The New York Post ran a story this weekend about veteran actor/Brooklyn Heights resident Chris Eigeman:

NY Post: On a Role: 'IF you want me to be clever and quippy, you'll have to pay me," says Chris Eigeman. Which is just the sort of quip one might expect from the type of character that made the actor an indie film darling in the '90s.

This kind of proves his point.

"That's literally how I put bread on my table," says the actor, who honed his trademark persona in a trio of movies by director Whit Stillman: "Metropolitan," "Barcelona" and "The Last Days of Disco." There was also Noah Baumbach's 1995 comedy "Kicking and Screaming," the definitive portrait of male post-collegiate aimlessness.

In all of them, Eigeman played young men who, as one critic pointed out, might have walked out of the pages of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. Highly intelligent and maddeningly smug, his characters were fueled by a blend of arrogance, verbosity and vulnerability.

This is why it's a relief, upon meeting him on his home turf in Brooklyn Heights, that he's not actually that guy. In fact, he's into the idea of playing someone other than that guy.

"If someone wants me to play a drug-addled ex-guitar player from a rock band," he offers cheerfully, "I'll do that for free!"