Computer in movie

While most up-and-coming actors assume any number of hyphenates to pay their way to fame--model, waiter, and personal trainer, to name a (legal) few--Dallas Roberts took a path less predictable. "I was an all-purpose Macintosh herd," explains the 34-year-old performer, who tuned up computers before landing his big-screen breakthrough opposite Colin Farrell and Robin Wright Penn in the new Michael Cunningham-scripted drama, A Home at the End of the World.

Dallas, strangely enough, was born in Houston and caught the acting bug in the second grade when he played a mouse in Cinderella. He studied drama in high school but became serious, he recalls, only after a community-college teacher suggested "acting was more than just memorizing lines." That idea carried him through four years of Juilliard and nearly a decade of Off-Broadway theater that culminated in last year's New York revival of Lanford Wilson's Burn This.

Upcoming plans for Roberts include supporting performances in next year's HBO film The Ballad of Bettie Page as well as in Walk the Line, a Johnny Cash biopic in which he plays legendary record producer Sam Phillips. And then there's the baby that New York-based Roberts and girlfriend Christine Jones are expecting in October. "The kid's gonna pop out, and he's gonna have a hungry belly," he laughs. "And either his dad will make money pretending he's someone else, or fixing computers."

Lewis Beale is a regular contributor to Interview.