Sean Astin Enjoyed Role Of Schoolboy Rebel In `Toy Soldiers'

You've seen their faces in People magazine or under tabloid headlines while you stand in line at the supermarket.

They're the child actors or teen idols whose careers faltered and personal lives collapsed, leading them straight to the detox center or drug clinic.

In fact, you read the same sad story so often that when you meet someone like Sean Astin, the 20-year-old son of actors John Astin and Patty Duke, you wonder what's wrong with him. He's dapper, cheerful, alert, intelligent - and on an absurdly even keel for a kid who grew up in the limelight and has been working for a living since he was 7 years old.

Astin was in Seattle recently to promote his latest movie, "Toy Soldiers," which opens tomorrow at several Seattle-area theaters. It's a fast-moving tale about an American prep school that is taken over by Colombian terrorists. It turns out that the schoolboy sons of the power elite make perfect hostages for the Colombians to hold while trying to get their No. 1 man - who's in prison on drug trafficking charges - released by U.S. authorities. Astin plays feisty school rebel Billy Tepper whose reckless, nonconformist streak helps save the day.

Astin, who had major roles in "Staying Together" and "Memphis Belle," was attracted to the role of Billy because he'd never played a character who was angry or rebellious. He loved the pacing of the script, co-written by director Daniel Petrie Jr. ("The Big Easy") and David Koepp ("Bad Influence"), and he appreciated the ethnic mix that Koepp and Petrie incorporated in the story.

The dean of the school is black (Louis Gossett Jr.) and the schoolboys come from a variety of racial and social backgrounds. The film draws on the current unrest in Colombia, while avoiding some of the xenophobic excesses of recent films like Chuck Norris's "Delta Force 2."

"You need a villain and you want the villain to be bad," Astin notes. "But the film isn't jingoistic."

"Toy Soldiers" was shot at the Miller School, a military boarding school near Charlottesville, Va. Care was taken not to set off explosions or fly helicopters overhead while classes were in session, but the actors and students interacted freely.

"They loved it that a movie was being made there," Astin says. "It stirred things up a little."

Also on hand were FBI experts on the handling of hostage crises. Astin asked them "provocative" questions - he wanted to know about the extent of their jurisdiction over the U.S.-Mexican border, and how much traffic they allowed to slip through - but he didn't get many answers.

"They're well trained at not giving anything away," he says.

Astin had never been enrolled in a boarding school - his education was an eclectic mix of public schools and private teachers who tutored him on the set when he was making a movie or television program - and he found himself attracted to the students' "fraternal feeling and mindset." One advantage of moviemaking, he says, is that you can plunge into another lifestyle for a few months and see what it's like.

He confesses to having an anger, exuberance and recklessness in him that helped him bring Billy to life on-screen. The difference between him and Billy, he says, is that he has creative outlets for his energy that are denied Billy. Astin credits his parents for helping him find those outlets.

"I consult them on every decision," he says. "From the time I was 12, every decision was my own - but at the same time, they always have opinions. Most of the things they say make sense to me. So I take that in, bang it around. As an actor, it's great to be able to call on two people who've been doing it for 30 or 40 years."

He counts some of his early career-related discussions - "learning the politics of getting what I wanted, doing what I wanted to do" - as a crucial part of his education.

Whenever a project was under consideration, he'd sit down with his parents, his agent, his school principal and set teacher, and they'd hash out whether he could make a movie and still keep up with his schooling. It was firsthand experience in the arts of debate and conversation: "I wouldn't have missed that for the world."

He also produced and directed a short film recently and is enrolled in a California college where he's majoring in history. His

ambition, however, is to prove himself as a versatile screen performer. Astin says, "I'm an actor for the long haul."