Out of the Batcave and into character

In “Shall We Dance?,” due from Miramax on Friday, Richard Gere plays a happily married husband who yearns for something more. He finds it, secretly, at a dance studio under the watchful eye of Jennifer Lopez.

Susan Sarandon plays Gere’s happily married wife who suspects that he’s having an affair. She turns to a private detective to find out the truth. Happily for her, and for the audience, that role goes to Richard Jenkins.

Jenkins is a character actor who has played more than 60 roles in 20 years and is probably best known for playing the dead head of the Fisher family in the HBO series “Six Feet Under.”

Jenkins stands out in “Shall We Dance?” as a sloppy, cynical investigator. One of the tenderest moments occurs not between husband and wife, but wife and detective, when Sarandon talks about the bittersweet nature of marriage over drinks at a bar. He knows to order her drink without asking, and she admonishes that she hired him to watch her husband, not her. His reply: “It’s hard not to, Mrs. Clark. With all due respect.” And suddenly his character takes on a surprising depth -- he’s not just an oddball private eye, but a man with a yearning of his own.

Jenkins is full of little surprises. Soon after sitting down at an outside table at La Conversation Cafe in West Hollywood, the tall, blue-eyed actor corrected a bio that put his age as 51.

“I’m 57. My manager put that in,” he said, joking that nobody would believe he’s 51, anyway.

He said that when the film’s publicist told him a writer wanted to interview him for The Times, he was genuinely baffled that anyone would care to hear what he had to say.

Jenkins, born and raised in DeKalb, Ill., loved movies but wasn’t sure how to pursue a career in film. He spent his first year at Illinois Wesleyan University as a theater major, sitting silently in the back of the class: “The head of the school called me into his office and said, ‘Who are you? I see your name here, but you haven’t auditioned for any of the plays.’ I said, ‘I don’t know how.’ ”

Moved, the professor gave him work in summer stock. From there Jenkins learned quickly. He met his wife, Sharon, at college, and they moved to Rhode Island in 1970 so he could take a job as an apprentice at Providence’s Trinity Repertory Company. (The couple, married 35 years, have two kids.)

After acting there for 15 seasons, he moved on to film and television work. One of his earliest film roles was as the editor of the town paper in “The Witches of Eastwick.” Since then, he’s played a lot of dads and a lot of “interesting” cops and lawyers. “I don’t mind playing a hundred of them if they’re interesting.”

One such cop was in director David O. Russell’s 1996 comedy, “Flirting With Disaster.” Jenkins played a strait-laced gay detective who gets dosed with LSD to great comic effect. Russell tapped him again for a small but hilarious role written specifically for Jenkins in “I {heart} Huckabees.” He plays the foster father to a young African refugee.

Russell said Jenkins is “great in an ensemble because he’ll play with everybody,” and added that he likes the fact that Jenkins still lives in Rhode Island. “It’s like Batman in the Batcave” being summoned to work.

Other directors have repeatedly summoned Jenkins: the Farrelly brothers, for “There’s Something About Mary” and “Me, Myself & Irene,” and the Coen Brothers, for “The Man Who Wasn’t There” and “Intolerable Cruelty.”

He feels very fortunate to be getting the roles and remembers when he wasn’t quite so in demand. He’s in town filming “Rumor Has It,” in which he plays Jennifer Aniston’s father. After a return to the bat cave, he’ll be back in November to film “Fun With Dick and Jane,” starring Jim Carrey and Tea Leoni.

When asked how he liked the completed “Huckabees” and “Shall We Dance?,” he replied that he hadn’t seen either of them. He makes a point of not watching his movies: “I’m not objective, and it doesn’t do me any good to watch it because I can’t really see it.”

One exception? “Six Feet Under.” “I do watch those,” he said. “I just like the series. And I’m not on it that much anymore.”