Actor handles 'Scissors'

If there were a Best Screwed Up Childhood Award, Augusten Burroughs would probably be a finalist. As told in his 2002 memoir, ``Running With Scissors," his deluded mother handed him over to a toxic Addams Family whose psychiatrist patriarch threw prescription drugs at problems, had a ``masturbatorium" next to his office, and read the future in the formations of his own bowel movements. Imagine Oliver Twist held hostage by a devoutly Freudian Fagin in Western Massachusetts.

In adapting Burroughs's story for the screen, first-time director Ryan Murphy didn't want his young Burroughs stand-in to win an award for Best Screwed Up Acting Experience. Murphy, also creator of ``Nip/Tuck," needed to find an empathetic kid who could play ages 13 through 19 but who was also mature enough to hold fast to his boundaries.

``So many vicious things happened to Augusten," Murphy says, ``you had to cast an actor who had an awareness of those things and yet would not take them personally, who could clearly make the jump of this is a movie and not my life."

While ``Running With Scissors" runs thick with mordant humor and 1970s kitsch, Augusten is nonetheless taken advantage of sexually by a man in his 30s and profoundly rejected by both his drunken father (Alec Baldwin) and his broken mother, played by Annette Bening. The film's eccentrics, including Gwyneth Paltrow as the Bible-obsessed daughter of the psychiatrist, Dr. Finch, are not always charming.

What Murphy came up with is the thin 20-year-old sitting in a Boston hotel room talking about his two biggest movies so far, ``Running With Scissors," which opens Friday, and Clint Eastwood's ``Flags of Our Fathers," which is now in theaters. His name is Joseph Cross, and he immediately projects the intelligence that helped him weather re-creating Burroughs's early psychological traumas. Despite his casual T-shirt, he has an elegant bearing, and his blue eyes are brightened not so much by the limelight as by his affection for ideas. A student at Trinity College in Connecticut, he uses words such as ``hetero-normative" amid his flow of ``you knows" and ``sort of likes."

And he has the sensitivity needed to be this movie's emotional center written all over his finely featured face.

Cross, whose resume includes ``As the World Turns," TV movies, and M. Night Shyamalan's second feature, ``Wide Awake," ranks the ``Scissors" role among his most demanding.

``It was emotionally awful," he says. ``It was an immersion in this craziness for two months. I was saturated with it, working 14 hours a day, getting up at 6, getting four to six hours of sleep -- which was good for the character, but it takes a toll on you." Also, he was daunted playing a real person, one who has built a cult of fans with his absurdly comic confessionals: ``People would come up to me and recite pieces of Augusten's memoir and say, `Is this in it?' "

Like a team of camp counselors, Burroughs and Murphy tended to their charge, then still a teen. Burroughs helped Cross discover the comedy in such a twisted story.

``I didn't see how it could ever be funny to anybody," Cross says. ``Augusten said he survived by finding the humor in it. He was able to step back from it and say, `This is crazy that this is happening to me.' " When Finch's wife, Agnes (Jill Clayburgh), snacks on dog food during ``Dark Shadows," for instance, or when Augusten walks in on his mother having sex with a woman, there may be nothing left to do but smile.

And Murphy had regular weekly dinners with Cross. ``We talked about the difficult scenes," Murphy says. ``My big job in directing him was not so much telling him how to act but making sure he trusted and was comfortable with me."

In some ways, the life of a young movie actor is that of an orphan child, an Oliver Twist like Burroughs himself. Cross, originally from New Jersey, is close to his family, and his parents go to Hollywood premieres with him. ``They let me know they're proud," he says. He also has a group of buddies, most of whom are from his hometown, as well as a girl-friend of nine months.

Still, he moves largely on his own from set to set, forming close bonds and surrogate families with cast members then moving on. On ``Running With Scissors," Cross was close not only to Murphy but to Evan Rachel Wood, who plays Finch's saucy daughter, and he praises her skills: ``You've got these tabloid girls who get all the press, and they get these movies financed because they dance on tables. But in terms of just raw talent and promise, Evan's the top."

His connection with Bening, whose Deirdre is a grandiose Anne Sexton wannabe, was more complex. ``I saw her a lot as her character," Cross says, ``and I still see her a lot as her character. . . . Obviously, she's nothing like that at all. She has four beautiful children and she's a wonderful mother." They saved their rapport for the screen.

Cross has had to learn to adjust to the nomadic lifestyle, as he continually bids farewell to the people who were his life for a few months. ``When I was younger, it was devastating. . . . You feel like someone is pulling the rug out from under you, and you feel very disconnected and strange. . . .

``But it's hard to make those bonds with people, and they're lasting. They last forever in the sense that I can see people I worked with six years ago, and still remember and feel that connection. . . . And I trust the fact that people weave in and out of one another's lives, that it's a natural thing."

Cross finds it amusing that he has just finished working with the openly gay Murphy, ``who is very stylish and becoming this gay icon," and then Clint Eastwood, an icon of quite a different stripe. And he seems admiring of Eastwood's matter-of-fact directorial style and his dry sense of humor on the set of ``Flags of Our Fathers."

``He does all of his directing in the casting room. He watches the tapes, he picks the people, and that's it. It was literally, `You're gonna go over to that door and walk through,' and we did it twice, and we were done. . . . He gets these tremendous performances, because people feel he's encouraging. He doesn't tweak. He's just looking for you to do something great. And when you're given that responsibility, most people want to live up to it."

It's easy to think Cross did make Eastwood proud, just as he impressed Murphy. And there may be another dynasty in the works, since Cross has four younger siblings, two of whom are already aspiring actors.

Does he want the Crosses to be the next Culkin or Baldwin clan? ``Phoenix maybe," he says. ``That would be a good one. In one way not, but the respect factor yeah. River Phoenix was tremendous. . . .

``I was looking up River Phoenix online to see what movies he did, to make connections between what choices he was making and why, and I stumbled across a photo of his body. It's so disturbing. It's an awful picture, obviously, and something that never should have been put up anywhere. It's invasive. But it's interesting because he's this beautiful young man and then you see what the drug overdose did to him."

On the list of people who have helped Cross negotiate Hollywood over the years, Phoenix may be one of the most important.

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com.