He won’t be boxed in

Consider the movie “Short Eyes.”

Shot in 1975 -- the same year actor Freddy Rodriguez was born in Chicago -- and adapted from a play by Lower East Side playwright Miguel Pinero, it dissects the fragile racial ecosystem inside a men’s prison.

It also remains one of the most harrowing movies ever made, filmed with verite ruthlessness by ex-documentarian Robert M. Young with an unknown cast, many of them Latino: Jose Perez; Shawn Elliott; Luis Guzman in his first role; Tito Goya, killed on death row in Austin in 1986; and Pinero, whose liver gave out two years later. Many of them continued to work in film and television, portraying a long litany of stock parts: pimps, criminals, gang members -- generic ethnics meant to service the plot or flesh out the cast.

In a way, Freddy Rodriguez is an heir to such unsung figures. The veteran of more than 25 movies, but best known as Federico “Rico” Diaz on “Six Feet Under,” the Fisher family’s chief embalmer and ultimate business partner, Rodriguez is featured in two current films. “Harsh Times” is an urban thriller in which he is the soul in contention between angelic wife Eva Longoria and Christian Bale, an Iraq war vet haunted by demons. In “Bobby,” which goes into wide release today, he plays a fictionalized version of busboy Juan Romero, whose iconic image cradling the dying Robert F. Kennedy has come to define that historical moment.

“People ask me all the time how I feel about playing stereotypes,” says Rodriguez. “But there is truth to stereotypes. And as long as there’s truth, there are going to be stereotypes in films, and actors who are going to play them. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. But I always felt like my game plan was different. There just needs to be somebody who stands up and says, ‘I’m going to take a stand and not be that dude.’ ”

One industry figure who was receptive was Alan Ball, who prior to his breakthrough with “American Beauty” cast Rodriguez on his abortive television series “Oh, Grow Up” for a four-episode arc. Sitting down to write the “Six Feet Under” pilot, Ball created the part of Rico for Rodriguez -- a detail he failed to share until after the audition.

“I didn’t want to play it with an accent,” says Rodriguez. “I didn’t want his back story to be that he was part of a gang. I just wanted him to be a person -- intelligent, educated -- that anybody with any ethnicity could have played. And Alan respected that.”

Rodriguez was raised in Chicago, the youngest of three sons of first-generation Puerto Rican immigrants. In the early ‘60s, the family settled in Lincoln Park, a predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhood they saw overrun with white rioters during the 1968 Democratic Convention, six months after the assassination of Robert Kennedy.

Growing up, Rodriguez tried his hand at a number of things, including music, dance and hip-hop choreography -- among his early friends were rappers Kanye West, Twister and Common.

“I grew up in this gang-infested, drug-infested area,” recalls the actor. “But I came from a really solid family. My parents are still married to this day -- all my uncles and aunts -- and I’ve been married 11 years.”

With arts programs the first to suffer from fiscal budget cuts in the schools, a nonprofit theater group called the Whirlwind Performance Company organized a progressive 20-week program in his eighth-grade class in which students would write and perform their own plays. When Rodriguez landed the lead, a company member, Carol Gutierrez, impressed upon him that this could represent a career opportunity. Through her intervention, he got his first theatrical agent, received a two-year scholarship for gifted children and was accepted at Chicago’s only public arts high school, where he majored in drama.

Auditioning in Chicago as part of a nationwide talent search for “A Walk in the Clouds,” Alfonso Arau’s period interracial romance set amid the California grape harvest and starring Keanu Reeves, Rodriguez was brought west for a screen test and landed the part. During his week off, his new agents sent him up for Albert and Allen Hughes’ post-Vietnam caper film “Dead Presidents,” where he was cast alongside other newcomers Chris Tucker, Terrence Howard, Bokeem Woodbine and Clifton Collins Jr. He took the second event as a sign from God, moved his wife and 6-month-old child to Los Angeles and never looked back.

“Harsh Times” is David Ayer’s directorial debut -- Charles Dickens by way of Run-DMC -- and thematically similar to his script for “Training Day,” which got Denzel Washington his best actor Oscar. Rodriguez plays the Ethan Hawke role -- a neophyte thrown into the deep end of L.A.’s high-risk pool, whose experience quickly turns into a cautionary tale -- even as his mannered use of “dawg” and “bro” at the end of every line belies a life spent not on the streets, but rather observing it in the front row. But it is in his role in “Bobby,” directed by Emilio Estevez, that the actor’s baby-faced guilelessness and natural empathy combine to their best advantage.

Based rather self-consciously on the ensemble origins of “Grand Hotel” (Anthony Hopkins makes the on-screen comparison), “Bobby” weaves two dozen character strands through the moments leading up to Robert Kennedy’s final campaign stop in the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel, its inexorable conclusion playing up the ensemble drama’s modern legacy -- the disaster film. Working against the clock, the production shot for a day and a half at the actual Ambassador Hotel, which was being physically dismantled around them.

“What was interesting to me when I first saw that photo,” says Rodriguez of the source material that served as a starting point for his character (here named Jose), “was here is the next president of the United States lying on the floor with blood spewing out of his body, and the only person kneeling down next to him is a busboy, of all people. Not one of his aides, not some other adult in the kitchen, but this busboy. That always spoke volumes to me -- that he would have the nobility and courageousness to act in that moment of truth; instead of fleeing or running for cover, he knelt down, spoke to him and put the rosary in his hand.”

Rodriguez will next be seen as a pumped-up, tattooed zombie-hunter and ex-military bad-guy in the Quentin Tarantino-directed half of “Grindhouse,” his upcoming collaboration with filmmaker Robert Rodriguez.