Dillon: I feel like in a way I haven’t had the opportunity to do as broad a spectrum of characters. It’s the one thing I haven’t tapped into as much as I would like to.

Me: Bob from Drugstore Cowboy and Pat Healy from There’s Something About Mary are light-years apart.

Dillon: Yes. It’s true. But I want to do something people wouldn’t naturally see me in. I want to be able to push myself.

Crash costar Terrence Howard: What roles hasn’t he played? The character choices he makes, it’s almost like he’s looking to fail. He may have a stud in his genes, but there’s an artist in his heart.

Wilson: He’s one of those guys like Gene Hackman, where he’s never less than good.

Kevin Bacon, Dillon’s longtime pal: Matt makes his choices based on things other than money and fame, and he’s always kept himself open. That’ll give you a foundation for a lifelong career. He’ll never be a flash in the pan, which is unusual, because, without naming names, how many flashes in the pan was he surrounded by in his early movies? He was just one of the boys, right? But he’s the one who’s hung in.

After 1998’s double whammy of Wild Things and There’s Something About Mary, there was the possibility that you didn’t hear much about Dillon for a while. Eating the right kind of chicken (he tells our waitress he doesn’t want the dark meat) and quitting smoking (it’s been a decade, he says) have kept him camera-ready—as handsome as he was when your older sister swooned over him during her “tin grins are in” era. But, he acknowledges, for a big chunk of time he had fallen off the map.

If you ask Dillon whether he wants to have kids someday (he does), he’ll joke and say, “I had a kid. It was a movie. It took seven years to get made.” He’s talking about 2003’s City of Ghosts, his debut as a feature filmmaker. The insurance-fraud caper was set and filmed in Cambodia. It vibes Joseph Conrad, is full of land mines and amputations, and features a sinisterly grandiose James Caan sporting a James Lipton beard, as well as Gérard Depardieu looking like the twisted offspring of the man in the moon and Andre the Giant.

“It wasn’t this overwhelming success,” Dillon allows. In the United States, it pulled in just over $300,000 (no, there are no zeros missing) and did not play in Peoria. The fact that it got finished at all after enduring financing turbulence in a country beset by coups speaks to Dillon’s can’t-turn-it-off, almost androidlike ambition. For instance, in the middle of preproduction, the brother of Dillon’s assistant got used as a human shield during a rebel attack on the Ministry of Defense.