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Glenn Fitzgerald is a Two-Face.

This is not to say he is two-faced; we're sure he is very upstanding and honest in his personal and professional dealings. We mean that he has a very malleable face, so that depending on how he's styled, he can look either really hot in a clean-cut, all-American way, or like a greasy, antisocial creep. Being a Two-Face is an attribute a character actor is fortunate to possess.

As a result of Fitzgerald's two-facedness, however, his roles tend to fall into two distinct categories. On the one hand, there are the attractive young men to whom no good is likely to come. Fitzgerald's most iconic and memorable roles in this category are as Neil Conrad in The Ice Storm, and Sean in The Sixth Sense. In the former, Fitzgerald is a college-aged kid brought by his mother to a key party thrown by her friends; he ends up leaving with Sigourney Weaver, lucky boy. In the latter, Fitzgerald is Olivia Williams's sweet, unassuming co-worker, who attempts to start a relationship with her as she gets over the end of her marriage. Both characters are polite, upstanding fellows, neatly dressed in their pressed trousers, earnestly eager to please the older women to whom they're attracted.

It took a few moments, in fact, for me to recognize Fitzgerald in The Sixth Sense, because his character was a total 180 from the role for which I know (and love) him best: Lonnie in Flirting With Disaster. We don't meet Lonnie until late in the film -- not until after we've already gone through all the agita of Mel's (Ben Stiller) search for his biological parents. Mel's parents, the Schlichtings, are still together, and have produced another child, Lonnie; he seems to be going through an awkward phase -- all combed-forward hair and bad skin and too-tight sweater vest and belly shirt and wallet chain -- flouncing about the house broadcasting his resentment toward the prodigal son. If his bitterness weren't obvious from his attitude, it becomes perfectly clear when he's forced to apologize, "I'm sorry I put Windowpane in Mel's quail, and I'm sorry that [the ATF agent played by Richard Jenkins] ate it." Amid the closing credits, we are treated to a vignette of Lonnie interrupting his parents' tantric sex to demand some of their "weed." Lonnie, in short, is a delight.

Jeffrey Norman, Fitzgerald's character in last year's woefully underrated Series 7: The Contenders, is a spiritual sibling to Lonnie, if Lonnie were a terminally ill closeted gay man with a youthful history of making painfully pretentious videos who was then selected by the government to hunt down and murder several people including his now-pregnant high-school girlfriend in a horrifying dystopic reality TV series. Which perhaps Lonnie is, in a parallel universe.

This week (and, probably, this week alone), poor Fitzgerald -- who, as the veteran of several brilliant and critically acclaimed independent movies (like Manny & Lo, A Price Above Rubies, Judy Berlin, and The Believer), knows better, and deserves better -- is playing fifth banana to Josh Hartnett in the puerile 40 Days and 40 Nights. We won't be enjoying Fitzgerald -- in clean-cut mode, it would appear -- as one of Hartnett's dumb-ass friends; we will rest a little easier knowing that he (judging by the trailer, at least) is not charged with the task of checking Hartnett's bedding for semen.