Don’t Label This Prinze

Freddie Prinze Jr. leans against the gritty brick wall of an abandoned warehouse, the faraway look of lost love in his increasingly famous dark eyes. Around him, cameras swoop as a video for Billie Myers’ title single on the soundtrack to Prinze’s newest starring vehicle, the Miramax film “Down to You,” gets made.

Hands thrust into the pockets of his loose black jeans, Prinze, 23, is gone, his slim body inhabited by college student Al Connelly, his character in the film. The actor is possessed this way for almost an hour, sexy, sensitive and tenderly misunderstood--all without speaking a word.

In a big-screen universe populated by generally older, tougher, more sarcastic and emotionally inaccessible leading men, Prinze’s refreshing youth and vulnerable humanity have made him America’s newest male star with superstar potential.

Prinze’s unanticipated mega-success in last year’s “She’s All That,” a low-budget teen flick that has made almost four times its production costs by grossing nearly $70 million to date, confirmed what his acting coach predicted of the wide-eyed 18-year-old from Albuquerque five years ago: “He’s very green. He’ll be a movie star.” And last weekend, Prinze hosted “Saturday Night Live,” in sort of a pop culture announcement of having arrived.

Of course, all of this makes guys like Chris Sandoval laugh.

Sandoval met Prinze when they were both first-graders at Manzano Day School and after years of “getting into trouble” together (staining a neighbor’s lion statues with mustard and jumping from Prinze’s chimney into the pool, for instance) remains a close friend. “All we want to know is this,” Sandoval says affectionately, “how did that goofball get to where he’s at?”

The answer to that question is not as simple as many think.

It’s easy to assume Prinze got breaks in Hollywood because he’s the son of comedian and actor Freddie Prinze, who starred in the popular ‘70s sitcom “Chico and the Man” and died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at age 22, when Freddie was only 10 months old.

But it should be noted the world is filled with aspiring actors sprung from the loins of celebrities, and many amount to nothing. Plus “there’s enough distance between his father’s celebrity and Freddie’s career that nepotism can be ruled out,” says actor Henry Winkler, who plays Prinze’s father in “Down to You,” opening Friday. “Freddie has a career because he is a truly talented man.”

It should also be noted that Prinze’s mother, real estate agent Katherine Cochran, wished for her son to be anything but an actor, as she blamed the pressures and easy access to drugs associated with the entertainment industry for her ex-husband’s early demise. Though the coroner ruled Prinze’s death a suicide, Cochran and the elder Prinze’s mother (Mary Preutzel) both fought that decision in court by suing doctors who allegedly overprescribed drugs to Prinze and gave him access to a pistol; they won more than $1 million in out-of-court settlements.

In fact, it was the dream of a normal life for her only child that led Cochran to ditch Los Angeles for Albuquerque, where her parents lived, when Prinze was 4 years old. He was raised in the middle-class Northeast Heights section of that desert city, nestled between the Sandia Mountains and the scribble of water known as the Rio Grande River.

The younger Prinze’s male role models early in life were his maternal grandfather, who, he says taught him to stand up for himself, and Sandoval’s father, Ron, who took him fishing and talked to him about those guy things he couldn’t discuss with his mom.

“It was really like I had three sons instead of two,” says the elder Sandoval, a successful business owner. “When we first met Freddie, he was in desperate need of a father type. Even though Kathy was very loving, he was still looking for a man. I feel fortunate enough to have been able to be here for him.”

Sandoval says Prinze’s aptitude for acting was obvious even when he was in grade school. “Fred was unique,” Sandoval says. “He had a special talent, always playing make-believe and acting things out. Kathy kind of fought it.”

When Prinze was 18, he left Albuquerque for Los Angeles, “because acting was the only thing I was even mediocre at,” Prinze says. Once here, he lived with a family friend and hooked up with manager Ric Beddingfield of Creative Artists Agency, who was introduced to him by another friend and has been his manager ever since.

The first few years in Los Angeles were difficult, Prinze says, and he felt incredibly lonely and scared. When he finally landed a four-line role in the TV show “Family Matters,” he was ecstatic.

Two years later, he was cast as the lead in an ABC after-school movie about a teen father, called “Too Soon for Jeff.” That same year he auditioned for a role in the movie “To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday,” starring Michele Pfeiffer, and got the part.

The following year, 1997, Prinze got feature roles in two films, “The House of Yes” and “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” in which he played Jennifer Love Hewitt’s boyfriend.

In 1998, Prinze appeared in the sequel “I Still Know What You Did Last Summer.” And last year, he gained widespread fame in “She’s All That,” followed by the space movie “Wing Commander.” Also last year he appeared in the quirky independent film “Sparkler,” which was shot two years before. “Sparkler” director Darren Stein says he had a strong sense Prinze was major star material.

“He just has that thing,” says Stein. “He’s like a male Julia Roberts, the kind of actor that projects their inner self and makes a character glow. He’s one of those.”

“He’s just an incredibly natural actor, and by far the nicest guy in the business,” says Rachel Leigh Cook, who co-starred with Prinze in “She’s All That.” “That’s said about a lot of people, but it’s actually true about Freddie.”

Though his career has been very different from his father’s, reporters simply can’t seem to stop asking about the similarities. Many close to him describe Prinze as relaxed, kind and generous, but the actor admits his dad is a sore spot for him, and the questions are annoying.

