THE patented Ben Foster move: Get cast in a minor role, dissolve yourself into it entirely and proceed to steal scenes out from under whichever more-famous actor has the misfortune to be appearing with you.
He did it as Lauren Ambrose’s creepy art-school boyfriend in “Six Feet Under,” and as a teen sociopath in the Bruce Willis film “Hostage.” He made a two-episode role as the mentally handicapped kid on “Freaks and Geeks” painfully poignant, and completely ran off with “Alpha Dog” as a rage-fueled meth addict.
“I’m sure a therapist could have a field day with some of the roles that I’ve played,” he says cheerfully. “F— therapy, shoot a movie!”
Foster’s new movie, “3:10 to Yuma” (Sept. 7), continues the trend, in a way. He’s once again playing second fiddle, this time to Russell Crowe and Christian Bale. But the Sergio Leone-esque poster for the film – directed by James Mangold of “Walk the Line” – seems telling. Its lone icon is Foster, sporting a gun and a brass-buttoned coat, and looking an awful lot like Clint Eastwood back in the day.
Foster’s character, Charlie Prince, is right-hand man to Crowe’s Ben Wade, the charismatic outlaw who always manages to evade capture. As Charlie, Foster’s scary as hell. There’s the crazy-eyes thing, the cold-blooded murder thing, the nearly-sympathetic-in-spite-of-being-almost-pure-evil thing. But, he says, he was really going more for “glam.”
“When I was going over all the archival photos of outlaws, it struck me that they were the rock stars of their time,” he says. “Our brilliant costume designer, who did ‘Hedwig and the Angry Inch,’ and I decided there was an inherent danger and sexuality to Charlie that we wanted to explore. I watched a lot of David Bowie’s ‘Ziggy Stardust.’
“And,” he adds, “a lot of documentaries on wildcats.”
Wildcats. Sure.
“3:10,” a remake of a 1957 film based on an Elmore Leonard short story, is the first time Foster’s really been part of a cast on his level. This may not be the case with his next movie, “30 Days of Night” (Oct. 19), a vampire flick in which he co-stars with Josh Hartnett. (Hardly seems like a fair fight, does it?)
Much to Foster’s chagrin, he doesn’t actually get to sink his teeth into anyone.
“I very much wanted,” he says regretfully, “to play a vampire.”