Prison Break

T-Bag's so glad to be bad

"Prison Break" star finds a gold lining in menacing roles

By Nancy Mills
The New York Times Syndicate

Article Last Updated: 11/16/2007 10:58:47 PM MST

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," set to open on Wednesday, 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 theater 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."

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 ...?' 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."'

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 seeing past the role that 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 "Hitman," 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."

How's his Russian accent? So-so, Knepper concedes, but he's not worried.

"If I lose 2 million Russians who will say, 'He's not Russian,"' he says, "I'll get 98 million others who will say, 'He's Russian enough for me.' People tell me I have a Russian look. On the plane back from Stockholm yesterday, the flight attendants came up to me and spoke Swedish."

Apparently they didn't recognize him as T-Bag, which would be the first time in a while.

"When I get my Oscar someday, I'll thank 'Prison Break,"' Knepper says. "It's what started this whole new chapter for me.