Gunfire, billowing smoke and raging fires are props usually reserved for flashy movie sets. But on the FHM Collections cover shoot in a seedy downtown Los Angeles hotel, the smoke and flames that are making their way onto the roof where actor Barry Pepper is posing with Australian model/actress Kristy Hinze are all too real. As are the helicopters hovering overhead, nervously monitoring the situation, and the fire trucks called to deal with the cover-threatening blaze. Fortunately, the conflagration – started, it turns out, by a careless crackhead two floors below – is soon brought under control.

“He was asleep with a cigarette in his mouth,” Pepper says of the culprit. “The stairwells were full of freaks, the elevators were broken, and down below I could hear gunfire,” he adds, waving his hands as if describing the latest ride at Disneyland.

For any other actor this might have been enough to elicit a temper tantrum or an angry call to his agent, but the quiet and impeccably well-mannered Pepper, cool under pressure like the characters he plays, didn’t break a sweat.

The 31-year-old blue-collar boy from a farming family of Canadian cowboys, most famous ad the Bible-quoting sharpshooter in Saving Private Ryan, has plenty of experience with extreme situations. He spent five years of his adolescence at sea onboard a 50-foot sloop his mother and father built to sail around the South Pacific. Then, as a young adult, he lived in a hippie commune on a Canadian island settled by American ex-pats and the offspring of death-row prison workers. “It was a real crazy, eclectic community,” he says, “where there were barefoot dances, farmer’s markets, live bands and sweaty freaks, hippies and gays.”

He started acting in Vancouver in 1992 and paid his dues on every half-baked TV show from Highlander and Lonesome Dove to Sliders and Outer Limits. When he did arrive in Hollywood, it took him a mere three months to land Saving Private Ryan. That led to The Green Mile and a role in Battlefield Earth that he’d rather forget. Currently, he’s getting ready for the release of We Were Soldiers with Mel Gibson. Pepper plays a photojournalist who is forced into combat in Vietnam.

Splitting his time between LA and a five-acre farm in western Canada, this most regular of regular-guy actors and married father of a one-year-old daughter has a tolerance for the bizarre and insane that is unheard of – as shown by his day in Crackville. “Before we started the shoot, all these toothless winos and crackheads were banging on my car window trying to sell me Percodan and uppers,” Pepper, sharply but casually dressed in black pants and a white shirt, says. “I knew it would be a strange day. And I had a great time.” 

Much like the freaks in this neighborhood, you do a lot of killing in your movies. How close have you come to killing someone in real life?

My buddy and I were screwing around as teenagers. My dad had this two-level workshop and there was a door between the two levels. The door was open, and my buddy and I were throwing rusty darts at each other as we ran past the door. I caught one right in the arm, right in the shoulder. It was just so demented. I nearly killed him a few times.

In your new movie, We Were Soldiers, you play another gun-toting hard guy. Do you take classes in bravado?

I wanted everything to be as authentic as possible. Everything down to what kind of cigarettes he smoked, down to the fact that he had a little can opener for eating his rations attached to his dog tag. This guy stepped onto a battlefield with just a camera and no helmet and wanted to be a part of what was going down in Vietnam. It was the place to be for a young reporter and that battlefield turned into such an absolute hell storm. He was handed an M-16 and said, “I’m a noncombatant.” But they said, “Not today, son.” He had to help fight. So he walked on the battlefield a witness and walked off a soldier.

You train for your movies. What was the coolest bit you’ve experienced?

I just did ranger boot camp in Fort Benning, GA. When I got there, the general asked if I would go out and meet with the snipers. I learned so much more than I ever did in the research for Saving Private Ryan. I got to shoot their Remington 700 at a 700-yard target. I hit a few in the chest. It’s so specialized because they spend so much time in the bush in camouflage and that’s their mission. The snipers I met with really gave me a strong indication that snipers are real loners. They’re fascinating guys.

On the other end of the spectrum of toughness, is it true you were in a boy band?

I was in this band called Band in the UK. It didn’t matter if you could sing. I did the dance choreography for it and some backup vocals. It was lame. We cut a video and a CD. We were No. 1 on the local radio station for a week. It was embarrassing as all get out. Everybody’s got skeletons, right?

