Right about now, if you're still unsure of just who exactly John C. McGinley is, then you need to stop, take a deep breathe, and look long and hard at this here picture on the left. Recognize him now? Sure you do. He's been in flix like The Rock, Set It Off, A Midnight Clear, Wagons East, Point Break, Car 54, Where Are You?. Hell, he even had his butt whupped by Steven Seagal in On Deadly Ground, got iced by Ice-T in Surviving The Game, and has been in just about every damn Oliver Stone flick to date (Platoon, Wall Street, Talk Radio, Born on the Fourth of July, Nixon, and On Any Given Sunday.). McGinley's been in at least 50 movies to date, not to mention quite a few TV appearances, to boot.

But McGinley isn't just a one trick pony. He's made successful excursions into the restaurant biz and has even done stints as both a screenwriter and producer. Not bad for a guy who's merely a character actor. But then that's the cool thing about being a character actor, you get to morph continually, always assuming a new guise and popping up in the places least expected.

McGinley's latest cinematic incarnation is as the libidinous Joe in Flypaper, a Two Days In The Valley-meets-Pulp Fiction-styled flick which was completed in 1997 and is just now seeing the light of day on vid and DVD. In this flick he plays a neo-lecherous lover who jilts his steady played by Ileana Douglas.

IGN For Men's Spence D. caught up with McGinley recently and got the full skilly on his never-ending rollercoaster ride through Hollywood thespianism.

IGN For Men: Since Flypaper, how did that come about? I mean what drew you to that project in the first place?
John C. McGinley: They sent it to me in the middle of the week a coupla years ago, I read it and then I went and met...it wasn't one of those, it wasn't an audition, they offered it to me. I thought it had the potential to be really hilarious, especially the character Joe and I just thought the missing piece of the puzzle was Illeana. And as soon as they got Illeana, I was like "Okay, I definitely want to do this."

IGN4M: When you say that the script was sent to you in the middle of the week, is that when you like to receive scripts? I mean is that the best time for you to get them and read them is the middle of the week?
JCMcG: Yeah, but all I mean is that there was an urgency to "Do you want to do this or not?" It wasn't like "audition today and then come back next week and then we're gonna read you again and again and again..." It was just like "Look, we think you could nail Joe. Do you want to do it?" And I was like "I would love to do it, but I gotta know who the wife is." And then they cast a great actress and I was like "Okay, call 'Action!'"

IGN4M: Since you brought up the audition process, do you enjoy doing auditions? I've interviewed quite a few actors who either A) hate the audition process, B) love the audition process or C) refuse to do auditions. Where would you fall?
JCMcG: I've produced five movies and I helped Oliver [Stone, baby!] cast Talk Radio, The Doors, and Born On The Fourth, and I understand that there's no better way to get a movie done than to have actors come in and read. They have to come in and read. So I get it. I don't love doin' it. It's much more fun just to be offered a movie. It always feels terribly flattering when someone goes "Do you want to do this?" But you've got to audition, you do. Unless you're a big star and then it doesn't matter. But for most of us, we gotta go in and audition.

IGN4M: Go through the motions...
JCMcG: Yeah, pretty much. And also, a lot of times, it's in an actor's best interests to go in and audition because you want to take the temperature of the person that you're probably gonna be spending 3 months with. And it may be in some foreign place, too. What if the man or woman director is a no good, um...you know?...

IGN4M: Son-of-a-bitch?
JCMcG: Yeah, your word, son-of-a-bitch. So it's in your best interest to go find out, man. The only way you're gonna find out is to go get in a room with them and read the scene. And if they say something really silly or inane then maybe you don't want to take the gig.

IGN4M: In many respects it's the same as going in for a job interview with a large corporation, you want to know the people you're going to be working alongside of.
JCMcG: No doubt! No doubt! What if [the boss] is a total jerk-off? It cuts both ways and a lot of times we actors forget that.

IGN4M: And I think that the general public often forgets that acting is, afterall, just another job.
JCMcG: Yeah it is! And sometimes it's really fun and sometimes it's not. So what? So is everything.

Nuthin' beats bein' chained to a bed. (CLICK ME, FOOL!)

IGN4M: Back to the flick, you have that great scene where you're handcuffed to a bed. Has your wife or any of your past lovers ever shackled you to any furniture?
JCMcG: No! That's not my style, so I was very intimidated by that. I just had to kind of commit to it and do it. I would say that is the first and only time I've ever been handcuffed to a bed and um, so I told the property master and the set designer, I'm like "Dude, I want you to use real things here because I'm gonna try to get out of these stinkin' things." And I did. And they did a good job, they made it as real, they made it real. I was handcuffed to a bed. I couldn't get out of that thing.

