Phillippe soldiers on

“YOU felt like a monster,” says Ryan Phillippe, describing how he felt barging into Muslim homes on Ramadan, one of the holiest holidays. “We were there in full gear, with these assault rifles, on what’s akin to their Christmas. We were barging into people’s actual homes to shoot those scenes. I felt incredibly uncomfortable and ashamed at the time.”

They weren’t really looking for insurgents in Morocco, which was doubling for Iraq, just acting. For his role in “Stop-Loss,” directed by Kimberly Peirce (“Boys Don’t Cry”), Phillippe spent a lot of time talking to soldiers, studying soldiers, and acting like a soldier. The 33-year-old actor plays a young Texan who’s served two tours in Iraq and, just as he thinks he’s getting out, gets stop-lossed -- or ordered back for a third tour, against his will. Of the recent spate of Iraq war films, it’s the first one that directly addresses the young soldiers on the ground and the fear and conflict they face fighting a war in which they’ve lost faith.

The loss-of-faith part wasn’t hard for Phillippe. “I can’t wait for [this war] to be over, and our troops to be home,” he says. “We’re occupying a territory we don’t belong in. We’re there under [grounds] that were not truthful or warranted.” That’s different than how he feels about WWII, where his grandfather served and where he’d have happily gone if called.

In a way he was called. Phillippe, a onetime blue-collar kid from Delaware, still looks as young as a college student, and he’s recently played a lot of young men caught up in the machinations of the military-industrial complex. Clint Eastwood’s “Flags of Our Fathers” opens with a young Phillippe hurtling around in the darkness of Iwo Jima like a cornered rat -- fear flickering across his moon-shaped face. In “Crash,” he’s a rookie cop watching his racist partner with quiet dismay, before tumbling almost by accident into his own dark side. In “Breach,” Phillippe plays a young CIA analyst sent undercover to take down double agent Robert Hanssen.

TWENTY years ago, any of these parts would have been played by Tom Cruise, who specialized in brash American youth, as cocky as a superpower nation during the heyday of Ronald Reagan. Given America’s shaky sense of itself, Phillippe has a different ratio of arrogance to vulnerability. In these performances, he’s a manly-enough guy who dutifully wants to do the right thing, though the pathway is hard to find. His tumult is internal. He thinks and observes -- his brain whirs away as his innocence is slowly shredded.

Phillippe didn’t plan this sojourn into playing young men struggling with authority and themselves -- but that’s the way the parts fell, particularly after a career-making role in “Crash,” the polarizing Oscar winner for best picture. And going forward, he says, with a laugh, “I’m done with suits, and uniforms, and the government.”

IN person, Phillippe looks less like an earnest young man ready to enlist; he’s more the sophisticated Angeleno, dressed in slacks, a smoky-colored T-shirt and a cap. He never went to college but has the brimming curiosity of an autodidact. He recently spent the writers strike writing a script in his home office -- which he’s decked out to look like a “post-apocalyptic Oval Office,” complete with a copy of the rug with the official seal (he ordered from a White House website), a print of George Washington, an American flag juxtaposed against a black flag, and a funky metal desk.

Despite having appeared in 30-odd films, Phillippe the leading man is in some strange way a newbie in the public eye. He’s suffered from what one might call the Nicole Kidman syndrome, where a talented person’s entire identity gets dwarfed by the fame of their spouse, until the moment the marriage fails, and suddenly the haze lifts. Until Phillippe’s marriage to Reese Witherspoon ended in 2006, almost every article written about him focused primarily on his relationship with his celebrated wife. The couple and their two children were catnip for the paparazzi. Now Phillippe’s out on his own for the first time in a decade, and there’s a dollop of hard-won wariness in what appears to be genuine sweetness.

He didn’t work for a year and a half after the split. “It was hard to make that [his career] seem important enough to spend my time on. . . . Now, I’m out of the woods and ready to focus and ready to create and excited about that. I feel a lot more OK than I did. This time last year, I was a wreck.”

PHILLIPPE had wanted to be an actor ever since he was a 13-year-old and saw Paul Newman in “Cool Hand Luke.” “Paul Newman is this amazing-looking man, this manly man, and he gets this telegram in jail that his mother has died. . . . He goes and picks up this little banjo, sits on his bunk, and plays ‘Plastic Jesus.’ I remember how hard that hit me. How does this guy find this emotion? It’s not real, but he’s making it real.” Phillippe went to the library and got out books on acting -- Stanislavsky, Uta Hagen, and tomes on Method acting.

The son of a chemical technician and a home day-care provider, Phillippe attended a Christian school with no drama department. He didn’t get much of a chance to act, though he played soccer and apparently got a black belt in tae kwon do. He did spend a lot of time with little kids -- about 11 of them who came to his mom’s day-care. “I loved working with them. I taught so many kids how to swim, helped them with potty training. I’d make videos and do little movies with them. I always loved it. By the time I had my first kid, I was only 23 . . . but it was so second nature to me.”

BEFORE that happened, however, he was discovered by an agent while getting his hair cut, landed a role as a gay teenager on the soap “One Life to Live,” and began his Hollywood career in earnest, mostly as a teen star in such films as “I Know What You Did Last Summer” and “Cruel Intentions,” a teenage version of “Dangerous Liaisons,” starring both Witherspoon and Gen-Y scream queen Sarah Michelle Gellar.

He and Witherspoon did have their two children young -- at least by Hollywood standards. And it’s clear that responsibility often sets Phillippe apart from some of his contemporaries.

“I finished the press junket [for ‘Stop-Loss’] on Saturday,” says Phillippe. “I had the kids [that night]. I was exhausted. I had literally done 70 interviews that day. My jaw muscles hurt. I thought, ‘My poor kids. I’m going to go home and want to be a mute.’

“Yet, you walk in the door and see their faces and find the energy. I made dinner. All the guys I saw on the press junket, they said, We’re going to go out and drink and this and that, and cut to me, and I’m cuddling my two kids, watching ‘Nancy Drew.’ The entire ‘Nancy Drew,’ and there is something really beautiful to me about that.”

Having the kids, Ava, 8, and Deacon, 4, has provided real comfort during the times when the tabloids have targeted Phillippe, particularly during the breakup from Witherspoon. “[My children] only care about who you are in reference to them, and there being love and protection from you.

“I will get down occasionally about the things they write or say about you, or being hounded by the photographers. There is so much ugliness and negativity fed by the Internet. [My children] do become a kind of solace,” Phillippe says.

“It makes all those other things mean so little and melt away.”

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rachel.abramowitz@latimes.com