Busting out

If Prison Break’s homicidal “T-Bag” hadn’t come along, Robert Knepper might be scrubbing urinals today.

He had appeared in dozens of TV shows and films over his 25-year career, but last spring, Knepper was just another unemployed actor looking for work. He’d had a recurring role as Tommy Dolan on the HBO series Carnivàle, but with that show off the air, Knepper needed a new way to pay the bills. “I filled out an application at Will Rogers State Park (near Los Angeles) to be a ranger—cleaning toilets or something,” he says. The park didn’t have any work for him, either.

A few weeks later, he got a call to audition for a small role on Fox’s new drama Prison Break. Murdering rapist Theodore “T-Bag” Bagwell originally was written as a 250-pound gold-toothed, potentially short-lived character, but Knepper had other ideas—particularly about the short-lived part. He gave the inmate an icy stare and an Alabama drawl, and quickly established T-Bag as Fox River State Penitentiary’s indispensable badass. By the time the state park called back last December, Knepper was not only inciting riots on the small screen, he was doing his best to bring down Edward R. Murrow in the Oscar-nominated Good Night, and Good Luck. “The woman from the park said, ‘We have an opening, but you’re probably not going to need it,’?” Knepper says with a laugh.

Indeed, the former Northwestern drama student and Chicago theater vet is setting his sights considerably higher than ranger duty these days. Back in the early 1980s, he cut his teeth at Victory Gardens, the Goodman and Next Theatre. Now he’s shooting for another Hollywood hit: “I want another Good Night, and Good Luck.,” he says over a few pints of pale ale. With Prison Break set to wrap up first-season filming in Joliet this month, Knepper is again looking for work, but this time around he’s in a better bargaining position. The show’s cachet is putting him in contention for quality movie roles, including a part in an upcoming Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia, Boogie Nights) film starring Daniel Day-Lewis.

“You just have to always believe you deserve to be at the dinner table,” he says. “This dinner table [Prison Break] is amazing. The Good Night, and Good Luck. table was amazing…Now that I’ve got a break, they say, Let’s see what he can do. But I know what I can do because I’ve been kicking around a few years.”

The kind of celebrity that comes with being on a hit network show is new to Knepper, but there’s something endearingly innocent about the way he approaches it. After all, a more seasoned celeb probably wouldn’t have been grabbing a smoke in the lobby when his show nabbed the People’s Choice Award for Favorite New TV Drama in January. And few Hollywood vets would “forget” to pick up an award-show goody bag loaded with $20,000 worth of swag (“I didn’t know about the whole goody-bag thing!” he swears).

Throughout the interview, Knepper is amiable and chatty—i.e., nothing like the sociopath he plays on TV. Then, while walking down Clark Street in River North, Knepper unexpectedly channels T-Bag and begins singing “Viva Las Vegas,” a bit that was filmed, but never aired on the show. The song is the only hint of T-Bag that Knepper’s shown all night, and the contrast raises questions about how he brings such a seedy character to life. “In junior high, I had a gym teacher who was a fucking tyrant,” says Knepper, who grew up in Maumee, Ohio, a small town near Toledo. “One day, I forgot my gym shorts and that fucker made me run the track in my jock strap. When I finished, I imagined I had a Saturday Night Special in my locker and I picked it up and killed him. We’re all capable of imagining. You’d never actually do it, but T-Bag would.”

Prison Break brought Knepper back to Chicago for the first time in more than two decades. “It was the best beginning I could have hoped for. [Chicago] is a place where you can take risks. You can fall on your ass and still get up,” he says, recalling his early days in the theater. Back then, the ambitious young actor posted a note on his refrigerator that said, “Chicago is only Chicago. It’s a stepping-stone to New York.”

This time around, though, he has a new appreciation for our city. “I’ll be forever indebted to this town,” he says, noting that this trip, he put a different note on his fridge. It reads, simply, “Thank you, Chicago.”

Prison Break returns from midseason hiatus at 7pm Monday 20 on Fox.