He’s Not the Type, but He’s the Lead

Pie in the sky?

A flash in the pie pan?

That could well have been what some thought of the career prospects of Jason Biggs after he imprinted himself on pop culture consciousness last year as the slightly pudgy, sexually curious adolescent who had, um, relations with the title pastry of the hit teen comedy “American Pie.”

It’s the kind of thing that can stick with you. But not long ago, Biggs started noticing something changing in the way people reacted to him.

“I’m just dealing with this now,” he says, sitting in a Beverly Hills hotel suite. “I went from being known as, ‘Are you the pie guy?’ to now people saying, ‘Hey! You’re Jason Biggs!’ It’s weird that people would recognize me and know my name.”

Still, there are the letters he gets. Looking at his shoes and blushing slightly, he admits that he’s gotten more than a few from young girls offering to “be my pie.”

Then, at the recent premiere of “Boys and Girls,” the teen comedy in which he co-stars alongside Freddie Prinze Jr., something else happened.

“I had my first real taste of screaming fans at the ‘Boys and Girls’ premiere,” he says, still perky at the end of a day of interviews tied to “Loser,” the Amy Heckerling film that opens Friday in which he has the starring role as a rural kid going to college in New York City. “Girls went crazy. That was so surreal. I think what it is, is I did a movie with Freddie Prinze--I got his spill-off.”

But the 22-year-old New Jersey native still knows that at this point, whatever recognition he has is still based on one thing.

“The question is, ‘Am I ever going to live this down?’ ” he says about his “Pie” escapades. “And you know, part of me says, ‘I hope not.’ I’m so proud of my performance and that movie and what it’s done for me.

“I think of Tom Cruise--and I’m not comparing myself to him--but when I think of him, I can’t help but think of him sliding across the floor in his underwear and dark glasses. It’s not quite the same as humping a pie, but it’s one of the culturally identified film moments.

“But when I think of him, I also think of those other wonderful roles he’s taken on and the movies he’s made, and I like to think I’ll be able to do that as well. . . . I will always be remembered for [the pie], but hopefully it won’t be the only thing.”

Heckerling, who cast Biggs as the title-character outsider in “Loser” before “American Pie” was even released, saw the way young girls behaved toward him when they were filming the movie in New York last year.

“The cards they were writing! Girls are crazy about him. He’s just so lovable,” she says.

The actor who most comes to mind watching Biggs in “Loser,” though, is Dustin Hoffman. He certainly was in Heckerling’s mind, as she included a sequence of the character, alone and depressed, with Simon and Garfunkel’s “Scarborough Fair”--a homage to “The Graduate,” the film that turned Hoffman into a leading man despite his not being exactly the Robert Redford type, just as Biggs isn’t the Brad Pitt type.

“The Graduate” “wasn’t just a career maker, but an archetype maker--’Oh! The little Jewish guy! That’s the one we all like!’ ” says Heckerling. “[Hoffman] goes to the fraternity house to look for the girl, and there’s a bunch of blond, boring guys.”

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Whatever screaming girls are thinking of Biggs, directors seem to be willing to give him a chance to show some range. In addition to “Boys and Girls” and “Loser,” Biggs has just finished shooting a small but key role alongside Christina Ricci in “Prozac Nation,” based on Elizabeth Wurtzel’s best-selling memoir of her manic-depressive days, and he is now filming a co-starring spot in “Saving Silverman.”

It’s a well-rounded batch of films. “Boys” and “Silverman” are more or less in the coming-of-age comedy neighborhood of “Pie”; “Loser” mixes a lot of drama with its comedy; and “Prozac Nation” is a very heavy drama. It’s a slate that’s convincing enough for Entertainment Weekly to pick Biggs and “Loser” co-star Mena Suvari (who was in “American Pie” and Oscar-winner “American Beauty”) as two to watch among the new generation of acting talent in its recent “It” issue.

