Much is made of the ways actors suffer for their art: losing teeth or gaining weight to get deeper into character, insisting on being addressed by their character's name on the set, living their roles on and off the set, kissing or faking love-making with nasty co-stars.
When the gifted, richly versatile Taiwanese director, Ang Lee, assembled his bright young cast for the American Civil War drama, Ride With the Devil, he told them not to wash or shave during the shoot, to rough it like the 19th century Bushwhackers they play.
"I don't bathe that much anyway, so it was kinda neat to have no one else doing it," Skeet Ulrich declared when we met after the movie's premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. "I'm not a big fan of showers, for some reason. There always seems to be something else to do instead. I realised very early on in life that there's only two types of jobs - for those who shower before and for those who shower after. I guess I stray from both those categories and don't shower at all. It's just the way we live. I live in the country in a house built in 1851 and it has no heating, no air-conditioning, no insulation."
However, the role did entail some suffering for Skeet, in the form of the long mane he had to wear throughout the shoot. "It was made of extensions which were glued on," he explains, "and there were these little glue-balls that were right up against the scalp and itched all the time and made it really difficult to sleep. "It made me hot and very uncomfortable and it was a real pain in the ass, but they were right for the character because these guys used to sleep outdoors and their hair got full of grime. There was another way of doing it, which was to weave in the extensions, but I guess Ang wanted us to feel the way the guys we played would have felt. So yes, I suppose you could say I suffered for our art!"
Based on Daniel Woodrell's novel, Woe to Live On, the drama of Ride With The Devil unfolds in 1861, on the Kansas-Missouri border while the official military campaigns are being fought miles away and the pro-Southern Bushwhackers engage in guerrilla warfare on the back roads and across the countryside. Often posing as Union soldiers to deceive and entrap their foes, these men are mostly young and inexperienced and the focus of the film is on two of them.
One (Tobey Maguire) is the son of a poor German immigrant and the other (Skeet Ulrich) is his friend since childhood, the son of a wealthy Missouri plantation owner. Taking refuge from the harsh winter, the two friends become involved, in turn, with a young widow (played by singer Jewel in a likeable film debut).
The contemporary resonances of this thoughtful anti-war drama are evident throughout, although never emphasised with any heavy-handedness, and the movie proves as powerful in its superbly staged action sequences as it is touching in its quieter moments. "Certainly the relationships in the story really spoke to me," says Ulrich. "The quest for individual freedom was something I really understood. And to get to work with Ang Lee was, of course, another attraction. I thought it was really beneficial for the film that the director wasn't from America. Ang brought a clean perspective to a subject that I had a biased opinion about and, I'm sure, most other Americans had.
"Being Southern, it was easy for me to key into the story. I can understand fighting for your property because we live in Virginia now and we have land and, if someone tried to take it from me, I'd fight for it until I was dead. To me the Civil War is not a cut-- issue. From my point of view we didn't stray north and attack them, so it was interesting to play a character who shared that view."
Shooting in Missouri and Kansas, Ulrich became acutely aware of the tensions that still exists between the two states. "I noticed that rivalry is still there in their football games," he says. "There seems to be something tied over from the Civil War. One extra on the set was a lady from Kansas and she talked about how much they still hate Missourians. And we talked to some people from Missouri and they feel just as passionately."
But it's hardly a peculiarly American phenomenon. "Sure, it's not," he says, "But in the case of your country it's more recent. I know it goes back hundreds of years, but there's been a lot more recent incidents in Ireland. In the US all this goes back over 150 years - to one conflict."
He was bemused by the 200 "Civil War re-enactors" who enthusiastically worked as extras on the movie. "They actually turned up dressed in all in the right costumes," he says. "I got to train with some of them before we started shooting. So many people have a total fascination with that period, and I can understand that. Bull Run is 15 minutes up the street from me, and there's a cliff where they ran a thousand Union members off it and I see that cliff every time I go to the airport.
"There's a lot of history about the property where my wife and I live. There were a lot of Civil War skirmishes on our land and there's a graveyard there where two Civil War vets are buried. It's all so much part of their roots for people living on the land, so I can see why so many guys get involved in the re-enactments. "Did you know that some women do it, too? One woman I know says she did her research and discovered that women dressed up as men to fight in the Civil War. She goes to the re-enactments dressed as a man, with her hair up under her cap and wearing a fake moustache. They're an interesting bunch of people. I don't know if I could devote my life to re-enactments. Then again, I guess I do, in a way. But not one re-enactment over and over."
