Lots of entertainers give you the big blah-blah about what private people they really are. Makes you wonder how you can find a fat stack of stories about them in which no peccadillo goes unturned. Sheeeessh! That's why actor Will Patton doesn't want to talk about his reticence and reserve: "We've read this a hundred times. I mean all actors talk about how shy they are ... " Difference is: If you look for the usual raft of articles about him, all you come up with is one encyclopedic entry about his career and one story about his reading for books on tape -- a file so thin it makes Kate Moss look like Luciano Pavarotti.

The 41-year-old Mr. Patton is a classic character actor: Moviegoers know the face, but when it comes to the name ... uhh, give me a minute. He's been in "Silkwood," "After Hours," "Desperately Seeking Susan," "The Rapture," "The Client," "Romeo is Bleeding," "Copycat," "Fled" and "Care of the Spitfire Grill."

Anyone who can put the name to the face probably best remembers him for his role in "No Way Out," as the aide to the villainous Gene Hackman. Next, he's the patriarch of the title family in the GenXers-caught-in-the-'50s-film "Inventing the Abbotts." He initially chafed at taking his latest role because he didn't think he was old enough to play the father of daughters already out of high school. Then the casting director convinced him that in 1957, when the movie is set, a man his age could conceivably have full-grown children.

"I wanted to try to do it, because I didn't know how," he says.

As for what generally lures him to a role, he says: "I think there's gotta be something in the story or the character that somehow corresponds to something I'm thinking about at the moment."

Yet, he's vague -- purposely -- about what he means. "Just something that's going on in my life. It could be any number of things. Something that's going on personally, something that I've been thinking about, something that has happened to me," he says. "Personal things that I'm interested in. Which actually I would never talk about in an interview. So that's probably why I would play a character."

Mr. Patton's answer makes clear that he's loathe to relinquish his privacy. On this day, he's arrived wearing a baseball cap and a beard, as incognito as he can be. "I probably would not be able to survive, no matter what I did, without a particularly kind of private life," he says. "I don't know, I think it's just my nature.

"Of course there's the whole thing about what a strange thing to be doing if you're like a private person -- like why would a monk want to have a camera on him for, like, millions of people (to watch him). Strange."

It's at this point he circumspectly acknowledges the contradiction of a public person craving privacy.

When he arrived in New York City years ago, he thought he wanted to be a writer, but people took him seriously for acting. "I didn't know what I was doing," says the actor who won two Obies for his off-Broadway performances in the '80s. And at that time of his life he was "in a lot of trouble" and had little money, working as house painter, construction worker, coal shoveler and Christmas tree salesman.

"I think because people took me seriously as an actor at this really dangerous time of my life, it became my means of survival. And I think if I hadn't grabbed hold of this thing and continued with it at that time which happened to be acting, which happened to be the thing that was working for me, that I probably would have died in the gutter. So acting became my replacement for being in the gutter." And that's why he sticks with it -- "some ancient fear that if I stop I'll die." And he means that quite literally, he assures.

"I was in trouble. I won't go into it too much. ... But that was the main motivating thing. It was a way to live, a way to survive. Crazy way to survive: acting. But that's what I found."

Before moving to New York, he lived in New Orleans mopping oil out of the Mississippi River. "All my clothes smelled like they were gray," he says. Originally from South Carolina, Mr. Patton got kicked out of school and was sent by his minister-father to a special school for the "creatively disturbed" he says, laughing. After graduating with a handpainted diploma with about seven others, he just started traveling around.

And all of those variegated experiences and jobs help him now. "I think it's good to have to struggle. It helps you keep perspective on what's real."

Given that, Mr. Patton -- whose next role will be in Kevin Costner's upcoming science-fiction thriller "The Postman" -- can barely wrap his brain around the upside of ever becoming a hyper-recognizable star. He seems almost flummoxed by the possibilities. After a long pause, he says: "What would be the good of that element of that? I wouldn't mind maybe" -- then pauses again and exhales -- "there's some parts I would like to have.

"But that other part of it, I don't know, what does it do? Get you more girls or something?," he wonders, evoking laughter that says what's wrong with that from a couple of people in the room. "I understand that part of it. More girls, and money to more indulge yourself. A big house in lots of different places."

Still, he thinks that it's good that major stardom isn't something he has to grapple with.

"I think it's been helpful to me, being who I am, to have moved at things the way I have. I think that if things came upon me too fast -- I think I've needed to take my time. I think there're things about me that are still too delicate for an extreme kind of thing like that. I'd like to just work my way to who I am, as opposed to just suddenly have a BIG IDEA OF WHO I AM," he says, getting louder for emphasis. "It's like NOW THERE'S THIS PERSON invented in this public way."

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Actor Will Patton says obscurity has allowed him to develop at his own pace. He plays the patriarch of the title family in "Inventing the Abbotts."