Tim Daly, ‘The Skeptic’

Those rumors about a horribly aging portrait in Tim Daly’s attic can be put to rest. Finally, in his early 50s, the actor looks over 30. The star of “Private Practice” is cool and calm, and when it comes to his new independent horror film, “The Skeptic,” surprisingly open about himself.

Writer-director Tennyson Bardwell (“You couldn’t make that name up,” Daly says) offered the actor the lead, an ambitious lawyer who experiences horrifying events he can’t explain, in a letter to his agent.

“I guess I was his choice, which I thought was interesting because so many of the psychological elements of the movie were things that I had experienced or knew about,” says the actor. And that’s not necessarily a good thing.

The setup is par for the genre: Buttoned-down Bryan Becket inherits a house that may be haunted. The central question is whether the strange events are supernatural, figments of a collapsing mind, or both. Where “The Skeptic” changes course is that as Becket begins unearthing the bones of secrets buried in the house’s past, he starts unexpectedly finding his own teeth marks on them.

“One of the things that I share with Bryan Becket is this hole in my childhood memory,” Daly says. “There’s about five years of my life that’s virtually gone. I’ve thought about it a lot and I’ve come to the conclusion that it might be for my own protection that those memories are gone, and maybe I don’t want to dredge up those things.”

Daly, who seems as unflappable as his screen personas in the likes of “Diner” or “Private Practice,” says he has been having enlightening conversations with one of his sisters.

“She tells me stuff about my childhood -- she’s sort of the family historian -- and I am just shocked. It’s wild. It’s really like having amnesia,” he says. “So when I read the script, I just got it. Maybe other people wouldn’t believe that you could lose your memory that way or have your mind do something to protect you from whatever pain you’re going through, but I believe it because I lived it.

“Tennyson couldn’t have known that about me in a million years, so it was interesting that he thought that I should play that guy who has so many dark corners. Clearly, Bryan’s a haunted man. Whether it’s actual or not, he’s haunted by his demons.”

Daly is hardly a true believer in the paranormal but knows he doesn’t know it all.

“I’m generally skeptical of things and yet I’ve had experience with things I have no way of explaining. I’ve had -- I don’t really know how to describe them, except moments of ‘extrasensory perception’ of some sort. I’ve also had sort of a ‘white light’ moment,” he says.

Another major point of appeal was the designed ambiguity of the movie’s ending, which forces audiences to question some of their own assumptions. It’s the kind of non-black-and-white finale, fading into the obscurity of a lack of light rather than switching on or off, that Hollywood abhors. And it’s an indie sensibility that Daly loves.

“It’s ironic, really, because I’ve spent the bulk of my career making my living in a very commercial realm: network television. And yet my sensibilities,” says the still-all-American-looking actor as he chuckles, “don’t necessarily line up with how I pay my rent.”

For instance, rather than buy into the reflexive pop-psych mantra that facing one’s demons is a freeing, strengthening experience, the film is, well, skeptical of that assumption.

Daly refers to one of the film’s moments of revelation, which was “a little scary to me because things start to flood in on Bryan. For people like me, who have blocked out a chunk of their past, you wonder -- if you open that door, if you walk into that room of your memories, what will happen? Will it destroy you or will it make you stronger?

“I don’t know.”

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Where you’ve seen him

Tim Daly’s first screen appearance was at age 10, in a television mounting of Henrik Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People” starring his father, James Daly. He was one of the guys in Barry Levinson’s “Diner” (1982, “I’ll hit you so hard, I’ll kill your whole family.”). He starred in the sitcom “Wings” from 1990-1997, and is now dreamy acupuncturist Dr. Pete Wilder on “Private Practice.” Three of his favorite roles, though, were either limited or little seen: “The Sopranos” -- “My death on that show came from nowhere, it was shocking”; “Almost Grown” -- “Another show I did with David Chase, was a character actor’s dream because on any given show, I played between age 17 and 40”; the detective show “Eyes” -- “I just loved that character because he was morally ambiguous and sort of accidentally ethical.” Daly is also co-president of the nonpartisan arts advocacy organization the Creative Coalition.