THE eyebrows have it. Black, bushy and imperious, they’ve helped define Peter Gallagher as the yuppie scum of “sex, lies, and videotape” and the oily real-estate salesman of “American Beauty.”
Now they’re making him look villainous again in “Noises Off,” opening Thursday.
As Lloyd Dallas, the acerbic British director and serial seducer, Gallagher is the man your mother warned you about.
So it’s a shock to meet him near his home on the Upper West Side – and watch him happily signing autographs for some passing drama students.
Could it be that Peter Gallagher is secretly . . . nice?
Clad in black jeans, jacket and a charcoal turtleneck, he looks like a living Gap ad. Which he made, by the way, five years ago. “I got a couple of chinos out of that,” he winks, those famous eyebrows flecked with gray.
Over chicken soup the other day, the 46-year-old spoke warmly about his work, his family – and just about every actor he’s ever known, particularly his costars in one of the most physically demanding shows on Broadway.
“Patti [LuPone] got me here with a flower,” he laughs, pointing to his brow. “The next day I gouged my hand, and Patti asked, ‘Whose blood’s on the deck?’
” ‘That would be mine.’ “
As a waitress scuttles away to inquire about his soup, Gallagher tries to explain why such a nice, happily married guy keeps getting cast as a cad.
“I think it’s written somewhere in the Book of Hollywood that if you look a certain way, you couldn’t get any sympathy from the audience. I guess it’s also written that these people don’t deserve any.
“The reality is, I’d rather play someone with some fun stuff to do than be the bland guy.”
As if. Like any guy with his glacier-blue eyes, cleft chin and pillowy lips could ever play bland.
And to think he’d majored in economics, of all things.
“I’d always loved to act, but I’d heard nothing but horror stories about people who tried to pursue a career in theater and how it brought them nothing but heartbreak and poverty,” he says. “And I guess I was afraid that if I studied theater, I’d lose my love for it.”
Then came the year he skipped summer stock to take a course called “Non-Western Economic Thought.”
“That’s then I realized,” he says, “that even heartbreaking obscurity and poverty would be better than this!”
He gave himself seven years to make a living in theater, and it wound up taking far less.
At 21, without an agent, he was cast in a revival of “Hair.” While the show was still in previews, he landed a lead in a “Grease” road tour and decided to go for it.
He’s worked steadily since. Ever the perfectionist, when he married dancer Paula Harwood 19 years ago, he talked his bride into honeymooning in Wales- so he could go into the coal mines and work on the dialect he needed for “The Corn is Green.”
“After several days of constant rain and cold, she cried, ‘Please take me to the Savoy!’ ” he grins. And it was there in London he saw “The Real Thing” and “Noises Off,” both of which he’d later perform on Broadway.
Clearly, the homework’s paid off. His “Noises Off” co-star, Richard Easton, calls Gallagher’s British accent “absolutely perfect.”
Not only that, Easton says, but “he’s full of ideas, all of them good – and he’s extremely generous to the other performers on stage with him.”
In other words, the exact opposite of the adulterous lawyer Gallagher played in Steven Soderbergh’s 1989 “sex, lies, and videotape” – the role that made those lips and those eyebrows famous.
“The yucky yuppie,” Gallagher smiles – causing a passing waitress to nearly drop her tray.
Even in his Gap jeans, you’d never mistake him for one of those.