While your typical Hollywood actor makes every effort to achieve a high profile, Sean Patrick Flanery prizes the anonymity his eclectic, mostly indie oeuvre affords him. "It allows you to be a butthole if you want," laughs the Houston-bred actor. "I mean, if Tom Cruise says something when he gets bad service in a restaurant, it's 'Whoa, Tom's getting snooty.' But no one knows me." And indeed, Flanery is barely recognizable as the deadly pale, supernaturally powered character in Powder. ("I looked like an androgynous mosquito larva chemo patient," he notes), and nobody would guess that actor who played that role also starred in TV's "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles." His role in Suicide Kings, a gritty crime comedy about a group of young toughs who abduct a mobster in retaliation for the kidnapping of their friend's sister, adds yet another note: "It's a really twisted, sordid film," Flanery reports with obvious relish.

 

None of which means Flanery is one to go completely unnoticed. He tools around town in a '65 teal Caddy convertible, smog blowing through his streaky hair. With the leather cord knotted around his neck, a winning touch to his overall I-have-a-life-of-the-mind sexiness, he looks more like the Shakespeare-spouting bank robber he plays opposite Drew Barrymore in the Dog Day Afternoon-ish Best Men than the former college triathlete he is.  Despite a taste for KISS concerts and the race car circuit, Flanery cuts a sensitive, romantic so sensitive he claims to frequently make do with the company of his small mutt, Tricky. "If there's nobody I feel like rubbing brain cells with, I just can't be bothered," he explains. "I'm very specific in the things that punctuate my consciousness."