Prison Break

Prison was his breakout

New York Times News Services

It's good to be bad. In a 20-year career actor Robert Knepper has played everything from Julia Roberts' husband in Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You (1996) to Robert F. Kennedy in Jackie, Ethel, Joan: The Women of Camelot (2001). But he didn't become famous until he created a murderous, racist pedophile named Theodore (T-Bag) Bagwell on the television series Prison Break.

Since then, oozing charm and menace in equal amounts, Knepper has captured audiences worldwide. Not only is he starring in a big Hollywood film, Hitman, opening tomorrow, but also he is rumored to be playing the next Bond villain, co-starring with Hugh Jackman in the X-Men spinoff Wolverine and starring in a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963).

What a difference a sneer makes. Four months before becoming television's baddest dude, the 48-year-old Knepper feared that he would have to give up acting to support his wife and 5-year-old son.

"I tried to get a job teaching theatre at UCLA, but I didn't have the right credentials," he says by telephone from his Dallas home. "I did get an offer from UCLA Extension, but it only paid $50 a week. I thought to myself, 'What else do I love? Nature.'

"I scrubbed toilets and dog cages for my dad (a veterinarian) when I was a kid," the actor says. "I was his right-hand man. So I drove up to Will Rogers Park to put in an application as a park ranger. I figured that I'd be able to support my family, I'd get on the State of California insurance program and we'd survive. But they never called me."

Meanwhile the producers of Prison Break were looking for, as Knepper puts it, "a 240-pound, stupid Southern hick with a gold tooth and tattoos" to play a convict named T-Bag. Didn't sound promising for Knepper, who is a slim 5-foot-9 and sounds like George Clooney when he isn't putting on a Southern drawl, but he saw possibilities. When he went in to audition, he threw them a curve ball.

"I wanted to charm the pants off them," Knepper says. "It's like, when you go out on a date, you don't say over the first drink, 'Wanna go home and (screw)?' How far would you get that way? Or 'Here's what's wrong with me.' You don't talk about negative stuff -- if you want to get beyond first base, you've got to charm. For me it comes naturally, because I am more interested in other people."

He got the part, and then had to convince himself that he could do it.

"The first season I took a pen and put 'xoxoxo' around the middle finger of my left hand," he says. "(I thought) 'If I can just feel tough, I'll be OK.' So I put that ring finger on, 'Love and kisses, love and kisses, f--k you,' to give people the finger."

It worked. Knepper's portrayal of T-Bag was one of the most talked-about performances of 2005, and two years later audiences still seem to love the character, even though he's the kind of psycho who will kidnap the woman he loves and slaughter the veterinarian who reattached his severed hand.

The worse T-Bag gets, the actor says, the better people like him.

"I'm not saying that girls are throwing themselves at me," Knepper says slyly, "but I'm finally seeing firsthand that the girls like the bad boys."

Knepper is having fun with T-Bag, but he's also seeing past the role that finally made him a star.

"When you're in a part that catches on fire," he says, "people want you to play the same part in something else. Ludacris wanted me to do a video where I'd play a pedophile. You've got to be crazy! I need an antidote to this, or I'll be known as T-Bag for the rest of my life."

Hence Hitman, based on the popular video game in which he plays a Russian bureaucrat named Yuri, with Timothy Olyphant as the hitman and Dougray Scott as the Interpol cop trying to catch him.

"My guy used to be KGB," Knepper says. "Now he's head of the FSB. You think he's just a guy going after the hitman too, but the plot has all these twists and turns. There's a lot of corruption going on."

But for know he's still recognized as T-Bag.

"When I get my Oscar someday, I'll thank Prison Break," Knepper says. "It's what started this whole new chapter for me. I remember very clearly the day people started knowing my name: At first I would get comments like, 'Hey, you look a lot like that guy on Prison Break.'" Then it was, 'Are you T-Bag?' Then, 'My God, you're T-Bag!' Finally I was in New York at Christmas, shopping for a ski jacket for my boy, and the clerk said, 'Just a minute, Mr. Knepper."'

So Knepper remains committed to Prison Break, now shooting its third season in Texas, even as big-screen opportunities open up. And so far the show remains committed to him, though the writers have long since established their willingness to kill off series regulars.

"The producers can do anything they want," Knepper says. "They know the love for and the interest in this monster, the fact that people are so intrigued. But, as my dad used to say, 'If you think you're so important, put your finger in a bucket of water, pull it out and see how fast that hole fills up."'

Nevertheless the actor is fond of "the dirty little guy," as he calls him, and looks forward to playing him for some time longer.

"I never judge a character," he says. "I always thought, 'What does he want? Who is he? What made him this way?' Obviously something from his childhood. I have a kid, so I'm not going to say this guy is a good guy, but I understand him."

His performance was modelled on the animals that he grew up with around his father's veterinary practice, he adds.

"I've been bitten by a lot of cats and dogs," Knepper says. "I know how they act.

"All that stuff I can use," he says. "Everything I was going with was animal imagery, a rooster-cock thing with my hair, flicking my tongue like a snake. I've always played him like an animal, not straight or gay. I don't think he cares about that stuff."

Knepper got into acting because of his mother, who handled props for a community playhouse in a rural suburb of Toledo, Ohio.

"I think my dad was secretly thinking I'd take over his veterinarian business," he says, "but Knepper & Son didn't really appeal to me. I love my dad to death, but the light had to shine a little bit on me."

Six years ago he married casting director Tory Herald and his perspective changed.

"I'd always supported myself and done fine," Knepper says, "but the jobs didn't pay much. Finally my wife said, 'You're going to have to get a regular job. We're not making enough money.' For the first time I thought, 'Oh my God, what am I going to do? I can't wait tables again. I did that when I first started."'

Then Prison Break came along and solved his problem -- in the nick of time, because a couple of months into the series the people at Will Rogers Park finally called back about his job application. The park-ranger gig was his if he wanted it.

"I was crying on the phone," Knepper recalls. "I told them, 'I'm so glad you called. Maybe when I get back to Los Angeles, if you need me, I can help you with fundraising."'

Source: The Record