The Tao of Donal Logue

Don’t get Donal Logue wrong. He is totally happy being a character actor. He enjoys being a team player on movie sets. He points out that directors and actors describe him as a nice guy. A great guy.

“But I always wanted my shot where I carried the movie,” explains Logue, 34. “I wanted to go, ‘Dudes. I can do this.’ It’s like people don’t know what you can do until you do it.”

Logue gets his shot in the Sony Pictures Classic comedy “The Tao of Steve,” for which the red-haired Harvard grad won a special jury prize at Sundance this year for his performance. The film opens Friday in Los Angeles.

Logue is a revelation as Dex, an overweight, chain-smoking kindergarten teacher who is catnip to women. The brightest guy in his college class, Dex stayed in Santa Fe, N.M., packed on the pounds, and became a slacker. But he has charm, intelligence and wit. And just like his idols Steve McQueen and Steve McGarrett, Dex is cooler than cool.

But when a former college flame, Syd (Greer Goodman), shows up in town and Dex finds himself falling in love with this bright, independent woman, the man-child decides it’s time to take his first steps toward growing up.

The character of Dex is actually based on the film’s co-writer, Duncan North, also a friend of the film’s director, Jenniphr Goodman.

Logue, who also appears in “The Patriot” and the upcoming “Steal This Movie!,” “The Opportunists” and “Million Dollar Hotel,” has slimmed down considerably from the Falstaffian Dex. Logue gained about 30 pounds for the part, with a fat suit giving him even more girth. It may not be what De Niro put on for “Raging Bull,” but, says Logue, “if you pick up a 30-pound weight at the gym, it’s ‘Jesus, man that’s a lot to carry around.’

“I really thought in my life I would never weigh 200 pounds. There is no way. And then at some point during ‘The Tao of Steve,’ I was like ‘Oh, lordy.’ ”

Director Goodman didn’t initially consider Logue, best known as the wisecracking Jimmy the cabdriver on a series of MTV promos, because she didn’t automatically think of him as an overweight actor.

“That was the primary importance at the time,” she says. But when her casting directors brought up Logue’s name, she thought he would be perfect. “I remembered him as the cab driver, and then I saw his reel and it’s extraordinarily diverse. He plays just sick creepos with the same ease he plays doctors. He’s sensitive and really funny, and he’s charming and sexy.”

Logue knows a lot of guys like Dex from Harvard. “They get into the real world, and the world doesn’t care what your senior thesis was about,” Logue says, stretching his feet out on the table in his suite at Le Meridienin West Hollywood. “Either you sink or swim in [the real world].”

Just as Dex does during the course of “Steve,” Logue has grown up a lot himself lately. “In my 20s, it was amazing to me that you don’t look at your body as being you,” he explains, taking a sip of tea. “It is just a receptacle for things. It is, ‘So I die 10 years earlier, those are the last 10 years.’ This attitude is crazed, and then I woke up.”

He first quit drinking. But giving up cigarettes took longer.

“I would smoke a cigarette and would be so depressed while smoking the cigarette, that it wasn’t the feeling of taking the first hit off a new cigarette, that I would rush through the cigarette I was smoking, just to light up another one. Or I would forget I was smoking a cigarette and dig for a cigarette and realize I had a cigarette in my mouth.”

Three years ago, he had a “calling” at the Sundance Film Festival. “We were climbing these wooden stairs to get to the street where a car was parked, and I had this respiratory attack,” he says. “I quit smoking right before I did ‘Blade.’ ”

Becoming a father 17 months ago has also changed his priorities. He’s glad his son, Finn, isn’t watching him drinking and smoking. “I don’t want that environment. He doesn’t need that.”

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Born in Ottawa, Canada, of Irish immigrant parents, Logue moved with his family to Boston when he was still little. He grew up, though, mainly in border towns in Arizona and California, including El Centro. “My mother taught at Catholic schools and my dad was an electronic engineer,” says the actor, who has three sisters, including a twin.

He describes moving around the desert towns as a “cool” experience. “To live in a place that was kind of hard and where nothing was guaranteed made me work a little harder,” he offers.

But Logue foundered early his junior year in high school, while attending a big public school on the California-Mexico border. “I was drinking a lot,” he says. “I wasn’t thriving.”

So his parents packed him off to North London to live with his aunt and uncle where he attended Catholic school--briefly. “It was even worse,” he says. “I would go to pubs. I got kicked out of Catholic school because I was rebellious. I didn’t know what to do.”

So he came back to California and decided to settle down and work. He won the state championship in speech and debate and was chosen to attend the American Legion Boys’ State, where he was elected president. “My senior year, I spoke to American Legion national conventions,” he says.

Before his junior year, his grades were so bad he thought he would end up at a junior college. But because of his extracurricular activities, colleges were knocking at his door his senior year. Logue decided on Harvard.

After college, he went to England to act in plays and even managed such rock bands as Lemonheads back in the U.S. Logue was about to take a job as a bartender in Boston when he ran into a theater director he knew in Harvard Square. A CBS-TV miniseries, “Common Ground,” just happened to be casting for young actors, and the director told Logue to try out.

“I auditioned for it and got the part. After that you go, ‘I’m in SAG. They paid me to be in a hotel and do a movie. I’ll do this.’ I never had it that hard, I have to admit. I just worked, which is all I could ask for.”