From Mouse to Rat Pack

Starvation, sleeplessness, a mouthful of cotton balls and a bellyful of gin: Method actors have employed all of these well-worn tricks to goad themselves into character. Nevertheless, as a gang kingpin with a lousy conscience and a chronically upset stomach in Warren Beatty's political satire "Bulworth," Don Cheadle may lay claim as the only performer ever to ingest mass quantities of antacids.

"The first few days, I was shooting real Rolaids," Cheadle admits. "After we knew it was a character trait, they got some vitamins. But that first day, it was chalky mouth."

The Rolaids character conceit was Cheadle's sudden inspiration. Despite the CIA-level secrecy that surrounded "Bulworth," someone managed to smuggle in a bottle or two. Beatty had sketched out the part of L.D., the South Central gang leader who delivers a scathing sociopolitical lecture to an unhinged U.S. senator, but after Cheadle came aboard, he and Beatty rewrote the role together.

Perhaps Cheadle's recent bout of gangster indigestion was not completely feigned. Since westerns have been on the wane, few outlaws have murdered with more grace, good humor and sheer frequency. In 1987's "Colors," LAPD patrolmen Sean Penn and Robert Duvall spend the better part of the movie solving the shotgun drive-by that Cheadle's character, Rocket the Crip, commits during the first few minutes.

Cheadle was so endearing as Denzel Washington's psychopathic colleague, Mouse, in 1995's "Devil in a Blue Dress" that he won the National Board of Review and Los Angeles Film Critics awards for best supporting actor. This summer, in "Out of Sight," he debuts as Snoopy, a surly drug dealer, who vies with ex-con George Clooney for a horde of diamonds hidden in the home of a Milken-era robber baron.

"I've been really fortunate to visit a lot of different people," Cheadle, 33, explains over a lunch of sliced turkey and mashed potatoes at Maxwell's in Culver City. "It's just that the gangsters make the most noise."

It is in less trigger-happy roles that Cheadle has demonstrated his ability to transform himself into any character, no matter how esoteric or overly familiar. In "Boogie Nights," Cheadle breathed life into his part as an African American porn star, sullen and self-conscious in his country-western attire, whose life's dream is to launch "Buck's Super Cool Stereo World." For John Singleton's "Rosewood," he played a distraught piano teacher in 1920s Florida who defends his family against a horde of racists.