  FBI trainee Ryan Phillippe is assigned to keep an eye on Chris Cooper in Breach. |
HOLLYWOOD -- It's possible FBI traitor Robert Hanssen hasn't heard all the salacious gossip swirling around Ryan Phillippe and Reese Witherspoon's divorce.
And they say there's no upside to being locked away in solitary confinement.
For the rest of us, details of Phillippe's private life are hardly classified and at least as much a commodity as the top-secret intelligence Hanssen spent nearly two decades selling to the Russians.
So excuse the 32-year-old actor if his reaction to his current career hot-streak -- last year's Best Picture Crash followed by Clint Eastwood's prestigious Flags of our Fathers -- is decidedly tempered.
"It's a really strange time in my life," admits Phillippe, who has two children with Witherspoon -- daughter Ava, 7, and son Deacon, 3.
"I acknowledge the successes and opportunities I've had lately ... I feel like the last three or four (movies) have been the best of my career. But I got to say it's the last thing on my mind right now, considering what I'm going through in my personal life."
Nonetheless, it is his work, and not his headline-generating split from America's sweetheart, Witherspoon, which brings a stylishly scruffy Phillippe out on this day to address journalists at the Four Seasons.
Specifically, he is plugging Breach, the thriller about the investigation and downfall of the treasonous Hanssen, portrayed by Academy Award winner Chris Cooper. Phillippe stars as Eric O'Neill, the ambitious young FBI agent who was assigned to investigate Hanssen under the guise of being his clerk.
Opening Friday, the movie is yet another compelling -- and disturbing -- character study from filmmaker Billy Ray, who directed Shattered Glass. That drama was also about the pathologically-intricate manipulations of an individual operating within the confines of a seemingly esteemed institution. In Glass, the setting was journalism. In Breach, it's the U.S. government. Why the fascination with these enigmatic deceivers? "I can't imagine coming up with a better character than Robert Hanssen," Ray says simply.
"How could I come up with someone more compelling, more nuanced, more strange, more idiosyncratic than that guy? I couldn't have dreamed him up. Human behaviour is so much more interesting to me than anything I could imagine."
As embodied by Cooper, Hanssen emerges as a sensational, scary jumble of egotism, insecurity and intellectual superiority whose double existence extended into the bedroom. Along with a predilection for pornography, the devout Catholic also secretly made tapes of himself and his wife, Bonnie, having sex. He then shared and swapped those tapes with others.
For Ray, the contradictions and seeming betrayals of self offered endless psychological avenues to explore. Problematically, though, he had no access to the man himself.
"I wanted to talk to Hanssen and FBI said no."
Eventually the director was allowed to submit written questions to his subject, who is serving a life sentence for treason in a maximum-security facility in Colorado.
Hanssen, though, refused to respond. Ray shrugs philosophically. "I understand his not wanting to help me."
Instead, the filmmaker relied on O'Neill to provide insights into the double agent's methods, mannerisms and presumed motivations.
We say presumed because Hanssen has never revealed why he betrayed the FBI.
Certainly, the Russians rewarded him for his services, but Breach also concludes Hanssen's own insatiable need to matter, to be someone, motivated him more than mere monetary gain did.
"I wouldn't have done this without Eric's assistance," Ray says. "The FBI gave me as much access as I needed. They put me in the room with the people who knew Hanssen, the people who worked with him and the people who caught him."
However, he didn't contact the Hanssen family. "I don't celebrate that this movie is going to create embarrassment for Bonnie and the kids. I used as much of the Hanssen family as we needed to tell the story, but not a frame more."
The resulting film, therefore, is as much about O'Neill's relationship with Hanssen -- and the effect the investigation had on O'Neill's own life and marriage -- as it is Hanssen himself.
It also continues Phillippe's stretch of dark, weighty films -- one he'll continue later this year with the Iraq war-themed drama Stop-Loss from Boys Don't Cry director Kimberly Peirce.
Doesn't he ever feel like lightening up? "I'm a serious guy -- sometimes to a fault," he says. "I like serious subject matter. If I'm going to devote months of energy and time and take that time away from my kids, the story's got to resonate with me. I can't do the fluff. I can watch it. I can appreciate it. It's not what I want to work on."
Phillippe was one of four actors who screen-tested for the O'Neill role opposite Cooper.
"Everyone who acts for a living knows Chris Cooper and wants to work with him," Ray says. "They were all great, but Ryan's chemistry with Chris was really, really strong."
"Chris Cooper is, if not the best, one of the best actors working today," Phillippe says, confirming that, on set, the veteran performer kept his distance to enhance the on-screen emotional chilliness between their characters.
"He's definitely a little bit method and I can be prone to that as well. I like pretending to being somebody else."
Yet someone, it turned out, whose story had parallels to Phillippe's real life.
After all, following the Hanssen investigation, O'Neill resigned from the FBI, choosing to put his personal life and marriage ahead of fast-tracking his career.
It's a choice Phillippe says he is similarly faced with.
"Immediately, the career takes a back seat. I did three movies in the past year and a half and I'm going to take a good, long break and be a dad, so that's No. 1 on my mind right now."
Nor does he dismiss the idea of quitting acting -- or, specifically, stardom -- altogether. "The celebrity aspect of it and living the fishbowl thing can get to be a grind. I feel you don't have to do the same thing for the rest of your life and you do have an opinion and if it does get to be too much, I don't like it anymore, I'll find something else to do.
"If you aren't happy living a certain way you should make changes to become so, especially when you have children. Kids need happy parents."
PHILLIPPE PHILM PHILE
Ryan Phillippe started his career in the soap opera One Life To Live. He was catapulted to fame in the horror film I Know What You Did Last Summer and met his future wife, Reese Witherspoon, when they starred together in the thriller Cruel Intentions.
His films include:
- Flags Of Our Fathers (2006)
- Five Fingers (2006)
- Chaos (2006)
- Crash (2004)
- The I Inside (2003)
- Igby Goes Down (2002)
- Gosford Park (2001)
- Antitrust (2001)
- The Way Of The Gun (2000)
- Company Man (2000)
- Cruel Intentions (1999)
- Playing By Heart (1998)
- 54 (1998)
- Homegrown (1998)
- I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)
- Little Boy Blue (1997)
- Nowhere (1997)
- White Squall (1996)
- Invader (1996)
- Crimson Tide (1995)
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