On a baking-hot day in Glendora, in the San Gabriel Valley, 23 miles from downtown Los Angeles, Eric Roberts is trying to straighten his tie. His director, Doug Campbell, blocks a pivotal scene in the hallway of Citrus College in which Eric, playing the predatory Dr. Beck, is confronted by one of his medical-school students. She barges into his classroom and throws him against the blackboard. In the rehearsal, Eric looks genuinely surprised: “Whoa, you scared me, honey!”

The movie is Stalked by My Doctor 3.

The third installment in the popular Lifetime franchise, it marks Eric’s 74th movie role—just last year alone. As of this writing, he’s credited with 487 film and television appearances. In fact, he may well be considered for inclusion in Guinness World Records as the American actor with the most film credits. (The current world-title holder, the comedic Telugu film actor Brahmanandam Kanneganti, known for his “hilarious facial expressions,” clinched that record in 2010, with 857 screen appearances.) There are times when Eric does three movies in one day—literally racing from one indie set to another. Some days are so ridiculous as to be almost sublime, as when he acted simultaneously in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight and in Witless Protection with Larry the Cable Guy.

So you need a lot of bandwidth to prowl through Eric’s filmography on IMDB. In truth, Roberts is in front of a camera nearly every day of his life. Like one of Hamlet’s Players, he’s an itinerant actor wandering the countryside looking for any stage. He’s been in mainstream television shows, such as Grey’s Anatomy and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, but in the last three decades most of his television shows and movies have had titles such as Sorority Slaughterhouse, Hansel and Gretel: Warriors of Witchcraft, Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs, Sicilian Vampire, and Snow White: A Deadly Summer.

There was a time—40 years ago—when Eric was poised to become a bona-fide leading man, after his powerful debut performance in Frank Pierson’s 1978 King of the Gypsies, based on the book by Peter Maas. He next co-starred as Sissy Spacek’s love interest in the 1981 drama Raggedy Man, followed by a scarifying performance two years later as the desperate bottom-feeder Paul Snider in Star 80, about the murder of Playboy model Dorothy Stratten. His compelling performance as a young would-be mobster on the make, playing opposite Mickey Rourke in The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984), helped make that film a cult classic. His role as a runaway redneck, Buck McGeehy, in Andrei Konchalovsky’s thrilling Runaway Train brought him an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor in 1986. The Golden Globes had already nominated him for best newcomer for King of the Gypsies, the movie that was going to change his life. Instead, his life changed him.

So what happened?

At 61, he’s considered a journeyman actor, not a “star” (his Web site introduces him as “Eric Roberts, Actor”)—but he’s more than that, because he’s also a legend. Dr. Rico Simonini can testify to that. Dr. Simonini is an eminent Los Angeles cardiologist, and he’s also a working actor. He’s producing an independent film, Frank and Ava, in which he plays Frank Sinatra and Eric plays notorious Columbia Pictures mogul Harry Cohn. Simonini says that to many of the A-list actors he knows, such as Leonardo DiCaprio, “Eric is a god. He’s the man.”

I met with Roberts and his wife, Eliza Roberts, at the castellated Chateau Marmont, on Sunset Boulevard. She and I watched Eric wade joyfully through the welcoming smiles of the servers, desk clerks, busboys—the whole Chateau staff. He stopped to talk to them and share a joke, pausing in front of the large, ornate mirror at the hotel’s entrance, where he stole a glimpse of himself. “Oh, God,” he said. “Chris Walken and I coiffed ourselves in front of this mirror 40 years ago, and not one molecule of this place has changed!” He loped once around the garden on his long, skinny legs to see if there was anyone he knew but quickly came back into the nearly empty bar, where his wife and I were waiting.

Blue-eyed, auburn-haired Eliza is a casting director and actress (she played Brunella in Animal House and appeared in the 1976 remake of A Star Is Born) who conveys warmth, strength, and brains.

They met on an MGM Grand airlines plane, seated next to each other. “I had David Rayfiel’s, my biological father’s, script Intersection on my lap,” she recalls. (Rayfiel co-wrote the screenplays for Three Days of the Condor, Round Midnight, and The Firm, among others.) “So, as soon as I was seated next to Eric, I was like, Damn it, I didn’t want to talk shop, but the Oscars had just happened where Eric was nominated for Runaway Train, and Eric loved David’s writing. So there were all these strange connections. . . . But I thought he was probably gay because he was very pretty and had a cat on his lap named Tender.”

They married six years later.

