Actor's Actor, Meet Fanboys

You know that geek validation has become a serious thing when actor's actor Jason Patric agrees to play his first real villain role in his first comic book movie. The film is the Sylvain White-directed `The Losers,' which Warner Bros. just put into production based on the DC-Vertigo comic. 

Patric has done stellar work in dark, edgy films from `Narc' to `Rush,' but never quite hit that big star level (he might have gotten there had Mel Gibson gotten his wish to cast Patric to play William Wallace in `Braveheart,’  only to find he would not get the financing unless he played the lead himself). He most recently starred in `My Sister's Keeper.' 

Drawn into `The Losers' Joel Silver (who produces with Akiva Goldsman), Patric is cautiously opening himself up to playing the game more than he has in the past. In `The Losers,’ he’s a legendary CIA agent who has gone off the rails and sets up the title characters, a black ops team, to be killed. They vow to return the favor. He stars with Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Chris Evans, Zoe Saldana and Idris Elba. 

`Let’s face it, the geeks have inherited the world, and if you want to be a player in this system, you have to be willing to do some of this,' Patric acknowledged. `That means exposing myself to Comic-Con and the foreign marketplace, stuff I’ve resisted in the past. You can’t resist it now. But I wouldn’t do `The Losers’ if it wasn’t interesting to me as an actor. I can use my voice to help a young director further his talent, that is the main goal. If it allows me to make the kind of adult movies that have become endangered, helped by securing a certain rating with these kids...'

That doesn’t mean that Patric is there to chew the scenery, as some comic book villains are known to do.

`I will never go in with a box of toothpicks, to clean the scenery out of my teeth,' Patric said. `For me, it’s always about behavior that is believable and thematically specific to the character’s situation, even if it’s a genre with a heightened reality.'