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NEW YORK -- Some things prevent Dermot Mulroney from becoming a media heat-source like Julia Roberts, his co-star in the romance comedy, My Best Friend's Wedding.
The biggest, and we'll take his word on this, is that he'd make terrible tabloid fodder. "I've been married to the same woman (actress Catherine Keener, his college sweetheart) since 1990. People have said I was going to be famous with this film or that, and the attention isn't something I've worried about. I always assumed with my sterling record, nobody would bother with me."
But he got a taste of attention in Chicago with the filming of My Best Friend's Wedding, in which he plays a guy who breaks the heart of his best friend (Roberts) by announcing he's marrying a rich girl (Cameron Diaz).
Mulroney, 33, an alumnus of Northwestern University, gladly returned to Chicago. There he found himself in the glare of the press's Julia Roberts watch. "The Sun-Times got the spelling of Dermot Mulroney down first," the Iowa-born actor says. "So it's my favorite paper.
"A lot of the Julia tracking was pretty obvious. We were shooting on Michigan Ave. at lunchtime, right at Comiskey Park during a Sox game. You could hardly miss her. But there was stuff that was pretty inaccurate. Like we were spotted working out together at the Ritz-Carlton, when neither of us stayed at the Ritz Carlton and neither of us worked out at that gym, let alone together.
"When you start working with people like Julia, uh, y'know, you start to take things with a grain of salt."
The other block to his superstardom has been his lack of commitment to the Hollywood star machine. His best reviews have been for indie stuff like Longtime Companion, Tom DiCillo's hilarious indie spoof Living In Oblivion, and How To Make An American Quilt (in which he played Winona Ryder's boyfriend). In Hollywood he's generally been "the boyfriend" or the guy in "women's films" who gets killed so the door is open dramatically for the women to flex their independence (Copycat, Bad Girls).
In fact, the latter bomb (a western with Drew Barrymore and Andie MacDowell), inspired a career change.
"Right after Bad Girls, I took some time off to rethink the whole process -- understandably!" he says with a laugh. "I got involved with this group of guys, including my brother Kieran (another actor) to start this band, the Low And Sweet Orchestra. It's not classical, though I play cello and mandolin and Kieran plays violin and accordion. I've been referring to it as punk-folk."
Nonetheless, the group got signed to the classically-minded Interscope Records. Their first album, Goodbye To All That, was released in September to positive reviews.
"A really cool thing was during the filming of My Best Friend's Wedding, I flew to play the second stage at Lollapalooza at Irvine Meadows in Southern California. That was a pretty fun couple of afternoons. Of course, we were playing opposite Nine Inch Nails, so it wasn't this huge crowd. We're talking about an East Coast tour, and we may end up in Toronto at some point."
How do music and movies compare? "I'm a lot less experienced with the music industry, so I'm more suspicious of it. Basically, what a record company does is loan you money. We owe Interscope records several hundred thousand as it stands right now. The idea is if you never make it back they write it off and that's that.
"It's like loan sharking -- as opposed to movies, where they pay you up front and you work and it's over."
The only other complication in his career is that people keep getting him mixed up with Dylan McDermott of TV's The Practice. "We've had fun joking about it. It's a curse he and I will carry with us for three or four more decades, if we're lucky enough to keep working."