Calling all nerds

Chris Collins is among the actors who find work by not looking good.
LONG ISLAND NEWSDAY
NEW YORK -- For as long as he can remember, Chris Collins has been a geek. It started back in rural Conway, Ark., where he spent his boyhood starring as a clich & eacute; -- the frail, ghostly white kid with minimal social skills and the athleticism of a soda can. If Collins wasn't being picked last in kickball, he was being picked on by bullies for his staggeringly uncool after-school activity: tap dance. It didn't help Collins' cause that he truly looked like your run-of-the-mill, George McFly dweeb, from the pimply face to the football-size Adam's apple to the thin lips and thinner shoulders.
"If you ask my mother, she'll tell you I'm a handsome young man," he says. "And if you ask my girlfriend, she'll say I'm sexy." Collins, sitting in the corner of a Manhattan pub, takes a bite of his cheeseburger, then grins awkwardly. "The truth is," he says, "they're both right." He laughs, because the truth is self-evident. At age 27, with an uncanny resemblance to Lyle Lovett, Collins is neither handsome nor sexy.
And, oh, by the way, let's keep it that way.
It is a twist of fate that should send every Tom Cruise/Denzel Washington/Brad Pitt wannabe cowering: Hollywood, Broadway and Madison Avenue want Chris Collins. Well, maybe want is too strong. But they need him, in the same way a golf course needs trees and birds and lakes. To maintain order. For authenticity.
He is among the legions of actors who survive by not looking good; by applying by the thousands when casting directors place an ad in Backstage looking for: a fat, balding, triple-chinned, zit-faced, long-nosed Elephant Man look-alike to portray a mentally impaired schoolgirl in an upcoming film.
"In this business, we're always searching for the unusual and unattractive," says Angela Bertolino, chief executive of the Hollywood-based Extras Casting Guild. "Overweight children, 60-year-old female hookers, fat hairy men, grandmothers in bikinis. It's not a politically correct environment, but it's one where negative characteristics are always in demand. To put it bluntly, you can't go wrong being funny-looking."
Enter Collins. Upon arriving from Conway three years ago with little more than a bag of clothing and thespian aspirations, he took a job waiting tables, sending out hundreds of head shots to casting agents in his spare time. Although his dreams involved the name CHRIS COLLINS in bright lights, the gigs weren't quite so glamorous. What Collins quickly discovered was that old attributes die hard. After being cast as a dog walker in a Campbell's soup commercial, he auditioned for a General Electric spot titled "Beauty and Brains."
"They wanted me as a Bill Gates-type character," he says. "Our American hero geek."
Worked with a model
So perfectly dweeby is Collins that he was flown to Los Angeles for a week to play opposite Yamila Diaz-Rahi, the Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, in a humorous ad that depicts a hottie and a professor of nanotechnology falling in love outside a Laundromat. The commercial still airs nationally.
"The funny thing is that when you talk to Chris, he's not nerdy at all," says Tom Harris, the casting director at Donald Case Casting in Manhattan. "But in this business, once people think of you in a certain way. ..."
Shortly after the GE ad began to run, Wired Magazine was searching for the perfect actor to portray a cybergeek in a photo shoot. They didn't have to look hard. "The makeup artists even added a zit to the right side of my chin," says Collins, laughing. "As if I weren't nerdy enough."
There is never nerdy enough. Never fat enough. Never bald enough. Never ... anything enough. Such is life in Hollywood, where the general idea has long been to not confuse. Or, in simpler terms, the general idea is to smack the viewer over the head with the obvious. In a sense, that's why so-called character actors exist.
This has always been the case. You might remember Margaret Hamilton best from her depiction of the Wicked Witch of the West in "The Wizard of Oz" 65 years ago. But Hamilton -- an angry-looking woman with piercing brown eyes and an evil grimace -- portrayed subjects with witchlike demeanors on at least 10 projects. More recently, Hollywood has offered us actors like the tart-faced Steve Buscemi, whose characters range from the tart-faced Carl Showalter in "Fargo" to the tart-faced Map to the Stars Eddie in "Escape From L.A." to the tart-faced Seymour in "Ghost World."
"But it's important to keep in mind that this is a good thing, not a bad thing," says L.C. Stark, a Manhattan-based casting agent for two decades. "For example, away from this industry, a person who's very heavyset is a health issue. But here, in our world, it can be a benefit. You'll find work."