Theirs is clearly a love match, but she’s the first to say that Eric can be trouble: “He’s had the bad-boy image from age 19 to 59, and still the crush-worthiness of him spans generations and genders.”

Like Christopher Walken, Eric can convey both menace and offbeat humor. Campbell says, “Eric has a keen sense for comedy, and he’s not afraid to be utterly goofy on-camera. Yes, he has played a lot of bad guys, but with our slightly comedic Stalked by My Doctor franchise, he gets to bring a little Jerry Lewis to the set. He gets to be funny, and vulnerable.” And what makes him great to work with, Campbell attests, is that Eric “is very easy to direct. He’s always there on time, and he’s the fastest actor out of the makeup and wardrobe mill. He wants to be on set, and he wants to work. He likes acting, and he’s there to play. . . . He’s genuinely happy to be working, and he truly is fun to be around. No ego, no vanity whatsoever. Very down to earth.”

So, again, given his love of the work, his dedication, his edgy beauty, his unmistakable talent—what happened? Why didn’t he have the long-lived, leading-man career of, say, Tom Hanks, Harrison Ford, Leonardo DiCaprio, or Johnny Depp? Why did his sister Julia Roberts become one of the biggest stars in the world, and he didn’t?

Basically, there are two answers to that question.

The first has to do with Eric’s decades-long drug abuse. Now in the past, at one time it had a heavy impact on his life and work. Then there was the car accident that left him in a coma for three days, roughed up his face, and resulted in some neurological damage, overcome through months of therapy.

Celebrity Rehab

The drug problem involved both cocaine and marijuana. “I would go to meetings with people that mattered, like Oliver Stone and Sean Penn,” he confesses, “and I would go stoned. Woody Allen. I met him very stoned, and he dismissed me, as well he should have. I did that for about 10 years. The whole point being I was asking for help, saying, ‘You see where I’m at—now help me, because I’m worth helping.’ I get it now. I just didn’t get it when I should have.”

Eric was doing a lot of coke, which at the time was running through Hollywood like a contagious rash. “You’d arrive [on the set] in the morning, and they’d send you to the prop truck, where there’d be bowls of cocaine,” Eric explains. “Everybody from executives to craft service was doing cocaine. I was doing it to the point where my wife said, ‘It’s me or the coke.’ I did all the psychotropics. I got myself arrested [in 1987 for possession of pot and cocaine and resisting arrest]. I went back to pot. I’ve been a pothead all my life, with several sober breaks I refer to as binge sobriety.”

Though he had managed to end his cocaine addiction years before, in 2010 Eric entered the world of reality television by appearing on Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew, which brings together a handful of known personalities who are struggling with substance abuse—usually the kiss of death for a working actor. Addressing his marijuana addiction, Eric appeared in Season Four, along with former model and reality-show regular Janice Dickinson, musician and former teen idol Leif Garrett, and Jason Davis, grandson of a former co-owner of Twentieth Century Fox, Marvin Davis.

“These shows are sanctioned voyeurism,” Eliza says, but they jumped in anyway. “Boy, did we get some flak—everybody from family to his agents, they were like, ‘You cannot do this!’ ”

But a funny thing happened on the way out of rehab. Eliza called several producers and casting directors and asked if they stopped considering people who had appeared on shows like Celebrity Rehab. “Across the board, everyone said, ‘Absolutely not. If anything, we look at them more supportively. We’re going to vilify somebody for sharing their struggle?’ ”

Instead of abandoning him, casting agents welcomed him. “Some of the best shows he’s done, he’s done since Celebrity Rehab,” says Eliza.

Where It All Started

Eric Roberts was born in Biloxi, Mississippi, and grew up in Georgia. His parents ran a children’s theater company, but they split up when he was 15 after a contentious marriage, which Eric remembered as “a catastrophe. They were married for 16 years; it was very emotional, very loud. It was very much an ‘I love you, fuck you’ marriage.” After the divorce, his sisters, Lisa and Julia, lived in Smyrna, Georgia, with their mother, Betty, while Eric lived in Atlanta with his father, Walter.

As a child, Eric suffered from “horrible stuttering. Not just once or twice but every time I opened my mouth. For years, the whole class found it amusing. . . . They would laugh, and it killed me. All these fucking rednecks, you know, and they hated me when I was little, and it was a drag.”

Acting saved him. He found that when he memorized lines he could speak without stuttering. He spent part of the summer of 1973 at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). Only 17, he returned to Georgia, but a few years later he left for New York. There he lived at a Y.M.C.A. and took classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He found TV work, on the soap opera Another World. “I was the world’s worst soap actor,” Eric would remember later. He was fired partway through his first season.

