shrimp boat. Actually, the shrimp boat isn’t far off, because the whiskers, he explains, are grown for Wolfgang Petersen’s next film, “The Perfect Storm,” in which Reilly has been cast as a doomed Massachusetts fisherman, alongside George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg. Reilly says he has even bulked up to 180 pounds for the part, “so I don’t get pulled overboard by a swordfish.”

The odd thing about Reilly is that although so many people seem to recognize him, you can bet not many can guess his name. Indeed, strangers often nervously approach Reilly and ask, “Don’t I know you?” or “Didn’t we go to school together?”

And Reilly patiently tells them he’s a movie actor and they probably saw him on the big screen. His wife, producer Alison Dickey, is amazed at how often Reilly can size people up and name the movies they recognized him from.

“Oh, man, yeah!” they will invariably say. “You were that porn star buddy of Mark Wahlberg’s in ‘Boogie Nights!’ What was your name again?”

“Reed Rothchild,” he will answer.

“Yeah, man! Cool!”

Or, they will flash on other Reilly performances, like catcher Gus Sinski in Kevin Costner’s recent baseball film “For Love of the Game”; the hard-luck gambler John in “Hard Eight”; Sgt. Storm in “The Thin Red Line”; Johnny Depp’s best friend, Tucker, in “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape”; the local constable, Frank Stamshaw, in “Dolores Claiborne”; the menacing bad guy, Terry, in “The River Wild,”; a young monk in “We’re No Angels,” or Drew Barrymore’s editor in “Never Been Kissed.”

“Most people remember me from ‘Boogie Nights’ because it was such a startling movie,” Reilly says. “But every movie that I do opens me to a different segment of the population.”

Reilly, however, may soon achieve the name recognition that has eluded him when he appears next month in “Magnolia,” writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s first film since his critically acclaimed 1997 “Boogie Nights.” The film features an ensemble cast, including Tom Cruise, and marks the third time Anderson has cast Reilly in one his films, beginning with “Hard Eight.”

Like Philip Seymour Hoffman and Philip Baker Hall, Reilly inhabits a loose-knit company of actors that turns up regularly in Anderson’s films. Indeed, the director calls Reilly one of his closest pals, describing the big, affable actor as “the funniest person I know” and adding, “He makes me laugh harder than any person on the planet--I mean, piss-in-my-pants, spit-takes kind of laughter.”

Still, recognition can be a humbling experience. Like the time Reilly pulled into a gas station to get a flat tire fixed and the grease monkey blurted out: “Oh, yeah! You played a mechanic in ‘Days of Thunder,’ didn’t you?”

“It’s so embarrassing,” Reilly observes, “not being able to change your own flat tire after playing an ace mechanic in a race movie.”

As he takes a seat near the back of the cafe, poking at a fruit-filled pastry, it doesn’t take a lot of coaxing to get Reilly telling stories.

Like the time they were making “Hard Eight” in Reno. The script called for Reilly to marry Gwyneth Paltrow’s character, so Anderson called up a local wedding chapel and said they were coming over. As the actors stood before the real-life chaplain and the cameras began rolling, it suddenly dawned on everyone that Paltrow and Reilly might actually be getting hitched.

“They could technically be married!” Anderson said with a laugh. “We’re not really sure!”

Anderson noted that Paltrow was freaked and that Reilly, who had a wife back in L.A., was saying things like, “I could be married to two women.”’

“Gwyneth was really flipped out,” Reilly recalled. “When you watch the movie, she is, like, laughing hysterically. That’s just Gwyneth, it’s not the character, because she had just started dating Brad [Pitt] at that point. . . . It was right when People magazine came out and said, ‘Brad Pitt: The Sexiest Man Alive,’ and I used to tease her and say, ‘I know I’m not the sexiest man alive but, hopefully, my little screen kiss will suffice.’ ”

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Or take the improvisational cop videos that Reilly and Anderson made a few years back to kill time while Anderson was trying to drum up financing for “Boogie Nights.”

