Thomas Jane: up until now he's been a man in the wings. With his role as a South African folk hero in this month's Stander, will all that change?

BILLY CRYSTAL: Tom, I'm James Lipton. Let me ask you something: You go to heaven, God's there, and he says what to you?

THOMAS JANE: [laughs] He says, "You got the wrong door."

BC: And you say, "Boy, it's hot in here."

[laughs] So how ya doin'?

TJ: I'm pretty good.

BC: And how's that baby of yours?

TJ: Came home and she had a tattoo of a cat on her arm. I go out of town for a couple of days and my 15-month-old daughter gets tattooed.

BC: Was it a real tattoo?

TJ: Well, that's what I wanted to know. But I inspected it, and it's just a wash-off thing. But they look like real tattoos now.

BC: So this is the world's youngest teamster. [Jane laughs] I remember you called me right after she was born and said, "You'll never guess how much Harlow weighs." I asked how much, and you said, "Seven pounds, not an ounce more." Remember how freaky that was? It's Mickey Mantle's baby [Jane played Mickey Mantle, whose uniform number for the New York Yankees was 7, in the Billy Crystal-directed film 61* (2001)].

TJ: If it had been, like, a fraction off, I would have thought, Okay; but the fact that it was on the nose made me feel like it was a sign from somewhere.

BC: You know, when we first met for the part, you came in barefoot with your hair to your shoulders, smoking those French cigarettes. I remember you were maybe 170 pounds then, looking to play this 200-pound bruiser. It was a hard part to cast. But I ended up feeling like it was fate that you got the role. Didn't you feel the same?

TJ: Every day. It was the kind of experience you dream about having, where you start out as one person and when you're done, you're changed from the inside. That's the only time I've had that kind of experience making a movie.

BC: It felt that way for me, too. What I found so fascinating was how you transformed yourself for the role. Of course, you lied to me at the audition that you could play ball.

TJ: [laughs] Well ...

BC: Yeah, I know--you had to. But I'll never forget when we went to meet Reggie Smith, who was going to teach you, and the first thing you asked him was how to hold a ball. I went, "Oh, my God, he's Tommy Tune." We worried that we were going to have to use a double for you, but then two weeks later, Reggie called me up and said, "Come out here. I want you to meet somebody." Then he said, "Hey, Mickey, come over here," and there you were. Your hair was cut, you'd already gained a bunch of weight, and you were swinging from both sides of the plate. Anyway, how did you get your start in the movies in the first place?

TJ: I had dropped out of high school and was taking a little acting class in Bethesda, Maryland, with a great old guy named Ralph Tabakin, who was in all of Barry Levinson's early films--he was sort of like his mascot. Anyway, he calls me up and goes, "Tom, there are these people from India in town, and they're looking for a blond-haired, blue-eyed kid to be in their movie." I said, "Ralph, I don't have blue eyes." And he goes, "You do now. You go down there and get the part, and I get 10 percent 'cause I'm acting as your agent on this regard." So I drive down to this little shack in Virginia, outside of Washington, D.C., and I knock on the door of this house. There're about 19 or 20 of these guys sitting on the floor with their saris draped around them. And one of them asks me to open and close the door, like, 10 times. And then he says [in Indian dialect], "Thank you very much." And the next day they offer me the part.

BC: What was the part?

TJ: A white kid who falls in love with a girl from India--kind of a Romeo and Juliet story in that their parents disapprove, so they run away. The film was called Padamati Sandhya Ragam [1986], which means "Sandhya's western song." We shot all around America, traveling in a giant RV, and then we took off to India, where we finished the movie. I ended up doing a whole press tour there and lived in India for months. I had a blast. In the end, though, they didn't have money to pay me, so they gave me the RV instead, which I promptly trashed with all my friends. I sold it to a mechanic for, like, 800 bucks, bought a '69 Camaro convertible, and drove out West to act.

BC: Your new film, Stander, which hits theaters this month, sounds like a fantastic story.

TJ: It's a great story, a true one--

BC: About a cop in South Africa who becomes a bank robber.

TJ: Yeah. I connected to him right away. It's based on the life of this guy, Andre Stander, who was a cop during apartheid. His dad was a big cop, and he's one of the youngest detectives on the force ever--a very bright kid, top of his class, a real go-getter. Because of apartheid the police force would have to drop whatever they were doing and run over and stifle riots, which basically meant being asked by the government to go kill people. And Stander can't reconcile these acts. He wants to be this great detective and follow in the footsteps of his father, yet he's being asked to do these awful things. So, he starts acting out by robbing banks during his lunch hour, and he gets really invigorated by the idea that by being a policeman he could rob banks and get away with it. He managed to pull it off for a couple of years.