Which Dermot Mulroney do you know?

The actor -- not to be confused with Dylan McDermott, and yes, he's heard all those jokes, thanks -- is known to some moviegoers from mainstream films such as My Best Friend's Wedding or About Schmidt, and to others as a star of such indie fare as Living In Oblivion and Silent Tongue. Other fans view him as a TV star thanks to that triple appearance on Friends or from Long Gone (his film debut), Family Pictures and a handful of other small-screen movies.

Then there are those who know Mulroney as a musician. He's in a band with his brother Kieran, who is also an actor. (The brothers appeared together in Career Opportunities.)

Mulroney plays cello and mandolin and calls their sound punk-folk; they recorded as The Low and Sweet Orchestra.

And Mulroney and another brother co-own The Double Door music club in Chicago.

Mulroney in all his guises turned up during the Toronto film festival to talk about Undertow, a dark and outrageous new film from David Gordon Green, the young filmmaker behind George Washington and All The Real Girls.

In Undertow, which opens here Friday, Mulroney and Josh Lucas co-star as estranged brothers who are reunited to continue a saga of jealousy and violence.

Set mostly in a rundown farmhouse, Undertow has Mulroney as a single father of two boys, and the film traces his sons' journey as they struggle not to make the same mistakes as their father and uncle. The film, which has a sort of Gothic flavour, is littered with the strange, the grotesque, the disenchanted and the disenfranchised.

Events begin with a teenager accidentally getting a huge nail right through his foot, setting a squeamish factor for the film that never flags. Green, the filmmaker, says this sort of thing, "I like to shoot in sequence, so if anyone gets maimed or hurt, we can incorporate it into the story." That dark sense of humour informs the screenplay.

As Mulroney puts it, "The movie has this incredible feeling of doom. Personally, I love doom. You know something is going to go wrong, somehow. From the beginning, with that chase -- you can be pretty sure this is going to be a wreck." He grins. "Doom looming, you know?"

Asked to sum up a lengthy career that includes roles in The Safety Of Objects, Lovely & Amazing, Where The Money Is, Copycat, How To Make An American Quilt, Young Guns, Longtime Companion and The Thing Called Love, among many others, Mulroney says, simply, "I grew up near D.C. and went straight to college and then went straight to L.A. from there."

He adds, "I've been working 19 years in Los Angeles, so now I've had more time as an Angelino than as a Virginian. I started in ah, 1986, I think. This movie," he says, of Undertow, "is the first time I've felt like the elder statesman or something." His director turned 27 while they were filming.

Mulroney, a Northwestern graduate, turns 41 on Halloween.

The middle child among five, Mulroney and his sister and three brothers grew up in Virginia. The family was originally from Iowa; Mulroney's father is a career lawyer and a professor at Villanova University, and his mother is an actress who returned to the stage once her children were adults.

Mulroney has been married to actress Catherine Keener for 14 years. They have a five-year-old son.

Asked about the tenuous nature of most Hollywood marriages, Mulroney says, "Nobody knows how it goes. Couples still go out to parties and get their pictures taken smiling, so of course it looks like everything is peachy. That's my theory, anyway. I don't go out to parties and have these false photos. Neither of us is interested in creating a myth."

He and Keener have only done a few movies together, including Living In Oblivion and Lovely & Amazing.

"The problem is, in the same movie there are rarely two really good parts, and neither of us wants to do parts that aren't really good."

They met in 1987 filming Survival Quest and he says they became instant friends. The two lived together for about three years before they were married, and Mulroney has said his marriage is the major grounding factor in his life.

"It makes the uncertainty of this whole acting thing easier to cope with."

And fatherhood has changed him, he says. "By this time, I'd be making changes anyway, so I don't want to make it his doing, but --now I don't have any burning need to work. It used to be about getting the next job, getting the next job. Now, there are few jobs where you can work a few months of the year and not have to for the rest of the time, and now I embrace that instead of making it a source of anxiety. That's the main change: I'd rather stay home and play."

Mulroney appears next in Something Borrowed, with Debra Messing.


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