More than a pretty face

WILLIAMSTOWN -- Blessed with piercing eyes, bee-stung lips, and a swimmer's physique, Logan Marshall-Green set hearts aflutter last spring playing Ryan Atwood's bad boy brother Trey on the soapy primetime teen drama ''The OC."

Throw in another recurring role on the Emmy Award-winning ''24" and a supporting part in ''The Great Raid," which opened in theaters last week, and you'd think Marshall-Green would be preparing himself for an onslaught of entertainment show interviews and magazine photo shoots.

But don't expect the 27-year-old heartthrob to nab his own TV series or become the Hollywood hype machine's newest ''It" boy.

No, Marshall-Green, who grew up in Rhode Island, displays a sharp aversion to the kind of publicity that could turn him into another Second Coming of James Dean cliche. ''I'm a little wary of exposure," he explains. ''I want work to beget more work. I don't want work to beget exposure."

Sporting jeans and a yellow T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his shoulders, Marshall-Green is perched on a bench outside the Williamstown Theatre Festival's new $50 million complex on a sticky summer afternoon. The actor talks thoughtfully and animatedly about working on two of the biggest series on TV.

But he'd rather discuss his first love, the theater, and his upcoming role as the naive, self-centered cowboy Bo Decker in the revival of the classic William Inge drama ''Bus Stop," which opens Wednesday and runs through Aug. 28 on the Williamstown Main Stage.

Although he's trying his best to fly under the radar, outside forces seem to conspire against him. When Internet message boards were flooded with breathless postings about him from lovestruck young women (and men) across America, several celebrity news programs contacted him for on-air interviews. He politely declined.

He also says he turned down a larger character arc for Trey on ''The OC" because he didn't want to be away from the stage for so long. ''I want to be able to observe and not be observed," he explains. ''That's why I've set a precedent for myself from the beginning that I don't want to do any taped or live interviews on TV. Will this get in my way in the future? Maybe. But right now, I'm sticking to my guns."

His anonymity, though, may not last. During an interview, a young woman approaches the actor. She had asked advice on where to park her car just minutes before, but has returned because she swears that she knows him. ''I've met you before. I recognized you the second I rolled down my window."

Marshall-Green is polite, but plays dumb. Later, he acknowledges that incidents like this are now a frequent occurrence. ''What's funny is that they may recognize me, but usually they don't know who I am or how they know me."

His good looks may have snared him attention, but it's his confident, nuanced stage performances that have given him staying power.

He nabbed Drama Desk and Lucille Lortel Award nominations in 2004 for his off-Broadway turn in Neil LaBute's ''The Distance From Here." And last month, he earned raves for his intense, poignant performance as a man-devouring shark, clad in a Speedo and strap-on dorsal fin, in Adam Bock's ''Swimming in the Shallows" at New York's Second Stage.

However, it's Marshall-Green's return to Williamstown, where he took part in the festival's renowned actors training program from 1998 to 2001, that has him most excited right now. When he learned that the festival was staging ''Bus Stop" this summer, he contacted the casting director about auditioning for the role of Bo Decker, a part he has long yearned to play.

''He's one of my favorite roles," says the actor. ''I love his enthusiasm for the world, but also his naivete. And I have a lot of parallels to him because I think I know everything, but I really don't. He's just a pistol. And he learns so much during the course of the play."

''Bus Stop," about a motley group of passengers stranded in a rural diner during a snowstorm, is Inge's most famous work. But Bo is not an easy role to tackle. The character can come across as unsympathetic if played too stridently. But director Will Frears, who rose through the ranks of the festival alongside Marshall-Green, thinks he'll do just fine. ''He's so annoyingly good-looking and sexy and cowboy-like to begin with," says Frears with a laugh. ''But more importantly, he's got this wonderful open spirit to him, an American openness that the character needs."

He may seem like a natural on stage, but Marshall-Green didn't pursue an acting career until his late undergraduate years. Although his mother, Lowry Marshall, is a respected professor of theater at Brown University, and his father a former theater professor, director, and actor, the young man never thought that stage work would be his calling.

At the University of Tennessee-Knoxville he witnessed a performance that would change his life. ''I saw this guy on stage doing the role of the boy, the Edward Albee role in 'Three Tall Women.' He didn't even have any lines, yet he still sucked. And I thought, I can do better than that."

So he signed up for a semester of intensive work at the Eugene O'Neill National Theater Institute training program. From there, he knew that acting would become his life's work. After earning an MFA in theater from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, Marshall-Green got his first taste of the Hollywood machine. Following graduation, he flew to Australia for a nearly six-month shoot of ''The Great Raid," a film about a daring World War II rescue mission.

He wants to work on more films in the future, but says it will have to be on his terms. He mentions his admiration for the spotlight-shunning Billy Crudup, himself once a Rising Young Talent, who is Marshall-Green's favorite actor and an enormous influence. ''I love how he's managed his career and the choices he makes to do and not to do certain roles," Marshall-Green says. ''He's been able to do what he loves, yet stay under the radar. And of course, he's brilliant."

Frears, for one, believes that his friend and colleague has a bright career ahead of him -- under the radar, or not.

''He's like a character actor trapped in a leading man's figure and body," Frears says. ''You see him in [the role of Bo Decker] and he looks like a teen rebel. But then there's this idiot inside, this wonderful idiot inside desperately trying to get out. And it's the juxtaposition of those two things that makes him so appealing."