Tate Donovan played lovable deadbeat dad Jimmy Cooper on The O.C.  He now plays lovable snake-in-the-grass attorney Tom Shayes on Damages.  I point out this troubling trend in his recent role selection.  “So what,” he replies with a chuckle, “my own moral ambiguity is seeping through in everything I do?”  You said it, Tate Donovan, not me.

It’s all very simple, to hear Tate Donovan tell it.  It’s not that his characters are good or bad, but that “as an actor, you don’t think of good and bad.  You try not to judge.”  Asked whether Tom Shayes, his backstabbing character on Damages is evil, he comes back with, “he’s capable of all sorts of things.  I try to let the audience decide.”  Damages, airing Mondays at 10 pm on Showcase (or online here), is a veritable playground of questionable ethics, and Donovan seems quite at home.  “It’s fun to be a part of a show that doesn’t always punish the bad guy and reward the good guy.”  Damn it, Tate Donovan, you’re more slippery than a very slippery eel.

And so forward we trudge, the shadowy Tate Donovan and I.  We discuss marathon running, the doc he’s working on about Barack Obama, and his love of traditional Irish music.  He’s charming alright, even likable.  But trust him?  Not today.  He’s hiding something, and I’m not leaving until I find it (or his rep tells me to).  I ask about his childhood in New Jersey (“My mom came by the set when we were shooting in New York”), his time as a smoker (“It was only for the film, Good Night and Good Luck.  I can’t bear smoking”).  It all checks out.

Then the tables are turned, and the hunter eel has become the hunted eel.  He’s asking me about my upcoming wedding, his friendliness overwhelming:  “It’ll be one of the great days of your life,” he tells me.  Thanks Tate, but I’ll be the judge of that.  “Try Italy for your honeymoon, it’s unbelievable.”  His sincerity is suffocating, I’m no match.

In a last ditch effort, I lay myself bare:

“What do you think or my beard?”

“Excuse me?”

“If you, Tate Donovan, don’t like my beard, I will shave it off.”

Now he’s sizing me up.  No room for interpretation on this one.  The beard is either good or bad.  Just like Jimmy Cooper, just like Tom Shayes.  Just like Tate Donovan himself.  Will he compliment me?  Reward my vulnerability?  Or will his true nature take hold and cruelly cast my beard to the cutting room floor?  It’s all or nothing time, and he says to me:

“I think you’re in good shape.  You should keep it.”

I guess people can change after all.