But Eric caught a lucky break when he met casting director Marion Dougherty. “She was the most successful, biggest, most famous, most career-changing, industry-changing casting director that’s ever been,” he says. “She discovered Robert Redford. She made star after star after star.” Having seen Roberts in a play at the American Academy, Dougherty—along with Juliet Taylor, her young protégée at Marion Dougherty Associates—took Eric in and introduced him to the manager Bill Treusch, who represented Chris Walken and Sissy Spacek. “He signed me the day I talked to him,” Eric recalls. “Never saw me work, but he took Marion and Juliet’s recommendation and signed me. Got me my first movie, King of the Gypsies.”

In 1979 he got cast as the fiery young seminarian in Mass Appeal, at the Manhattan Theatre Club. In those days one of the places Eric hung out was the Cafe Central, on 75th and Amsterdam. “It was kind of a hot spot for a lot of actors, musicians, ballet dancers,” recalls the producer and actress Colleen Camp. “Baryshnikov would be there, and Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, and, a little later, Mickey Rourke. Bruce Willis was the bartender. If someone was doing a play, they’d go to Cafe Central.” That’s where Colleen first met Eric. Later, when both were living in Los Angeles, she was impressed with how funny he could be, so she asked him, “Why aren’t you doing comedy? You’re freaking hilarious.”

King of the Gypsies

For his first film, Eric was thrown in among seasoned actors—Sterling Hayden, who was enjoying a resurgence after playing the crooked cop in The Godfather, Shelley Winters, and a young Susan Sarandon. “I was the only one who was a rookie in the whole cast,” he explains. “I worked my ass off all night, got about three hours’ sleep from anxiety, get up and go again. I was a 21-year-old kid who was scared to death.”

“I walk in,” he says. “I smell hashish very strongly. I see the smoke in the air, I smell it, and I recognize it. So I’m in this little trailer filled with hashish, and Sterling Hayden is smoking a pipe.”

The first thing Hayden said to Eric was “Want to get high?” Eric demurred, explaining, “I can’t work if I’m stoned. I don’t talk well when I’m fucked up. He goes, ‘You do get fucked up, don’t you?’ I said, ‘On occasion.’ He says to me, ‘O.K., let’s get down to business. What scene are we shooting tonight?’ ”

“I said, ‘Scene 87.’ He says to me, ‘I don’t give a shit about the fuckin’ number. What happens in the scene?”’

Eric answered, “It’s kind of a pivotal scene, Mr. Hayden. I run away from home, and you’ve come to find me, and you have your thugs grab me and bring me back because you want to hand your kingdom to me, and not to your son.”

Hayden asked if Eric was good at improvisation, “because that’s what we’re doing,” and so they improvised the whole scene. “I felt like I was skydiving,” Eric recalls, “but I had a parachute. I wasn’t scared, but I was thrilled. . . . After we worked together, Sterling said to me, ‘You’re in for a big ride. They’re going to try to get you to move to Hollywood. Do not do it.’ I was like, O.K., O.K., because he was adamant.”

Some years later, Eric would visit Hayden in his hospital room. He was dying of cancer, which is what had killed Eric’s father. “I was probably more numb to it than I would’ve been otherwise, because of watching my father die. . . . So I never felt the pain, up until he said to me, ‘Don’t come back anymore.’ I said, Why? He goes, ‘Because I need to die.’ And then I started to feel the loss.”

High on cocaine, Eric had a horrific car accident in 1981. “I was in a coma. My speech was very retarded. I had to learn how to walk again and talk again. It was really hard.” Eric spent two months going to rehab every day, getting back in shape, but he continued to have short-term memory issues, not uncommon with brain trauma.

He went back to work, hired to reprise his role as the seminarian in Mass Appeal on Broadway with Milo O’Shea, directed by Geraldine Fitzgerald. Because he had already performed it, he knew all the lines, but he and Fitzgerald disagreed about how to play his character. Eric quit the play before it opened. As a result, he says, she “told everybody I wasn’t healed from my car accident. The phone calls stopped. Nobody called Eric Roberts. Except Bob Fosse, who said, ‘I want you to come in and audition.’ ”

Star 80

Eric feels that Bob Fosse saved his career. “I got hip to Fosse as a kid when I watched Lenny [the 1974 movie about the controversial comedian Lenny Bruce], which I thought was the best movie I’d ever seen at the time. So I kept track of Bob Fosse because of that, but then he didn’t make a lot of movies. Then I leave home and I’m out in the world and he does All That Jazz—oh, my God!”

