PARK CITY, Utah – After 27 years as Hollywood’s quintessential “Outsider,” Matt Dillon is ready to join the club.
Dillon, who has been playing rebels since his 1979 debut (when he was a 14-year-old from Westchester in “Over the Edge”) is widely tipped to receive his first Oscar nomination next week for playing a racist cop in the surprise dramatic hit “Crash.”
“We’ll see, this is all very new to me,” the now middle-age actor says at the Sundance Film Festival, where he picked up a lifetime achievement award and attended the U.S. premiere of his newest film, “Factotum,” in which he gives his best performance yet as a fictionalized version of Beat writer Charles Bukowski.
“I won an Indie Spirit Award a few years ago for ‘Drugstore Cowboy,’ but you never think about awards when you’re doing a movie,” Dillon says. “Most of the time actors don’t even do it for the money.
“It’s nice when they pay off. It’s discouraging when you do the work and nobody sees the movies. People ask you what you’ve been doing.”
Everybody has seen “There’s Something About Mary,” Dillon’s greatest mainstream success, where he played a sleazy detective. But few even know about the 2002 thriller “City of Ghosts,” which Dillon not only starred in but directed on location in Cambodia.
The 41-year-old actor, who has long made his home in Manhattan, where he has an interest in a couple of restaurants, says he was surprised that “Crash” connected so deeply with audiences, even on the East Coast.
“The movie’s landscape is so specific to Los Angeles, where people of different races sometimes only meet in car crashes,” he says with a laugh.
“In New York, people from all economic groups are forced to ride together on the subway. That’s what makes New York one of the world’s great cities.”
Dillon went to Minneapolis to film the darkly comic “Factotum,” which IFC will release here in the fall after the movie opened to widespread praise in Europe last year.
The title means “man of many jobs,” and Dillon plays Bukowski’s hard-drinking alter ego Henry Chinaski, who passes through many menial jobs and sexual flings with women played by Lili Taylor and Marisa Tomei.
“When director Bent Hamer approached me, I had already read most of Bukowski’s fiction,” Dillon says. “I’ve always been drawn to marginal characters on the fringes of society and, in a way, I’ve done 25 years of research for that character.”
But even as he develops a biography of New York mob hit man Eddie Maloney that he may direct as well as star in, Dillon is flirting more with the mainstream.
He surprised fans by appearing in “Herbie: Fully Loaded” last year (“because my nieces and nephews can see it; I’m not robbing drugstores or having a ménage a trois with a high-school girl”) and just completed “You, Me and Dupree,” a comedy opposite Kate Hudson and Owen Wilson.
“Comedy is the hardest thing for me,” Dillon says. “I’ve been doing this since I was a teenager, and the best advice I can give is ‘Let the teeth do the work.’ ”
Read more of Lou Lumenick from Sundance at blogs.nypost.com/sundance