So maybe there is life after “Pie.” Well, Sean Penn transcended his introduction to the public at large as stoner Spicoli in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” didn’t he?

Biggs identifies two other actors as role models, both of whom have also overcome potentially limiting introductions to the public to hit Oscar-winning heights: Robin Williams, who started as TV’s Mork from Ork, and Tom Hanks, first seen by most people in drag on the sitcom “Bosom Buddies.”

Heckerling has no problem envisioning a Hoffman-like career for Biggs--and her opinion definitely has value. In fact, it was she who cast Penn in “Fast Times,” which stands as a landmark film for the exposure it gave to an impressive ensemble of young, then-unheralded actors, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, Phoebe Cates, Forest Whitaker and Judge Reinhold.

She did it again five years ago with “Clueless,” another finger-on-the-pulse-of-youth-culture movie that provided breakthrough opportunities for Alicia Silverstone, Paul Rudd and Brittany Murphy.

With “Loser,” she was ready to give up on her search for the right actor to play earnest, put-upon Paul Tannek. She needed someone worthy of her “Fast Times” and “Clueless” legacy, as well as someone who could help the Columbia Pictures film, reportedly made for less than $30 million, stand apart from the glut of coming-of-age films.

“I was looking and looking and looking,” she says. “I was thinking that maybe this movie shouldn’t be made. Maybe the right person isn’t out there now. When he came in, I was so relieved.”

Heckerling was willing to essentially turn the script she’d written over to him to anchor a cast including Suvari and Greg Kinnear. Biggs is in nearly every frame of the movie.

“There’s nothing to cut away to,” Heckerling says. “It’s him. But I was completely confident. I knew wherever my mind would go that he could bring a lot to it and it would be OK, which is a very liberating feeling.”

It was just as liberating for Biggs. As “American Pie” started making its rounds--even before it was a pop culture phenomenon--Biggs started receiving an endless stream of teen coming-of-age comedy scripts.

“I could cash in on ‘American Pie,’ ” he says. “I’ve gotten, for the most part, comedies; some scripts where [the character is] older, but they want to capitalize on the younger side of my comic abilities.”

Biggs’ manager, Peter Kiernan, recalls that “we saw every teen gross-out, slap-sticky script, basically wanting him to play the same guy. I think there’s some element of the public that wants to see that again, but you can’t keep doing that. . . . I look at it as trying to leave all the doors open. That’s what doing ‘Prozac Nation’ is about. If there’s a director doing a movie who needs a little more depth and wants to know if he can do more than the broad comedy, he can see those scenes.”

“Loser” does include a lot of physical comedy--something Biggs says he loves doing. But it also offered a chance to show the wider range he developed in such pre-”Pie” work as the Broadway play “Conversations With My Father” and a short-lived Steven Bochco TV series, “Total Security.”

“It was exciting for me,” he says of taking the “Loser” duty. “I know it was a weight I was ready to bear. I’m hesitant to call it my movie, but it’s definitely not an ensemble the way ‘American Pie’ is. It’s my story. But with Amy, I knew I was in good hands and I was ready to take on the responsibility. She let me know she had the confidence all the time, and I wanted to be her ‘Loser’ since the moment I read the script. I knew exactly how I wanted to play this character.

“ ‘Boys and Girls’ and ‘American Pie’ were more me, maybe, more goofiness. But this was the first character I got to play, this loser, this outcast. It was fun and a challenge.”

That, says Kiernan, was more important to the choice of this film than it being a chance for Biggs to be the star.

“If you look at people who had careers you want to follow, very rarely do they take films that are supposed to be star vehicles,” he says. “They just build up a great body of work, and over time the star thing happens.”

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Biggs has changed his look from the “Pie” guy--he’s trimmed down, buffed out a bit. He still has that doe-eyed vulnerability, but he’s physically closer to the Hollywood norm than he was before. It’s not as calculated as it looks, he insists.