Named Bryan Ray after his birth, Ulrich was nicknamed Skeet as a schoolboy when a baseball coach commented on how small and swift he was, like a mosquito. When Skeet was 10 years old doctors discovered he had a heart defect and he underwent surgery which explains the winding scar on his chest when he's shirtless on screen.
While studying marine biology at theUniversity of North Carolina in Wilmington, he funded his education by working as an extra on movies shooting at the production studios in town - among them Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (a brief appearance as a thug in the first few minutes), Chattahoochee, Everybody Wins and Black Rainbow.
Bitten by the acting bug he enrolled in classes and appeared in productions of The Diary of Anne Frank and Hedda Gabler. He then switched to theatre studies, transferring to New York University's acting programme under David Mamet and joining Mamet's Atlantic Theatre Company. The tall, brown-eyed young actor was regular confused with Johnny Depp, which he believes was more a hindrance than a help as the roles started rolling in and he inched his way up the credits of Boys, Last Dance, The Craft, Scream, Albino Alligator, Touch, As Good As It Gets and The Newton Boys.
Ulrich has completed two movies since making Ride With the Devil. Recently released to indifferent reviews in the US, The Chill Factor marks his debut in the action movie genre. "I'd like to try another action film," he says. "That one didn't work out critically or at the box-office, but that doesn't take away from the fact that I enjoyed the experience. Obviously it's not a film made for artistic reasons, but in terms of challenging yourself, I'd say it was harder than doing Ride With the Devil, as ironic as that sounds, because you're not given a lot, there's no character development, no interesting ideas - this makes it tougher.
In Takedown, which opens in the spring, Ulrich plays Kevin Mitnick, a computer hacker he believes was set up by the FBI. "He didn't want the film made at all," Ulrich says. "He was totally against it, as were quite a few other people. We got picketed all the time.
"They kinda picked on me because I was playing him. I knew my phone conversations were being listened to and why my emails weren't working. Just wait till he gets out of jail! That's what I'm afraid of. Even though I believe he was set up and the film is doing him a favour. But all these rumours got out about the film." On the Internet? "Yeah," Ulrich replies ruefully.
He is now co-starring with Gary Oldman in Anasazi Moon, written by David Seltzer, who's also directing it. "It's about two best friends who grow up together in an orphanage," he says. "Later, when we flee from jail, we get split up and are about to meet in this place. Along the way to there I find a baby in a car wreck and the baby has survived. The film is about how this baby changes the two men and the entire trailer park community they wind up in. Then my character has to face the responsibility towards the child and even though he loves the kid, he has to decide if this is the life it should be raised in."
"It's kinda funny to be working with Gary Oldman. Back when I was doing extra work to make money, ever before I started acting, I was an extra in a film he was in - Chattahoochee. And I bummed a cigarette from him when we were shooting across from each other at Sony, when he was doing Air Force One and I was working on As Good As It Gets. I don't know if he even remembers seeing me."
Skeet Ulrich, who will be 30 in January, is married to the Welsh actress, Georgina Cates, who made her debut in the Dublin-made An Awfully Big Adventure and returned to Ireland to make Frankie Starlight. They met two years ago when they played lovers in the Vietnam drama, A Soldier's Sweetheart, recently released on video here, and they live on their 500-acre property in Virginia.
"She loves it there," he says. "Her family came over and she says Virginia is a lot like Wales. I've never been there so I can't say. She took to Virginia right away and the lifestyle - the privacy, the freedom, and cultivating your own piece of property. It's hippy, it's a very hippy lifestyle."
She has decided to quit movies, he says: "She couldn't stand it. She's been studying photography for a couple of years and she's actually had a few offers to do books. She's loving that. She's much more passionate about photography than she ever was about film. It does wear on you after a while. I remember David Mamet making one of his cryptic comments to me. He said that the reason older actors are so good that they're too tired to give a damn anymore. I think that's very true."
Ride with the Devil, directed by Ang Lee opened yesterday at cinemas nation-wide