Reilly would don a police uniform supplied by a Hollywood costumer and pile into the driver’s seat of a car next to Anderson, who was taping him with a hand-held video camera. After phoning ahead to actor friends like Jennifer Jason Leigh and Hoffman to alert them that they were on their way, Reilly hit the gas and they roared off through the streets of Los Angeles, mimicking the popular reality TV show “Cops.”

One day in Studio City, startled passersby stopped in their tracks as they watched Reilly, huffing and puffing, run past a gas station in hot pursuit of Hoffman, who looked every bit the petty criminal with long hair and grungy T-shirt. The alert citizens pointed at Hoffman and yelled at Reilly, “He went that way! He went that way!” while Anderson, camera rolling, scrambled to keep up. The mock chase went on for blocks.

On another day, the two drove up to Leigh’s house as Anderson videotaped the improvised encounter. She asked the “officer” his name. Reilly told her, “Jim.” She pressed. “Jim what?” He thought a moment, then came up with a name on the spot: “Jim . . . Kurring. Officer Jim Kurring.”

As fate would have it, Reilly’s “Cops” improvisation would live on long after Anderson switched off the video camera. His portrayal as Officer Jim Kurring has surfaced again--this time as a key character in Anderson’s highly anticipated new film “Magnolia,” which New Line Cinema is scheduled to release in L.A. and New York on Dec. 20 for Oscar consideration; the film opens nationwide Jan. 7.

Like “Boogie Nights,” Anderson’s script for “Magnolia” is also set in the San Fernando Valley; it takes its title from a major Valley thoroughfare.

The film focuses on one fateful day in the lives of an odd assortment of people. Cruise, for instance, plays a misogynistic self-help guru who conducts fiery seminars for men seeking tips on sexual conquest, while William H. Macy plays a former TV quiz-show boy genius who pines after a bartender with braces. Also featured in the cast are Jason Robards, Jeremy Blackman, Michael Dowen, Melora Walters and Melinda Dillon as well as Hoffman, Julianne Moore and Hall.

“Magnolia” begins by depicting some of the more bizarre urban legends that have sprung up in America over the years, like the tale of a scuba diver who was found in the branches of a tree after being accidentally scooped out of a lake by a water-dropping plane fighting a forest fire. What the movie posits is that just as urban legends can’t be explained, life is filled with events and their consequences that seemingly defy logical explanation.

Reilly’s Officer Kurring is perhaps the most stable character in the film’s mini-plots. Despite encountering all sorts of craziness and crime on his police beat, he believes he can still save those around him and even falls in love with a young woman (Walters), whom he meets on a call. He asks her out on a date, even though her personal life is falling apart amid a swirl of family turmoil and drug addiction.

His ability to blend effortlessly into all kinds of roles landed him a part in his current film, “The Perfect Storm.” He plays Dale Murphy, a fisherman on an ill-fated boat. The script entails getting smashed repeatedly with hundreds of gallons of water and, Reilly says, he crosses himself each time, praying to God, “Please let me live through this take.”

“I always get these jobs of extreme physical endurance coupled with the necessity to have a deep understanding of some occupations, whether it’s a baseball player, or soldier, or cop, or fisherman,” Reilly says with exasperation. “I don’t know what my story is, but I always end up in movies like that, and I always end up surrounded by men too. I told my wife I’d like to play a handyman in a convent--an easy job surrounded by girls.”

He may not always get the girl, but he does manage to work for some big-name directors such as Brian De Palma, Woody Allen, Terrence Malick, Lasse Hallstrom, Curtis Hanson and Neil Jordan.

But Anderson believes that Hollywood is selling Reilly short if it keeps casting him in buddy roles. “What I saw in him was a Jimmy Stewart quality, a Joel McCrea quality, an old-fashioned leading-man quality,” Anderson said. “Obviously, his face is untraditional, but talk to any girl who’s ever worked with him, from Gwyneth Paltrow to Melora Walters, and they have all practically fallen in love with him. It’s on display again in ‘Magnolia.’ ”

With an Irish mug that seems fashioned from putty, Reilly is to the 1990s what such brilliant character actors as Walter Brennan, Arthur Kennedy and Lee J. Cobb were to earlier generations.