“It’s something that’s talked about a lot,” Prinze says, “and it’s not always in a positive light. Some people make a lot of comparisons and stuff between the two of us, and I understand why people do that, but it’s incorrect to do so. I don’t think the press understands how that makes my family feel, and how it makes me feel. I hope and I assume that they’re innocent questions.

“It’s like this, I mean, the bottom line is like this: I’m 23 years old, and I’m trying to figure out who I am. And that’s a difficult thing on its own, but to have people constantly ask questions about who my father was, and what he was all about--the honest to God truth is, I don’t know, I was 10 months old [when he died] and I know people are aware of that at this point, and it’s like, read a book, that’s what I did. It’s weird when you go home and you still have all that stuff to think about and they don’t, you know what I mean? And I think that a lot of reporters don’t think about it like that.”

Because his mother felt traumatized by the press coverage of his father’s death, Prinze tries to shield her from the media now. He does not give out her name freely and asks reporters to respect her privacy.

“I try to keep my mom as far away from all this as I can, because she got, you know, after my father passed away, she got really kind of jerked around by the press and by a lot of people, so I kind of have this need to protect her.”

Cochran, who now lives in Nevada, invested money in real estate and worked hard. Still, friends say the family did not live lavishly. They always drove used cars, for instance, a tradition Prinze continues to this day.

Though he makes more than $1 million per film now, Prinze still drives the black Dodge Ram pickup truck that brought him from Albuquerque to Los Angeles when he was 18. And don’t expect to find him living in Beverly Hills, either, or doing Jell-O shots at the Viper Room with other hot young celebs. Prinze is a homebody who would rather play video games on his 40-inch TV or cook in his modest stucco house in Toluca Lake. (As with his character’s in “Down to You,” Prinze’s favorite food is fish.) When he’s not at home or working, he’s probably playing basketball with his pal Conrad Jackson at a park near his house, playing paint ball or tap-dancing, his newest hobby.

The younger Prinze’s only escape from reality, he says, is acting.

“I make movies for the same reason I think people go to see movies,” he says. “To escape reality for a while. It’s the only place where I can fly the spaceship, pitch the winning game and get the girl and live happily ever after.”

Back in Albuquerque, Prinze is something of a hero, especially at La Cueva High School, his alma mater. This, of course, is ironic to Prinze, who hated school and felt rejected by most of his classmates when he was there.

“Me and high school had an agreement,” he says with a sad grin, “I won’t go, and you won’t bother me.”

By his own description, Prinze was a strange kid. Few of his classmates or even his teachers seem willing to dispute that assessment. He spent much of his time in a fantasy world, where he was a comic book hero, and some classmates remember seeing him joust imaginary demons on the playing field after school.

“I guess I was acting all the time, even though back then I didn’t know that was what I was doing,” Prinze says.

Prinze’s 12th-grade English teacher, Patsy Boeglin, remembers him most for his passionate out-loud readings of classic literature such as “Oedipus Rex.”

“He was quiet, and sensitive,” Boeglin says. “For lots of kids that seems strange, I guess. But I would say the young girls always found him cute and attractive, but he probably wasn’t aware of it.”

Prinze says he still can’t fathom his teen idol status. He was voted Male Hottie of the Year in the Teen Choice Awards last year, and this month, Prinze is on the cover of Seventeen magazine, holding a big red Valentine--another ironic position considering his girlfriend of four years, soap opera actress Kimberly McCoullough, recently broke up with him.

“I did three movies in six months,” he says. “And it cost me a lot. It cost me my girlfriend. It cost me time with my family. I’ll never do that again.”

Those three movies, Miramax’s “Down to You” and “Boys and Girls,” and Universal Picture’s “Head Over Heels,” all due out this year, mean Prinze will be on a lot of screens, big and small, and in a lot of headlines. He’s now in negotiations for the lead in Warner Bros.’ “Summer Catch,” a film originally written for Matt Damon.

Though it’s tempting to get caught up in the attention, Prinze says he is doing his best not to believe any of the hype around him.

“So many actors get trapped like that,” he says, “and I feel bad for them. To be an actor, it’s almost like a rule that you’re supposed to be insecure, and everyone that I’ve met is, including me. I have my insecurities, too. But when you’re insecure, you don’t feel great about yourself and if people start saying you’re the second coming, and you’re the next this, and you’re the next that, if you hear that enough times you might fall victim and start believing it.

“So I look at it like this: I sit back and watch. My whole life I’ve always been on the outside looking in, I’ve never fit in, and I love it like that. People say all kinds of stuff, from ‘He’s the next Cary Grant’ to ‘He’s the next Keanu Reeves,’ and I don’t care, yo. None of that is me. None of it.”

Prinze has found himself pinned with labels by the media. One of the most annoying is “Latino actor.” Prinze’s father was half Puerto Rican and half Hungarian, and his mother is English, Irish and Native American.

“People ask questions like ‘How does it feel to be one of the only working Latino actors?,’ and it’s, like, pump the brakes, man. I’m a mutt. An American mutt. Period. Or they’ll ask something like ‘How is it you’re Caucasian, yet so street?,’ and I’m just like, ‘What are you talking about, man? I’m ‘street’? I’m young. That’s how we talk. So it’s, whatever.

“I’m me, yo, and that’s it.”