Eric read for him four, five, six times. Fosse—a dancer and choreographer—asked him to stand up, walk around, and then skip around the room. “He said, ‘Have a seat. I was told you were crippled.’ I said, No, and he said, ‘O.K. Want to make my movie?’ I said, ‘Oh, dude, yes.’ ”

Fosse cast Eric as the villain of Star 80, Paul Snider, a small-time hustler who discovers Dorothy Stratten at a Dairy Queen in Canada and orchestrates her career as a model and actress. When she leaves him for director Peter Bogdanovich, Snider becomes murderous, stalking Dorothy and brutally killing her with a shotgun. Eric brought what would become his trademark mix of wounded vulnerability and murderous instincts to the role—to great acclaim.

Eric’s Paul Snider is an incredible creation, disturbing and powerful. “Let me tell you something—all humble bullshit aside—I owe every inflection, innuendo, movement, to Bob Fosse. We spent three months doing research before we ever shot a frame. We were together every day for 90 days, day in and day out. And the stuff he did, I can’t even tell you, he was so fucking wired.”

At one point, shooting a scene that didn’t end up in the movie, Eric blew a line and called Cut. “But you don’t call Cut on a Bob Fosse set unless you’re Bob Fosse,” Eric says.

Fosse walked across this huge soundstage and said, “Come here.”

Eric braced himself, but that’s when Fosse gave him a director’s note that nailed the performance: “You’re playing me if I weren’t successful. Do you understand?”

“On the way back to set, I watched how he walked, his little ass swinging, and I played Fosse for the rest of the movie. I understood the desperation. But who is going to expose himself like that to an actor? Fosse was a genius—an overused and abused word—but he was.”

Eric was so convincing as the disturbed Snider that, for months after the movie came out, he would be walking in Manhattan and women would cross the street to avoid him. “The first dozen times this happened, I felt weird, but then I asked Chris Walken, Why is that?”

“Because you’re fucking spooky, dude,” he said. That was the beginning of Roberts’s being cast as a troubled, dangerous guy—with the misconception that he was simply playing himself in the movies.

It was the most exciting thing in the world when his manager Bill Treusch said to Eric, “I want to show you something,” at the end of the press tour for King of the Gypsies. “I go up to Sunset Boulevard and there’s this billboard that says, KING OF THE GYPSIES. IT’S ALMOST HIS TIME. And I cried. I thought I had arrived.”

Based on his strong performance in King of the Gypsies and the sheer impact of his screen presence, Paramount offered him a three-picture deal, Eric recalls, but Treusch advised him against it. “He said, ‘They’re going to make you into an adolescent superstar, and then you’re going to be stuck.’ ”

Eric begged him: “It’s a lot of money. I come from poverty!” But Treusch won out and Eric turned down the offer. (Treusch declined to comment for this article.)

Later, in 1985, Eric also turned down the lead role in 9 1/2 Weeks, which made Mickey Rourke the darling of French cinephiles. Looking back, Eric says, “I always wished I had [taken that role], but I thought Mickey was awesome in that movie.”

If Mickey Rourke was a rock star in France, Eric Roberts is a superstar . . . in Russia. His continued popularity there stems from Andrei Konchalovsky’s 1985 Runaway Train and a pair of martial-arts movies, Best of the Best and Best of the Best 2. In Runaway Train, Eric nearly steals the picture from Jon Voight’s mean-as-hell escaped convict, Manny. As a tagalong escapee, Eric employs his southern drawl to portray layers of hurt, confusion, and even innocence, which earned him his Academy Award nomination, for best supporting actor. “I go to Russia,” Eric says, “and I’m like Elvis Presley.” Russian women grab him on the streets of Moscow and start screaming. He’s even had to resort to bodyguards, but he felt they were “too mean, so I’d have to tell them, ‘No, be nice to people,’ and they’d say, ‘No, I protect you.’ ”

Good-Bye for Meow

King of the Gypsies came out, and, soon after, PBS produced an adaptation of Willa Cather’s short story “Paul’s Case.” Again, Eric says, Treusch didn’t want him to do it, telling him, “You’re not a PBS actor.” However, Eric insisted—he had liked the story when he had read it as a kid, so he took the role. That’s when Sandy Dennis came into his life.

