For 'Pie' actor, success is a funny business

Seann William Scott is at it again in 'Role Models'

Seann William Scott (at the Liberty Hotel in Boston), best known for his ''American Pie'' movies, has had a few serious roles. (ARAM BOGHOSIAN FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE)

In a movie, when Seann William Scott wants to curse, he lets it rip. At lunch in a new, mostly empty Beacon Hill restaurant on a Monday afternoon, it's a different story. Scott blurts out a four-letter word (it had something to do with the election), then took a sheepish look around. "You think I'm too loud?" he asks in a jolly cadence typically associated with the middle of the country (Scott's from Minnesota).

His upbringing has left him incurably nice. He orders a glass of wine the way some people excuse themselves to get off of a crowded bus. Sorry to inconvenience you. It's the side of Scott that three "American Pie" movies, in which he played the lascivious meathead Steve Stifler, and an assortment of other comedies ("The Rundown," say, and "Dude, Where's My Car?") couldn't find.

But in the last couple of years, it looked as though Scott was serious about springing himself from Stifler's prison. He made much smaller movies. He played a cop with a twin in Richard Kelly's apocalypse spectacular "Southland Tales." And in the spring he tried a bit of tenderness as the striving manager of a superstore in Steve Conrad's comedy "The Promotion," where for the first time the actor seemed completely human.

Scott says he was inching away from Stifler, but at some point he wanted to make a movie people might actually see. So "Role Models," which opened here on Friday, finds him playing an energy drink salesman sentenced, with a co-worker (Paul Rudd), to 150 hours of mentoring kids through a big-sibling program. Scott is back wearing jeans and T-shirts, eager to crack people up with his insatiable horniness.

The surprise is that he's not the most vulgar person in the movie. That honor goes to 12-year-old Bobb'e J. Thompson, who plays Scott's cantankerous little brother. After a few racial dustups, man and boy bond over their shared enthusiasm for women's breasts. But this isn't a Stifler redo. It's actually a Stifler remix. The interval he spent making those movies no one saw have made Scott a better actor even in a locker-room comedy like "Role Models."

This was never the plan for Scott, this "American Pie" life. As a teenager, he wanted to make serious movies with dark themes. "I wasn't funny in high school at all," he says. "My brother Dan was one of the main writers for the Onion. But he was a film theory major, too, so when I was 4 or 5, I was watching 'A Clockwork Orange.' My mom was a little freaked out, but Malcolm McDowell was my hero."

He says "American Pie" was a fluke, as rises to fame tend to be. Scott says the role he really wanted was in "American Beauty." "I had a smart part in that, and they cut it out." Condolences only make him laugh. "No, no. Don't feel bad. I had a two-line part, and I knew it was getting cut out as I was doing it." Stifler, on the other hand, stuck, and he continued to work in a collection of comedies that if ever packaged in a single collection might be called the Frat House Box Set.

The thought Scott, who's 32, has put into the roles he's taken is evident. "I did 'Mr. Woodcock' and 'The Dukes of Hazzard,' and those movies are kind of soft, and I'm not really doing anything in them. Then I look at a guy like Vince Vaughn in 'Wedding Crashers' - and I'm not Vince Vaughn by any means. But I was so rewarded watching him be crazy, funny, sharp. After 'Wedding Crashers' he did 'The Break-Up,' another hit. And if he wanted to do a drama next he could have, but he didn't." So taking a cue from Vaughn, Scott decided he'd do "Role Models" not only to be in a potential hit but, like Vaughn, to embrace what he's good at and what audiences think is good about him.

In other words, Stifler's legacy doesn't scare him. But he also knows it casts a long shadow. "There's a lot of filmmakers I would love to work with, and I will never get to work with those guys until I do something extraordinary in the drama world. I'm sure doing 'The Promotion' or even 'Southland Tales' was all a way to get some material to show someone like David Fincher or Sam Mendes that I can do something else. But it was never really a decision to prove myself. With the economy where it is, and with the world the way it is, to be able to make somebody laugh is pretty great."

With that, Scott abandons his fellow diner ("Gosh, I'm really sorry to do this to you") and heads to an adjacent courtyard to have his picture taken. He jumps up and down on a sofa and makes crazy faces at a couple of children.

Everybody laughs.

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to www.boston.com/movienation.