Matt's Crash landing

There is a quiet intensity that hovers around Matt Dillon, even when he seems to be at his most relaxed, lying across a sofa in Galway's Harbour Hotel as he talks in a low drawl.

Yet Dillon feels perfectly at home in the west of Ireland's renowned party town where he was guest of honour at last month's Galway Film Festival. It's mainly because he is, as he says, 'of pure thoroughbred Irish Catholic stock - we go back a few generations.' He was born in February 1964, the second of six children, to Mary Ellen and Paul Dillon, a stockbroker, in New Rochelle, New York.

His black wardrobe of jeans, jacket and T-shirt complement the dark features and heavy brooding brow, the face a little fuller compared with the one we remember from his callow youth in the early Eighties, when he was cast as the thug next door in films such as The Outsiders and Rumble Fish. And, despite his earnest answers, he still has the air of the goofy, yet potentially dangerous guy in class.

Since his days as a teen idol, the 41-year-old actor has had a habit of disappearing off the movie radar. But 2005 is proving to be the year of Dillon's full-blown renaissance.

We may have witnessed a few old, reconstructed faces resurfacing this year - in particular Mickey Rourke (who, ironically, co-starred with Dillon in 1983's Rumble Fish) in Sin City - but Dillon can easily stake his claim as this year's comeback king with three wildly differing high-profile films.

It's doubtful that any screen actor has made such an eclectic series of choices in quick succession, including, to the consternation of some fans and critics, his enjoyable panto villain race-car driver in Herbie: Fully Loaded. But it is as a racist Los Angeles cop in Paul Haggis's Crash and, later this year, as the reprobate in Charles Bukowski's Factotum, that he comes into his own.

'I'm drawn to play characters who have an edge,' says Dillon. 'Drama is conflict and characters with a dark side are often more interesting and very wilful. That's what I look for. But I try to be as versatile as I can.'

In Crash, a collection of disparate characters connect and collide over two days in the sprawling ethnic melting pot of Los Angeles. In a film that is essentially about race and prejudice, Dillon plays Sergeant Ryan, an LAPD cop who violently harasses a black Hollywood director (Terrence Dashon) and his wife (Thandie Newton). It's a challenging role that elicits little sympathy.

Among a blue-chip cast, including Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle, Thandie Newton and Brendan Fraser, Dillon stands out as the furious centrifugal force at the centre of a dextrous, multi-layered drama. One of most mature and socially realistic US films of the year, Crash has performed surprisingly well in a summer box office crammed with comic-book blockbusters.

'This guy is an out-and-out racist, and his actions are inexcusable,' says Dillon. 'But the film is really about Los Angeles, about how spread out it is, how segregated people are. When I read the script I thought it was accurate and courageous. And I wanted to do it because I knew Paul Haggis is a dynamite writer.'