My heart of darkness

THERE'S a quiet intensity that hovers around Matt Dillon, even when he seems at his most relaxed, lying across a sofa in Galway's Harbour Hotel. Yet Dillon feels at home in west Ireland's party town, where he was guest of honour at last month's Galway Film Festival. He is at his ease mainly because he is, as he says, "of Irish Catholic stock". He was born in February 1964, the second of six children, to Mary Ellen and Paul Dillon, a New York stockbroker.

His black jeans, jacket and T-shirt complement the dark features and heavy brooding brow, the face a little fuller compared with the one we remember from his callow youth in the early Eighties, when he was cast as the thug next door in films such as The Outsiders and Rumble Fish. Since his days as a teen idol, the 41-year-old actor has had a habit of disappearing off the movie radar. But 2005 is proving his renaissance. We may have witnessed a few old, reconstructed faces resurfacing this year - in particular Mickey Rourke (who also starred in 1983's Rumble Fish) in Sin City - but Dillon is this year's comeback king with three wildly differing high- profile films.

It's doubtful that any screen actor has made such an eclectic series of choices in quick succession, including his enjoyable panto villain race-car driver in Herbie: Fully Loaded. But it is as a racist Los Angeles cop in Paul Haggis's Crash and, later this year, as the reprobate in Charles Bukowski's Factotum, that he comes into his own. "I'm drawn to play characters who have an edge," says Dillon.

In Crash, a collection of disparate characters collide over two days in the ethnic melting pot of Los Angeles. In a film essentially about race and prejudice, Dillon plays Sergeant Ryan, an unsympathetic LAPD cop who harasses a black Hollywood director (Terrence Dashon Howard) and his wife (Thandie Newton).

Among a blue-chip cast, including Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle and Brendan Fraser, Dillon stands out as the centrifugal force in a dextrous, multi-layered drama. One of the most mature and sociallyrealistic US films of the year, Crash has performed well in a summer box office of comic-book blockbusters.

"I've experienced the aggressive tactics of the LAPD myself,"` says Dillon.

"When I was 14, I was arrested for jaywalking. So when I read Crash, I thought, 'okay, let's shed some light on what these people do'."

At the same age, Dillon was talentspotted while truanting from high school, and flown to LA to make his screen debut as a school bully in Over The Edge.

His breakthrough came with The Outsiders and Rumble Fish. Both directed by Francis Ford Coppola, the teen-gang films served as the launch pad for a remarkable collection of new talent, including Tom Cruise, Rob Lowe, Mickey Rourke and Patrick Swayze. But as the others raced towards superstardom, Dillon slipped into inferior rom- coms. It wasn't until he played a junkie in 1989's Drugstore Cowboy that he regained credibility.

His role as a vagrant in 1993's The Saint Of Fort Washington established him as a maturing actor and in To Die For he unveiled comedic talent as Nicole Kidman's dim husband. He also shone as the sleazy detective in There's Something About Mary.

He co-wrote, directed and starred in City Of Ghosts, which was given a limited release in 2002, but earned plaudits for an impressive directorial debut. "Directing City Of Ghosts was the highlight of my career," he says.

"I've been developing a couple of directing projects, but things will happen when the time is right."

. Crash opens tomorrow. Herbie: Fully Loaded is on general release.

SEE FILM REVIEWS: PAGE 23

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