IGN4M: So there were no trick cuffs in case you got freaked out by being shackled like that?
JCMcG: No way dude! No way! How could you play the scene that way? I was like, even though it's a farce, I still...if I was gonna be handcuffed to the bed, let's do it! Let's go after it! And I had Talisa Soto teasin' me? Please! I was in heaven. I got a Bond girl...please!

IGN4M: Yeah, but you were chained to the bed so you couldn't do anything anyway.
JCMcG: So what?!

IGN4M: So do you like to be the controller as opposed to the controlee?
JCMcG: Definitely!

IGN4M: Now, for all intents and purposes, you are a character actor...
JCMcG: Yeah, probably.

IGN4M: Is that how you would define yourself if forced to put a label on what you do?
JCMcG: Yeah, I'm a character actor, sure.

IGN4M: Well, you've carved out a definite niche, in the significant body of work that you've done, as the sort of whiney weasely guy.
JCMcG: Yeah, but also as the funny guy. As long as you can keep it funny, you win.

IGN4M: Is that your secret then? Even when you're portraying the conniving bastard, you always gotta keep it funny.
JCMcG: Yeah, he's got to be funny. Absolutely! As soon as he takes himself too seriously, you're dead.

IGN4M:Are you satisfied as a character actor? I mean never getting top billing has got to be a bummer, but then at the same time you are afforded considerably more anonymity than a big name star. I mean you can probably walk down the street a lot easier than say Sean Connery.
JCMcG: Absolutely! But then I've also done two films with Sean. I mean I did The Rock and Highlander 2. It's as good as it gets! It's as good as it gets!

IGN4M: And why is that?
JCMcG: Because I get to make an enormous amount of money and I get to creatively challenge myself almost every time I'm on a set because invariably I get, to my mind, the most delicious role in the script and I get to go after it. I'm not carrying the movie, unless I'm producing it. I'm the number three or four guy and it's just...I just can't imagine this goin' any better than it has. I can't. This is like a dream gig. Eric LaSalle and I got out of school in '84 at NYU and if you told either one of us that we'd be able to be doin' what we're doin'...all we both wanted to do was just go do plays and make a living as an actor, just not have to wait tables anymore. And we get to do this!? What!? Are you kiddin' me!? $%&*, you can just shoot me! You could kill me, I can't believe it! I'm like $%&*@!' Roberto Benigni, what are you kiddin' me!? I saw that nutbag climbin' all over the place [at the '99 Oscars] and I kinda understand his vibe. The guy's like, he can't $%&*@!' believe it.

IGN4M: This is the proverbial "dream come true?"
JCMcG: It's better than that! [dripping with enthusiastic sarcasm]

IGN4M: Hey, I wouldn't know as I don't live your life.
JCMcG: Dude, it is so...it's just a really good groove, to have a potential constant source of stimulation, you know, creatively and sometimes intellectually. And to be able to do what you actually set out to do. Most of us make all these plans and we never get to execute them for a zillion reasons. I planned on being an actor and trained my ass off to do it and now I get, I get paid to do it, to be part of the storytelling process. Al Pacino and I were talkin' about this for a coupla months down in Miami. I mean to fit in somewhere in the storytelling tradition is, you know...Joe Campbell, who taught up at Sarah Lawrence for all those years the mythology of the storyteller goes back to the most ancient tribe...

IGN4M: I'm familiar with Campbell. I was a speech major in college...
JCMcG: Oh, then you know! He's my hero. So to fit somewhere into the mythology of the shaman of the tribe who continues the tradition of telling the story, whether actors like it or not, that's who they are. I think it's geniusly brilliant.

IGN4M: Since you brought up the whole mythology thing I almost see--and you can slap me upside the head via the fiber optics if I'm going way off base on some metaphysical tangent here...
JCMcG: {laughs very, very boisterously]

IGN4M: The characters you tend to play almost have a distinct character similarity to the native American mythological deity Coyote.
JCMcG: Absolutely! You know, I never even thought of that. Now you're gonna make me go back [and re-read those stories].

IGN4M: Yeah, Coyote the "trickster." He's kind of wise on the one hand, but he's kind of cocky, kind of whiney, and $%&* always seems to happen to him, but he always pulls out of it in the end.
JCMcG: Yeah, I'll buy that.

McGinley, for the culturally deprived, has been gracing the silver screen for damn near a decade plus showing up in such crowd pleasers as Platoon, The Rock, Office Space, and Se7en. McGinley can currently be seen on the DTV Flypaper, a ribald Pulp Fictionalized-2 Days In The Valley-styled ensemble romp.

Click on the orange letters in case you missed Part I.

IGN For Men: You had a ton of dialogue in Flypaper, considering that it's an ensemble cast. I also understand in your upcoming film Leonard Cohen Afterworld, that the part you play of Johnny The Fox was written specifically with you in mind.
John C. McGinley: How'd you know that?

