For Campbell Scott, no more Mr. Nice Guy

In the new film “Roger Dodger,” Campbell Scott plays the title character, a fortyish ad copywriter who relentlessly strips away the romantic delusions of the people -- mostly women -- around him with long, lacerating, hilarious monologues.

As Scott recalls, after seeing the film, “10 women came up to me and said, ‘I dated that.’ Of course, my next comment was, ‘Have you moved on? Are you OK?’ ”

In writer-director Dylan Kidd’s dark comedy of manners, Roger (Dodger was a nickname given him by his sister when he was a boy) gets an unexpected visit from his teenage nephew (Jesse Eisenberg). He takes the kid under his wing and gives him his bent view of gender relations while squiring him to a bar, where they meet two women (Jennifer Beals and Elizabeth Berkley), and crashing a party thrown by his boss (Isabella Rossellini).

Roger’s abrasive shtick is a defense mechanism and a method of seduction. And it works both on women (to a point) and on audiences. The film won the best narrative feature award at the Tribeca Film Festival and best first feature and best film outside the main competition awards at the Venice Film Festival.

“When he wants to be, the guy is drop-dead charismatic,” Kidd says of Scott, and “Roger” requires it. “He is burning up the screen. It’s a true leading man role.” It may be a true leading man role, but it might not bring Scott more leading man parts. Now 40, Scott, the son of actors George C. Scott and Colleen Dewhurst, reports he’s been “discovered” half a dozen times. To hear him tell it, he’s beyond all that now.

“I had my little Hollywood foray 12 years ago, one right after the other, ‘Singles’ and ‘Dying Young,’ ” Scott says. “Neither side really liked it. I didn’t like it, and they didn’t like me. But I think that’s appropriate. And those were good scripts. They were good movies. And then other things happened. I was naive and stupid. I was a theater actor. I was like, ‘Why aren’t we working on the scenes?’ ”

And so, over the past 15 years, Scott has appeared in countless plays and made two dozen movies, many of them small and highly regarded, some of which he’s even directed. Among those roles are parts in “The Sheltering Sky,” “Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle,” “The Day Trippers,” “Big Night,” “The Spanish Prisoner” and “Spring Forward.” In a number of these films he’s been a jerk (“Day Trippers,” “Spring Forward”), but the image he has, such as it is, is that of someone who plays bland, monochromatic characters -- in short, nice guys.

And that’s exactly what Kidd was seeking, an actor who didn’t have “heavy” written all over him, because the part already had “heavy” written all over it. (Roger to Berkley, whose character dates married men: “It’s the emotional unavailability that you look for.”) Kidd says he didn’t have Scott in mind when he wrote the part. In fact, he’d been nursing the project for years and was never able to break through the firewall of agents who surrounded potential actors for the role. Instead, he found his lead in a Greenwich Village coffee shop.

“I sat there and watched him for 10 minutes and thought, ‘This is perfect,’ ” says Kidd, who simply walked up to Scott and offered him the script. At the time, Kidd, a New York University graduate, was teaching and working at a video store.

“He seemed very unthreatening,” Scott says. “So I said, ‘All right, send it to my to agent.’ ‘No, I have a script right here in my hand.’ ‘All right, give it to me.’ It took me a while, but I read it greedily. I was like, no one’s going to give me this kind of part, so I’ll do it.”

“I never thought I’d hear from him again,” Kidd says. “It seemed too good to be true. Is this guy joking? Could he really be this great?”

Three months later, they were shooting. In the interim, Scott, assuming the role of executive producer, helped secure funding (the film cost $1.2 million) from Holedigger Films, which financed two other movies Scott has been involved with over the past year and a half, “The Secret Lives of Dentists” (as an actor) and “Off the Map” (as a director). He recruited old friends Rossellini and Beals for key roles -- “When Campbell Scott calls, I jump, because he is God,” Beals says -- and introduced Kidd to film editor Andy Keir, who cut the movie.

“He’s not a showy person,” Beals says. “He’s not flaunting his talent.... With all that calm, he’s very complicated, and nobody’s tapped into that darker side until this.”