In 1966 the eccentric, mannered actress had won an Oscar for playing the mousy faculty wife Honey in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? She was almost 20 years older than Eric. After seeing him in Paul’s Case, she called Treusch and said, “Oh, my God, this actor! I think he’s the next big thing, if he can get the material.” So Treusch introduced them.

What first impressed Eric when he walked into Sandy Dennis’s house in Westport, Connecticut, was her 2,500-book library. Even when he was a boy, disappearing into books was one way Eric handled his social isolation. “So I go over to Sandy’s house and we start talking about books. After about a month, I’m over there in the afternoon, just me and her in the house, and we’re having a talk about cats. How many cats on this property? She goes, Probably 30. And her house had 12 rooms, so you didn’t feel cats were an issue. So I was fine with it. And I’m a cat person anyway. . . . The next thing I know we were rolling around together.”

They began “this little book affair,” which turned into a four-year relationship, from 1980 to 1983. It almost ended, Eric says, after he had a brief relationship with another actress while Dennis was on the road doing a play. Sandy found out and forgave him, but there was another problem: “Too many cats. By now there’s a hundred cats. Not 30, there’s 100,” Eric recalls. He offered to start an animal shelter if she would agree to keep just 10 or 12, but Sandy refused. Neither would budge, so Eric asked for his engagement ring back. Over the years he had bought her an antique jewelry box and a lot of jewelry, but he wanted her to return only the ring.

“Sandy went upstairs and stood at the top of the winding staircase,” Eric recalls. “Here’s your engagement ring,” she said as she hurled the jewelry box and it crashed to the floor, smashing into pieces.

He never saw her again. (She died in 1992.)

The Pope of Greenwich Village

In 1983, Eric was appearing in Hartford in The Glass Menagerie when he got the script for The Pope of Greenwich Village, based on the darkly comic best-seller by Vince Patrick. It came with a note from the producers offering him the lead role of either Paulie or Charlie, Italian cousins who get on the wrong side of the Mob after pulling off a heist. Eric studied the script and chose Paulie, the younger, edgier cousin, only to hear that they’d hoped he’d play Charlie, because they didn’t think he looked tough enough to play the hothead would-be mobster Paulie. But he didn’t want to look tough—he wanted to play him as “a mama’s boy who wants to be a tough guy, because I know those guys.” So he lost 30 pounds and had his hair permed, and he played Paulie as a hyped-up, reckless dumb-ass who gets his thumb sliced off by Bedbug Eddie’s henchmen.

Eric felt that the producers—and Mickey Rourke, his co-star—were not happy. That’s not how they saw the character.

Eric recalls, “O.K., we get five days of rehearsal before we’re starting to shoot. It’s the last week of August. I’m ready to go. I know every word of my dialogue. I’m in character. I spent a lot of time in Little Italy.” (After The Pope of Greenwich Village, Eric says, he never had to pay for a cup of espresso in Little Italy again.) “I know what I’m doing—I know all the lingo.”

Three days in, the director asked Eric to resign.

“So I went up to Mickey’s room”—they were staying at the Mayflower Hotel in Manhattan. “What’s up? The director asked me to resign. What?! So we called the producers and they fired that director.” They eventually hired Stuart Rosenberg (Cool Hand Luke, The Amityville Horror) to take over, and he understood what Eric was after. And Eric’s Paulie is unforgettable—a driving piston of big dreams and bad ideas, alongside Rourke’s cool, savvy, heroic Charlie. They are great together, but in scene after scene you just can’t take your eyes off Eric. He nails it again, playing another schizo-affective personality, a dangerous, charismatic dude, which meant producers stopped thinking of him as a leading man. He was just too good as Paulie.

He’d crossed over.

Eliza

Eric works consistently, devotedly, obsessively, and he credits that to his wife, to Eliza. He’s even appeared in a mini-movie made to sell a multi-million-dollar house. “If a house is over $20 million,” Eliza explains, “they make these little movies where they show off the house. Eric was in one. He pretended to live there. He was the husband, he had fake kids and a fake wife (who was way too young for him), and they showed him lounging and drinking coffee.”

Eric told Eliza that if he could work every day as an actor he’d be happy. But the big starring roles stopped coming, so, Eric explains, “I start making a bunch of B movies—bam bam bam bam bam bam—one after the other, and then suddenly two, three years have passed, and I made like 30 films in two, three years. Now, in the past two years, I’ve made around 70 movies.” But the weird thing is, he’s happy. “I started having fun at the craft. I’m a fucking groupie for it! I can do it every day, all day. But then everybody started making fun of me, and I turned to Eliza with the question ‘Why?’ ”

“Sit tight,” she told him, “because, even when you’re shit, you’re fucking awesome, Eric.”

