Sixth in Line

What kind of actor is this chameleon-like Alec Baldwin anyway?

If you saw him in “Working Girl” as the Staten Island lover Melanie Griffith scorns, you might think him Method. If you saw him in “Beetlejuice” as the kindly and dead young husband, you might posit some regional theater training. And if you took in “Married to the Mob” and panted over his incarnation of Frank (The Cucumber) DeMarco . . . , well, maybe you thought it was the Flatbush Dramatic Academy and Auto Shop.

You get the same sort of impressed disorientation from speaking with the volatile Baldwin. One minute, the 30-year-old actor is silent, broody, ticked off at The Business. Another: garrulous, chummily profane. The next: impassioned about the craft--and, sometimes, the art--of acting.

“I’m just taking the work I’m given,” he says, somewhat annoyed. “If I didn’t do these roles, I wouldn’t work. I mean, I’m (ticked) off at the way you’re categorized as a certain type by the studios and the guys in the suits--and then you’re locked up doing that. They want a big name--who may or may not be able to act--or nothing in the lead roles.”

A handsome, intense fellow, Baldwin has been offered two sorts of leads so far: “Leads in awful movies, or leads turned down by five other actors.”

“I’ve just recently changed the way I feel about what I do, in some ways,” Baldwin says. “I used to be consumed with making sure I was making art, or involved with people who made art, and that was it. But I have turned down the commercial thing for the more creative thing enough times now.”

But Baldwin cautions against making The Business his or any other actor’s only focus: “Fulfillment on your terms is the thing, man, the only thing there is. These people who make the industry their lives . . . well, they have (awful) lives. No matter how much I work, I’m not letting that happen to me.”