I’m talking with Justin Kirk in the lobby of The W Hotel, which is very sleek and shiny. Justin Kirk is also quite sleek and shiny: spotless and sharp and refined, with just a touch of arrogance riding in them thar high cheekbones. There’s something Byronian about his forehead and the perfect slope of his nose, too. He’s chewing on a toothpick. His teeth are perfect, his hair is perfect—sexier still from the gentle dusting of white just behind his ears. He’s wearing a respectable “I-just-turned-sexy/forty” ensemble of jeans/striped button-down-under-a-casual-black-cashmere-spring-pull-over. We are both wearing Converse All-stars. Mine are smudged. His are surgical. You really notice how smudged your Converse are when you're sitting next to Justin Kirk.

Sitting next to Justin Kirk, I feel like a dish rag.

You remember Mr. Kirk, of course, as AIDSy Prior Walter from the mostly fabulous made-for-teevee HBO version of Angels in America, also with Meryl Streep and Al Pacino. Or maybe you remember him from Weeds, on Showtime. (I’ve never seen Weeds. It’s an embarrassing point of conversation. I try to fake it, but he catches on right away. “Weeds isn’t about people who sell weed anymore—it’s about these people's descent into criminality.” Fuck!)

But I’ve seen Angels in America 42 million times—but just recently. I’ve read the script(s) compulsively since I was a wee impressionable fag circa the early ‘90s (they shattered me, if you must know), and for a very long time I avoided stage productions and the television version like the, um, plague. I had a very stubborn vision of the characters, and I didn’t want to be disappointed, or to have my vision sullied. But Justin was a perfect Prior Walter. (Meryl Streep as the Rabbi, however? Whiney Lewis? Emma Thompson’s angel? Meh.) But I really fell in love with Prior/Justin. Spots and explosive crap and all.

SIFF brought Justin to town, of course. He’s in two films that just blew through: Four Boxes, which is a very film-festival-y looking sort of affair with a choppy, homemade seeming trailer that offers absolutely no information on what the damn thing’s actually about; and Against the Current, which is a very slick and much bigger-budget flick featuring also Joseph Fiennes, Mary Tyler Moore, and that awful Michele Trachtenberg wench who ruined Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Justin assures us that the film is very funny, despite the rather gravid synopsis and trailer, but it looks like a big, teary, emo chick-flick to me. It’s about a guy (Mr. Fiennes) who swims the entire Hudson River to mark the five year anniversary of the MORBID DEATHS of his wife and daughter.

A swimmy pilgrimage of morbid death? In the corpse-rich Hudson? Hilarious!

Justin has been touring the film festival circuit promoting one or the other of these films all spring. Justin lives in LA now, after ten years in New York, and the vibes coming off of him are still definitively New Yorky, but believe it or not, he’s a local (please pardon the expression)—a Washington Native—quite literally, almost: He went to grade school on “The Res,” in Union Washington, on the Hood Canal. His mother and younger sister live in Olympia. They are browsing Pike Place Market as Justin and I speak. They’re waiting for him to be done with his interviewings. I feel guilty—like I should hurry up. So I dive in and I ask him “questions.”

God, how I hate “questions.”

I ask about his role in Against the Current. “I play an under-employed actor/bartender and I’m asked to follow along with my best friend in a boat as he swims the Hudson River.” I ask him if his friend is trying to commit suicide—which the trailer kinda definitely leads me to believe. He refuses to say. I give him my entire theory that I developed just watching the trailer ten times: "Your character finds out half way through the trip that your swimmy friend is suicidal, and then you have to save him. It’s a redemption film!” “Well, some of that’s sort of close, but some of it’s wrong.” He’s just not budging.

Then Angels in America suddenly comes up. I’m not quite sure how. I confess that I’ve just seen it—that I TiVo’ed the sucker, no less.

“Did you TiVo it from LOGO?” I admit, yes. Ugh. “That’s the censored version…they cut out all the good parts: the sex and nudity.” Sex? Nudity? Justin Kirk with his perfect hair and kill-me-now smile and respectable sweater and size 10.5 All-stars just said “Sex and Nudity” to me? In reference to his own Sex and Nudity? And suggests that I experience more of it? I’m having a heart attack.

I promise to rent the uncut (ahem) version of Angels soon. Still, I mention, edited for television or not, the LOGO version still clearly features at least two scenes in which his rather ample penis is quite plainly visible through his thin pajama bottoms. Things sort of blur at this point—my eyes cross, my smile fixes, my cheeks flush, my freckles vibrate, and I don’t really remember how he responds. I try not to let my eyes drift in the direction of the actual ample penis in question, which is just. Sitting. Right. There. I kind of wish I’d shut the god-damn-hell-fuck up.

I come-to and deflect: I ask him about Four Boxes, the weirder looking of the two SIFF movies that he’s in. He calls it, “Fantastic,” and isn’t kidding. He is really and genuinely excited about it—you can tell. The project was conceived and executed by his best friend as a kid. “These kids I grew up with are now great artists,” he says. He admits to the film’s low-budgey-ness, but tows the line on the “heart” of the film, “Every morning there’d be a different sound crew—you know, it was all kids who were all doing it because they loved it, and they were excellent at it…these kids in the middle of no where.” You love it? “I love it.” It played back-to-back with Against the Current at SIFF, “It’s like mother coordinated this festival showing,” he says.

Goddamm Angels in America comes up again. (I have no clue how!) He surprises me. "It was miserable. I mean, it was a great show, but it was a miserable time for me. It’s the play of my generation, and working with Meryl Streep and Al Pacino and Emma Thompson…You wake up every morning feeling as if you could never possibly be good enough—it’s not a good place to be as an actor. I just hoped my fear and loathing would translate itself into Prior’s fear and loathing.” I want to lick his ear.

The conversation comes back to Against the Current, and its notable cast. Mostly, I asked him why I shouldn’t murder Michele Trachtenberg, who cameos in the film, for destroyingBuffy. (Do you hear me, Michele Trachtenberg!? I blame YOU!) “Tracky?" he says, "You hated her?” Despised her, I did. “What did you hate about her?” She was whiney and irritating and obnoxious. And she ruined Buffy. “Well, she was like 14 or something right? Now she’s just mostly a sex bomb…You should give her another chance.” Whatever. And what about working with Mary Tyler Moore? (She’s in Against the Current too, for a minute). Justin tells me that working with Mary was, “Daunting.” Really? “You're daunted by Mary Tyler Moore?”

But, lo, our time is up. His mom and sister are waiting. And I have things to do too, of course—much better things to do than sit around mooning at the hotness of Justin Kirk all day.

Um, yeah. Like sponge off my damn All-stars.