“And so suddenly it’s like 250 movies, and I realize, I went from being a joke that’ll do anything to being ‘Is there anything he can’t do?’ ”

As with Christopher Walken, a sort of movie-star-manqué image clung to him, an image that made him hip to a whole other contingent in Hollywood—rappers and other musicians. It got to be that having Eric Roberts appear in a music video ensured its success.

“Well, let me tell you what happened. I get offered a video. I say instantly, No. My wife says, ‘Of course you’re doing it. They’re called the Killers—they’re huge. And you’re doing the video, no questions asked.’ And it’s a huge hit. I do Akon next. Another huge hit. I do Mariah Carey. It goes to No. 1. So I was like a lucky charm for a while. I got a whole new audience.”

It turns out Rihanna is a big Eric Roberts fan. In 2015 he appeared in her controversial “Bitch Better Have My Money,” originally cast as the husband. But Rihanna told Eliza, “He can’t be the husband, because I can’t kill him—he’s too fine.” So he was cast as a clueless cop. Ten years earlier, he had played the groom in Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together,” and in 2004 he did “Mr. Brightside” for the Killers and, in 2012, “Miss Atomic Bomb.”

He may not be the name above the title, but he’s the hardest-working actor in America.

Julia

‘I wouldn’t characterize it as a falling-out,” Eric says as he talks openly for the first time about his relationship with his famous sister. “I was crazy about my sisters. Loved them, adored them. They were precious to me, and we had times of great closeness. We all felt very protective of each other, but the hardest person to protect yourself from is yourself.” Eric’s longtime drug use alienated Julia. “I was exhausting to be around,” he admits. “Complainy, blamey, unable to enjoy enjoyment. Everyone in my world needed a break sometimes, and that must have included Julia.”

When Julia and her husband, Danny Moder, had their twins, in 2004, Eric and Eliza went to the hospital “to drop off gifts. Instead I was ushered into their room and was immediately awash in brotherly and uncle-ly love.” That visit changed everything; they’ve since enjoyed Thanksgivings together, and Eric and Julia are now “e-mail buddies.”

Asked about his daughter with Kelly Cunningham, the actress Emma Roberts (We’re the Millers, Gia Coppola’s Palo Alto, and American Horror Story), Eric says, “If it wasn’t for me, there would be no Julia Roberts and no Emma Roberts as celebrities, as actresses, and I’m very proud of that. When Julia first came to New York, I went into William Morris and I said, ‘Which one of you is going to sign my sister Julia?’ ” That was before Mystic Pizza launched Julia’s long, spectacular career as America’s sweetheart. Eric adds, “And I am so proud that everybody knows I was first, because I was first by a long shot. I was first to get Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations, so I’m proud of that.”

“In my estimation, Eric is a great actor,” David Duchovny says. “He’s using himself in a very honest and idiosyncratic way. It’s more of what you see in character actors, so maybe that’s one of the problems that he faces: he’s an extremely unique presence trapped in this beautiful exterior.”

Duchovny admitted to having a sinking feeling, however, whenever he sees Eric in, say, a Lifetime movie. “Why does he have to do this? And then I think, Well, he’s an actor and he’s working, and he loves to do this . . . The way that Mickey Rourke was re-discovered as a great actor, I think Eric is due for that, for sure.”

So where are the Aronofskys, the Ratners, the Tarantinos, the bad-boy whisperers who certainly know better, who grew up on his movies, who know his history and his name?

“Quentin knows that everybody has a craving for a Tarantino-Eric Roberts thing; it makes sense on every level,” says Eliza. “He brought Travolta back.” Eric has read four or five times for Quentin Tarantino. “I think Quentin calls me to say no to me,” Eric says. As Duchovny puts it, “So much of the business is luck and timing. You know, it’s very possible that there’s somebody out there right now, someone we’ve never heard of, writing the perfect movie for Eric Roberts.”

Colleen Camp couldn’t agree more. Directors and producers “should be calling him off the hook,” she says. “If you play him just like he is, he’s just real. If you use Eric Roberts as Eric Roberts, he’s hilarious.”

At the end of our day at the Chateau, as the table candles were being lit, Eric asked, “Why me, of all the guys, of all the has-beens, of all the good actors who are over—why me?”

Maybe because, as it said on the billboard for King of the Gypsies 40 years ago: It’s Almost His Time.