“I’ve grown up a couple of years,” he says. “And right before ‘American Pie’ came out, I moved out here [to Santa Monica]. I went from getting home-cooked meals at home to eating garbage and not exercising. And I realized that I had always wanted to take advantage of the beautiful weather out here and do things like mountain bike and snowboard and run, which I wouldn’t normally do in New Jersey.

“I can run on the beach and bike in the Santa Monica Mountains. It was something I started for fun, not to lose weight. That wasn’t my goal, but the weight came off and it was a nice bonus and I’ve tried to maintain it.”

It seems that all things have come as easily and naturally to Biggs as his weight loss. And the fact that his first movie became a youth culture hit and a year later he was holding down a movie on his own fits smoothly into his resume.

Biggs has been performing since he was 5, starting out as a model for boys’ apparel in catalogs and print ads. His mother had decided to take his big sister into New York to pursue that kind of work, and Biggs just slid into it as well. Soon he was doing voice-overs for TV commercials as well.

And when he was 12, he auditioned for and got the co-starring role in the stage drama “Conversations With My Father.” With Judd Hirsch as the father, the play debuted in Seattle, where Biggs and his mother moved temporarily, and went straight to Broadway.

That’s a pretty heady thing for a young man: to have his first stage experience--with a demanding role--go to Broadway.

“This was my first big thing and it was very exciting,” he says. “Judd Hirsch took me under his wing and taught me so much--kind of my acting mentor.”

Between the Seattle and Broadway runs, Biggs also got his first TV work as a student in the short-lived Fox sitcom “Drexel’s Class.” And after the play’s run, he got a regular spot on the soap opera “As the World Turns.”

Balancing high school and acting meant sacrificing some social life, he says, but he continued to go to a public school, and says that his parents (his mother is a pediatric nurse, his father manages a shipping office) always kept his head level and his feet on the ground.

“I never touched any of the money I made from acting,” he says. “If I wanted gas money, I had to work for it. I worked in retail, worked at a Subway, did chores around the house even though I was on ‘As the World Turns.’ ”

To what does he attribute his ability to move to the head of the class throughout his career?

“My poise and maturity,” he says with poise and maturity. “It’s an adult world out there, and in order to succeed at a young age, you have to have some sort of poise and maturity and be able to hold your own with adults. I get that from my parents. I get that from starting in the business at 5 and getting rejected, learning to deal with that at an early age is something not many 5-year-olds are supposed to deal with.”

Today Biggs finds himself among a class of young, seasoned veterans, including most of the cast of “American Pie,” looking ahead to the next phase of their careers.

“It’s very exciting,” he says. “There’s Chris Klein and Mena and Sean Scott all from ‘American Pie.’ And Freddie [Prinze] and the television crossovers--Sarah [Michelle Gellar] and the ‘Dawson’s Creek’ gang.”

But it’s also very uncertain terrain. Prinze, for example, seemed as hot as any new face in films after “She’s All That,” but with “Wing Commander” and the recent “Boys and Girls,” he’s hit a cold streak. James Van Der Beek of “Dawson’s Creek” made a successful slide to film with “Varsity Blues” but hasn’t made any significant impact since. And the teen field in general seems to have suffered from burn-out.

Heckerling is betting on Biggs to break out of the mold.

“If I was him, I would look in every direction,” she says. “Very few people can deliver the comedy and also be completely realistic and dramatic--do things that are either based on the humor or the sexiness or charisma. He has all that to fall back on.”

And where does Biggs see himself among that crowd?

“Um, I don’t know,” he says, haltingly. “I mean, I’m hesitant to compare myself to other actors.”

But he’s confident about transcending career stagnation.

“Those of us who are able to add some variety will be the ones that maybe will make it a little longer. There’s a lot of us out there. How many of us will be making movies 20 years from now? I don’t know. How many of us will be able to make long careers out of this? I don’t know.”