The actor: Tom Noonan leads a curious double life as a respected playwright/arthouse fixture and a sought-after character actor and villain in genre movies, particularly horror and suspense films. Noonan's current feature, the atmospheric early-'80s-style fright flick The House Of The Devil, makes inspired use of the seeming incongruity between Noonan's towering frame and the underlying gentleness of his manner and sonorous voice. So did Noonan's breakout film, Michael Mann's 1986 masterpiece Manhunter, which cast him as a killer pursued by William Petersen with help from Brian Cox's Hannibal Lecter. Noonan won the Grand Jury Prize and Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance for his low-budget 1994 directorial debut What Happened Was...., in which he also starred. He followed it up by scripting, directing, and starring in 1995's The Wife. He's also turned in memorable supporting performances in The Monster Squad, The X-Files, Last Action Hero , and last year's Synecdoche, New York, where he played Philip Seymour Hoffman's doppelgänger. 

The House Of The Devil (2009)--"Mr. Ulman"

Tom Noonan: I liked the movie. Rarely do I see stuff that I make, in general, and even more rarely do I like stuff that I've done. I think this is a good movie, which I was very surprised by. 

The A.V. Club: Why?

TN: Because generally, these movies are not that good, overall. It's just very unusual. And I also found it scary, and I rarely ever find anything scary. The movie is scary. I'm just this doddering old guy trying to get through the evening. I'm the one who gets terrorized by [the film's protagonist], really, in the end. [Laughs.]

AVC: A lot of your signature roles have been in horror films. Do you gravitate toward the genre? 

TN: Who knows? I think I probably have a creepy kind of scary quality. Otherwise I wouldn't get jobs. But I also think it has a little bit to do with, you've done it a couple times, and then people see you that way. The first play I ever did that got me any kind of attention was Buried Child by Sam Shepard. It had won the Pulitzer Prize, and it ran for a year in New York. It was the first thing I ever did that people really saw me in, and I was sort of sweet and funny, but sort of scary in it. And so that's how people know you, and they start giving you parts like that, and then it starts to built up momentum, and you're in the culture's consciousness, or at least the movie culture's consciousness. They can just plug you in. You'll give that same effect. That's sort of how the movie business works.

AVC: One of the things that makes you so effective in films like Manhunter and House Of The Devil is the incongruity between your size and underlying gentleness.

TN: [Laughs.] Yeah, but I'm also unpredictably crazy. You can't really tell what I'm going to do. Making "bad people" seem human is the key to making them really scary. To realize that really "evil, bad" people are only bad a very small amount of the time. Most of the time, they're pretty normal, they're just like you or me. I can't really vouch for that, but I think a lot of people want to pigeonhole a bad character or a villain as if they were just pure evil, nothing they do is of any use, everything they do is just horrible and terrible. And that's not really the case. 

Manhunter (1986)--"Francis Dollarhyde" 

TN: I really don't do anything that terrible in the movie. I do seem to be threatening, but you can't really play a person like that thinking there's something wrong with them or that they're bad, or else it becomes a comment on the person, and it doesn't become very human, and it's not effective. So I just play parts sort of as me. Try to understand the person, and try to talk from my own self. 

AVC: Part of what makes the character so poignant as well as terrifying is the sense that there's an internal struggle, that he wants to do right and lead a good life. And yet there's this compulsion he can't really control.