Reilly himself doesn’t complain about not having a Robert Redford profile. “I don’t think of a ‘character actor’ as a pejorative term at all,” he shrugs. “It’s like, I wear it as a badge of honor.”

The way he sees it, George Clooney and Brad Pitt want to play the kind of parts he always gets. “They come up to me and say, ‘I love your work so much and love what you do and how detailed it is. I always have to be a guy who’s, like, smiling.’ ” Reilly shakes his head. “Just sitting there looking pretty or putting on that winning smile gets pretty boring after a while.”

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In “Magnolia,” Anderson has stripped Reilly of Officer Kurring’s outlandish characteristics that were evident in their old mock-cop videos and transformed him into a policeman with subtle traits and noble qualities.

“In a way, my character is the hero of the story. Even though he is flawed and has his own problems, he is the one guy in the story who is trying to get outside of himself and touch someone,” he says. “Everyone else is locked into their own morass.”

To prepare for his role, Reilly accompanied real LAPD officers on their patrols--at one point, responding to a wrenching call related to a 14-year-old girl with a baby who was in a fight with her mother.

While filming “Magnolia,” Reilly felt the “intensity” of walking into a dangerous neighborhood dressed in a uniform and badge.

“I got a real sense when I was walking in there just how scary it is for a policeman,” he says. “You never know, if you open a door, whether it’s somebody going to be saying, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize the music was so loud. I’ll turn it down,’ or whether it’s going to be some kind of insane person with a gun behind the door. That element of chance--you have to be a pretty brave person to be a policeman. You might as well have a sign on saying, ‘Shoot me.’ ”

A child of the Midwest--or, what he prefers to call an “Irish-Lithuanian-Polish-Chicago-South Side thing”--Reilly grew up with three brothers and two sisters in a rough part of town. His father owned a local linen-supply company, and Reilly remembers what it was like helping out in the laundry room.

His big break came when he sent off a videotape of himself performing to director De Palma, who brought him to Thailand and eventually cast him alongside Sean Penn in the 1989 Vietnam War film “Casualties of War.”

Just like that, his first plane trip out of Chicago, and Reilly’s life was turned around. Not only did he go on to make his next two pictures with Penn (“We’re No Angels,” “State of Grace”), but he also fell in love and later married Penn’s development person.

“My first plane ride, my first movie and, basically, the first woman I met there I fell in love with and I married,” Reilly marvels. “We’ve been married seven years now and have a 1-year-old kid.”

Although he has made 21 films overall, Reilly notes that it’s getting harder for character actors to thrive in Hollywood.

“Unfortunately, the producers are spending all their money on the stars and then they want to cast everyone else at sort of [Screen Actors Guild] scale,” he said. “What it is doing is destroying that class of actor, the character actor, . . . people who bring credibility and realism to movies.”

If there is one note of personal sadness to Reilly’s story, it is the death of his father.

“He was kind of a movie buff,” Reilly says of his dad. “He fancied himself sort of a cross between Humphrey Bogart and W.C. Fields, so he was real tickled that I was in movies.”

His dad was also a fisherman.

“He had a boat on the Great Lakes and, when he got older, he had a house down in Key Largo. We’d go out to sea. That’s where I spent time with my dad. I think of him all the time when I’m doing [“The Perfect Storm”]. He died about six years ago. It was very, very hard, but he was so proud of me.”

The interview over, Reilly walks back through the cafe, stopping to chat with some Latino bakers behind the counter and some patrons at tables. The sun has burned through the overcast, and Sunset Boulevard is alive with traffic and noise. Reilly walks outside, shakes hands and smiles, then crosses a side street to his parked car. In moments, he is gone, a face without a name, heading back toward home.

Robert W. Welkos is a Times staff writer.