IGN4M: Hey, I did my homework.
JCMcG: Yeah, Scotty Rosenberg, who's probably the best writer out here right now, he's got the movie Gone In 60 Seconds and he's one of the great kids from Worcester, Mass, one of the great guys, really prolific, really smart guy. Before the Acapulco Film Festival became what is now the Black Film Festival we went down there and we were both on the jury and we were hangin' out for a weekend and just became best friends. Cut to X years later and he called me up and said "I wrote a part for you in this movie A Leonard Cohen Afterworld." And I was like "Well, lemme read it!" And I did and it was the cause for me to lose 70 pounds and get dreadlocks sewn into my skull, so I had this whole mutant Iggy Pop vibe going. And it was really one of the most intense experiences I've ever had.

IGN4M: What kind of regimen did they have you on to drop 70 pounds?
JCMcG: Well first of all I stopped eating and New Line hired a nutritionalist for me and he had me consuming this green juice. So you have a juicer and anything green, you just put it out on the counter. Umm, so everything from spinach to kale, anything green you could possibly think of we would put in the juicer and I would drink it all night and all day. And you can't keep weight...

IGN4M: I would think not, it's like goin' in one end and immediately comin' out the other.
JCMcG: Absolutely! But it's all chlorophyll. It's the best stuff you could put in your body, but it's not satisfying.

IGN4M: So have you maintained the "green diet"?
JCMcG: NO!

IGN4M: It's back to the burgers and fries, eh?
JCMcG: Hell yeah! But I mean when I was down making Any Given Sunday Jamie Foxx and LL Cool J each had gyms in front of their trailers. And so we were out in front of the Orange Bowl for almost 3 months and you know, when there was nothing to do you just go over and start lifting. So I went up to about 215, just 'cause you start liftin' and when you lift you gain weight. So I was just packin' on all this good weight. It wasn't like I was just droppin' fat, so it was even harder to lose 'cause I'd packed on all this upper body stuff. So by the time we did Leonard Cohen I had gone from 213-214 down to 157.

IGN4M: What are you like close to 6 feet?
JCMcG: I'm 6'2" and I weigh 184.

IGN4M: And you took it down to 157? Damn!
JCMcG: Yeah, it was the most intense thing, next to Platoon it was the most intense thing I've ever done. It wasn't like once you actually arrived at 157, which was my goal, you could go "Okay, good, I accomplished that." It was like "No, dude, now you have to stay that way for three months." So it took me four months to take it off and then 3 months to hang on to it. Are you kiddin' me?

IGN4M: Well that there is the job part of it.
JCMcG: No question. And especially in Seattle. You know Seattle? Seattle rocks! You get the best food on the planet and I couldn't touch any of it.

IGN4M: Speaking of food, do you still have the restaurant with Willem DeFoe?
JCMcG: Yeah, Willem and I went in with Julian Schnable and about 13 other knuckleheads on a restaurant in New York called Match.

IGN4M: Yeah, now is that just the one in SoHo?
JCMcG: Yes, yes.

IGN4M: Yeah, 'cause there's another one Uptown, right?
JCMcG: Yeah, no joke, up by the new Barney's. I wish I had a piece of that, it's a goldmine. But no, that's Billy Gilroy. By the time the second Match was goin' the Match downtown was such a hit he didn't need to put 15 people together, he just hit one guy for 'X' dollars and they did it again Uptown. But everybody won on that restaurant. It was totally ethical and aboveboard and it just worked out like a charm. It was one of those things where you could be 'Big Man On Campus' when you go back to New York.

(CLICK ME, FOOL!)

IGN4M: What drew you into the restaurant biz?
JCMcG: The guy who ran the place is named Billy Gilroy and he used to run a place called Lucky Strike down on West Broadway and Grand and he used to baby-sit all of us all night long there forever. When he broke off from Lucky Strike he said "I'm gonna open up a restaurant, do you want to be part of it?" And I was up in Alaska doing Steven Seagal's movie On Deadly Ground and I called him in New York and he had a minimum ante. He was trying to raise 1.2 million dollars and there were different places you could get in; you could get in for 25 grand, 50 grand, 100 grand, whatever you want. So I was like "Yeah, put me in. But I've got to tell ya, just from my own New York sensibilities, just guarantee me that this isn't some silly, money laundering thing that's gonna get my tax returns audited for the next 15 years." And he was like "On my word." And true to form it was. It's just been a good gig. Everybody won in an investment where you usually get burned.

IGN4M: For sure. I mean investing in the restaurant business is usually regarded as foolhardy.
JCMcG: No, it's like investing in the movies. The Vegas odds are you're gonna lose your money. But this was one of those things where it actually worked out.

