Entertainment

Smooth criminal

Kartheiser, with “In Time” co-stars Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried, plays a shady banker. His “Mad Men” character Pete Campbell is also morally ambiguous.

Kartheiser, with “In Time” co-stars Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried, plays a shady banker. His “Mad Men” character Pete Campbell is also morally ambiguous.

How much do you crave your daily cup of Starbucks java — enough to give up four minutes of your life?

Time is literally money in the new film, “In Time,” in theaters this Friday, which imagines a world in which people have been engineered to stop aging at 25. After that, they die — unless they can get their hands on some more time.

This creates a massive schism between the rich, who control the time and often have eternity at their disposal, and the poor, who give living day-to-day a refreshingly lethal meaning.

Vincent Kartheiser, the actor best known as Pete Campbell on “Mad Men,” plays one of these wealthy men. He controls a bank that safeguards time for its clients, and he must protect it against Justin Timberlake, who is leading a revolt of the time-poor.

“I knew it was topical when I read it because of things that were happening in Libya, Syria, London, Paris,” Kartheiser says. “There will always be haves and have nots, but for the last decade or so it’s been getting lopsided, and people were getting fed up.”

Kartheiser’s banker, Philippe Weis, is given to saying obnoxious things, such as “There’s nothing I can’t buy” and “For a few to be immortal, many must die.” But somehow Kartheiser — who masterfully balances Pete Campbell’s smarm and desperation with genuine earnestness on “Mad Men” — makes him sympathetic.

He gets an extra dose of empathy when Timberlake kidnaps his daughter, played by Amanda Seyfried. “I don’t think of myself as the villain in this,” says Kart-heiser. “My character really believes what he’s talking about. No one ages, so there’s an opportunity for people to live forever if given enough time. So people like [him] are faced with this real dilemma of population control. What’s the fair way to do that? He believes this is the most sensible way.”

Thus what could have been a stereotypical portrayal of an evil overlord becomes imbued with the kindness of a father. Kart-heiser likes playing with the idea that even as he is making the world a miserable place, his character has something that’s appealing.

“You have people on different sides of issues, and I think one of the big things we need in the world right now is the ability to stop demonizing people,” he says. “It’s really important to me that as an actor, I approach characters in a way that gives them an opportunity to be flawed, but also to be right.”