Growing up on a hippie island, you must have seen so much ‘70s stuff.

Hippie women with bushy armpits and cotton dresses and all, yeah. They reeked of amazing homegrown grass. There were nude beaches and areas where squatters would just find a plot of land and put up a tepee or live in a school bus. And kids in tie-dyed diapers!

Did you dabble in the tie-dye, bellbottom pants and platform-shoe craze?

I was into psychedelics more. But mostly hot pinks, purples, sky blues and psychedelic colors. It was really hot for a few summers and then it died out.

What other fashion trends were you into that fell off?

I used to breakdance. We were the West Coasters. My handle was “Dr. Pepper” – you know, tracksuits, bandanas, the whole bit.

Were your folks people of peace and nature?

My dad was a lumberjack. He was a scrapper. He was the guy Harrison Ford and Clint Eastwood play in movies. Some drunk would come up and start hassling my mom at a party, and he’d cold-cock him. Drop him on the floor like a side of beef. He taught me to fight by knocking my lights out in the backyard. He was rugged.

You’ve played in a couple of movies with Vin Diesel, who seems to be a bit of a scrapper himself. Could you knock him on his ass?

He can kick some serious ass. He used to be a bouncer in New York before he got into the business. Vin is trained in jujitsu and shute wrestling so that would be a pretty serious fight. I think with Vin, my speed in boxing would be to my advantage. I just got hooked up with a guy who’s teaching me Brazilian shute wrestling. But I’m more fascinated with martial arts – kung fu and tai chi. There’s a great book you might like to check out; it’s called Bruce Lee’s Fighting Method. And it’s all knees, eyes, throat and groin. I couldn’t believe that Bruce Lee’s there in the pictorials telling you how to mangle somebody.

Do you worry about the “Skeet Ulrich Curse of the It Guy”?

No, and you know why? Because I’ll only get there when I totally deserve it, not because somebody out there says or writes, “I discovered him.” And not because I have the cheekbones for it. I don’t want to be there until I feel like I have the chops to back it up. And that’s the way my career’s gone so far.

When was the last time you pulled some cliché celebrity move?

We were filming on this lake in California and I had a house with my wife and baby. I was walking around at night with bare feet, turning out the lights and shutting the doors. I was shutting the last door and boom, I got stung on the foot by a scorpion. So my wife comes down, she’s got a flashlight and she’s up on a chair. I’m squeezing the blood and venom out, and I hear this skittering, this clattering across the linoleum. And the little prick’s running for me again. The next day, the agent gets on the horn, starts freaking out, and there’s a big hoopla. I was embarrassed, because everyone on set heard about it. I’ve got the scorpion in a little Ziploc bag now. I kept him. We don’t have scorpions up in Canada.

Have you ever blown a part by screwing up an audition?

I auditioned for the role of a bartender. I had bartended, so I figured I was a shoe-in. I could do all kinds of tricky stuff with the bottles, flipping this and that. I could take the cap off a beer with my forearm and then drop it into my hand and flick it across the room into the garbage can. So I threw a couple of beers into my knapsack and off I rode on my mountain bike. I got in there and I threw on a white shirt, black vest and a bartender’s apron. I pulled these two beers out of my pack, put them on the table, they called “action,” and the beers burst all over the casting director and director and all of her papers on the table. They just exploded, man. I didn’t get the job. My agent heard about it and yelled at me and told me to never again bring live props to an audition. It was pretty humiliating.

You came to LA in a ’71 Dodge Dart named Grace. Do you still have it?

We gave it to a friend, a single mother. Her husband left her in the lurch with their young sons. She was on welfare and couldn’t afford a car, so we gave her Grace. I got it totally repaired, got an engine and everything done up for her so that it was in good running condition. All I said to her was when my daughter turns 16 you have to give it back to us, you can’t sell it. I said that anything that goes wrong with it I’ll repair – new tires, new engine, whatever. But at the end of the road, who knows if my daughter will even want that piece of crap.

When you’re not hanging out in a crackhouse in Armani and Dolce & Gabbana, what are you wearing?

Tonight I put on some nice clothes because I thought I’d go have a good meal with a friend of mine. I have about 20 suits that every designer in this city has given me. Bit it’s always jeans and T-shirts.