IGN4M: Since you brought up Seagal, what was it like gettin' your ass whupped by him in On Deadly Ground?
JCMcG: It was intense because it was right by a moving plane, a Cessna, where the prop was goin' around and it was a real prop. It was intense, Steven's an intense cat, man. He really doesn't play games, especially for the fights and the combat parts, the staged combat. We rehearsed the hell out of it. And it's a really good fight.

IGN4M: Do you have a preference over doing action films versus dramas or small, quirky independent projects? Or do you just view that as the cool perk of the job, that you get to flip from drama to action to sci-fi to whatever?
JCMcG: It's all good. If you get in that room with the director and his vibe is somewhere in the vicinity of what your creative vision is about the piece that you read last night, then it's a gas. If you guys are on two different pages, then usually it doesn't work out and they'll hire somebody else.

IGN4M: How much of your own stuntwork do you do?
JCMcG: I used to do a lot of them, but then in the last film I produced, The Jack Bull, I had a horse wreck and we had to shut down for a week. I just had a horse wreck. I thought I broke my pelvis, but I didn't. I just had this intense, deep tissue bruising. [Sighs] We shut down for a week and it was really spooky. I don't know if you've ever been in a wreck on a horse, but it'll get you in touch with your mortality really quick.

(CLICK ME, FOOL!)

IGN4M: It's been about 15 years since I've ridden a horse.
JCMcG: Dude, be careful [laughs]. That's 1200 pounds of muscle, man! Horses can go about 35 miles an hour and we were goin' about 35 miles an hour and we just had a wreck. Needless to say, stunt guys will be doin' a lot more of my stunts now. Like by the time I did Any Given Sunday when Al throws me down the dugout, I mean a stunt guy did that. I mean I was like "Oliver, I can't get thrown down a baseball dugout right now because my pelvis is still...it still hurt. I did all that rehabilitation stuff for like 4 months. They were giving me electric shock, just trying to get the muscles not to atrophy. And it was intense, it was very intense. I was really scared.

IGN4M: Obviously that wasn't you being thrown out of the ambulance in Flypaper, right?
JCMcG: No, but that guy did a great job! Did you see him bounce on the stinkin' asphalt? I was like "Whoooo! What!?"

IGN4M: Is your wife at all jealous of your relationship with Oliver Stone?
JCMcG: Nnnoo man [laughs]. It's not that kind of party [laughs]. Oliver's thing is so specific and so lazer beam focused that no one could ever get confused with the space that he occupies in my life.

IGN4M: Is it cool to have such a long running cinematic relationship with him? Obviously you and him have a good working relationship otherwise you wouldn't have been in so many of his films like Platoon, Nixon, Any Given Sunday, Born on the Fourth of July.
JCMcG: Yeah. I just think that after a while you create a shorthand with the actor and with the director, so when it's crunchtime, when Oliver's like "You know, we've got to do this, that, and the other thing" I'm like just "Let's go baby! Let's go! Just turn 'em over, let's go!"

IGN4M: What about the Get Carter remake with Sly and Michael Caine (again)?
JCMcG: Yeah, Michael I know from two movies, from Sweet Liberty and from Seagal's movie. It was great, though. We were up in Vancouver and then down in Seattle and then Vegas. And actually then some re-shoots. It was great. This young director's gonna be a superstar. This kid Stephen Kay, all you're gonna be doin' is readin' about him. He's just got this fresh kind of take on things, he's gonna be a superstar.

IGN4M: Now when you work on a film like that, which is a remake, did you immerse yourself in the original or did you steer clear of it?
JCMcG: I saw the original and it was good. But this is...Sly is such a fascinating guy and is just kind of in a good groove right now. I think that from Copland to this, he's in this really good kind of groove. I saw a couple of reels of it the other day and Sly is off the chart, man. Sly is a warrior. I really dug him. We used to lift at Malibu Gym together and, you know, we had kind of a casual relationship, but then on the set the guy is...his focus, it's unbelievable. It's unbelievable. No games. I was diggin' it. All I can tell you is that I was diggin' his whole vibe.

IGN4M: Since you've brought up the concept of focus, do you have any on-set rituals that you follow before going in front of the camera?
JCMcG: Yeah, I sleep. Whenever there's downtime I sleep. Because the bright lights really bother my eyes and there's always smoke on sets. I've got these Irish blues that get all whacked on sets. So I just keep to myself and I go to sleep. My thing is those bright lights, you know, I've got those sensitive Irish eyes, they get...all those bright lights irritate them, so I just go back to my trailer and I don't bother anybody. I just go and I focus. Then you wake up, you're fresh and it's like "Let's go!" There's such a finite amount of time that you have to make a movie. My whole thing is just stay in your groove, whatever you need to do, stay in your groove. And so that's what I do.

Spence D. wishes he had his own stunt double.