On Movies: A character actor steadily plies his craft

"He loved old movies, and was an expert on character actors - Walter Brennan, Sydney Greenstreet. He'd watch old Bogart movies and he could name all of the character actors. And it's funny, because people so identify me as this character actor now, and kind of put me in that lineage, and my dad worshipped those people. He didn't really live long enough to see me fully come to fruition. I'd done probably 10 movies or something when he died. But he was very proud. He couldn't believe the success that I had had."

Reilly lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Alison Dickey, an independent producer, and their kids. In addition to Cyrus, he has two titles in the can: Cedar Rapids, a comedy set in the world of insurance sales, with Anne Heche, Ed Helms, and Sigourney Weaver (from Reilly's The Good Girl director, Miguel Arteta), and We Need to Talk About Kevin, "a very sad, somber movie about what it's like to raise a kid that doesn't like you" - and who goes off and commits a horrible crime. Reilly is the kid's dad, Tilda Swinton the boy's mom.

There are other projects in the works, Reilly says, and there's even talk of a Step Brothers sequel ("it's become this real cult movie - people love it, quote it"), but nothing that's certain at this point.

But he's glad to talk about Cyrus.

"A cool thing about this movie is that a lot of the characters do unsympathetic things, or weird things, or overly needy things, but it all comes from a place of love," he says. "It's not because they're bad people, or they're deliberately trying to be bad. They're just desperate. Everyone has moments of desperation."

Contact movie critic Steven Rea at 215-854-5629 or srea@phillynews.com. Read his blog, "On Movies Online," at http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/onmovies/