Pausing en route to the garden at the Chateau Marmont, Liev Schreiber gives a vigorous, double-palmed handshake to a friend he has spotted, the actor-director Tom Gilroy. Schreiber, who is tall, broad-shouldered, and moves with the jaunty ease of an athlete, played one of two male leads in Spring Forward, the little-known 1999 indie that Gilroy wrote and directed. "Six people saw that movie, and I was related to two of them," Schreiber chuckles, with a candor surprising for an actor mid-interview. "But,"he adds, "It's a really great film."

Chain-smoking his way through a Cobb salad, Schreiber, 39, approaches every question with similar frankness. A New Yorker, he has just spent a stint in Los Angeles filming an arc of episodes for CSI—a venture in no danger of a six-person audience—before heading back east to star in a revival of Eric Bogosian's play Talk Radio. Dressed in faded cargo pants and a wrinkled white button-down undone at the collar and cuffs (a tiny stain adorns one sleeve), Schreiber leans forward as he speaks, articulating his thoughts with an unselfconscious intensity. His rumpled attire seems of a piece with his unstudied manner. When asked why, at this stage in his successful film and theater career—critics have called him the best classical actor of his generation—he would appear on the small screen, Schreiber shrugs. "I was impressed by how quickly things move," he says in his unmistakable groggy baritone. "There's not time to over-measure or overanalyze, so you have to be really intuitive." That and, well, "it's fun."

Forthcoming as he is, one senses Schreiber's reluctance to embrace Hollywood, to play the role of famous actor, celebrity persona, subject of interviews. "Once you become well-known, that's who you are, you're that guy, which has nothing to do with who you were before you started acting. So if that's what you were trying to figure out, you've fucked yourself up even further," he says, explaining that he began acting as a way of exploring his own psyche. (His childhood was itinerant and "very bohemian"; his mother, who "was into squats,"took him to live on an ashram.) He tends to resist certain disagreeable aspects of the job: "I would be much farther along in my career if I were better at having my picture taken, but I can't do it." Despite his obvious talents—he has an impressive range, moving from, say, playing Macbeth to starring in a remake of The Omen—Schreiber has remained a critic's actor and has not become a household name. (Though lately his well-documented relationship with Naomi Watts has made him a tabloid regular.) Hollywood, after all, likes its ambition naked and its stars slick, and does not always know what to do with recessive or rough-hewn types (think Christian Bale, Billy Bob Thornton).