Still Looking for Love

Will somebody please cast M. Emmet Walsh as a romantic lead?

“It’s amazing how I fall into the trap of doing those bad guys,” the 53-year-old actor says genially. “I’m still waiting to do a role with a toupee. And they never let me play Jamie Lee Curtis’ love interest. In USA Today, Mike Clark said it was nice to see me back--after ‘Clean and Sober’--in the kind of roles that had made my career: ‘playing cesspools in colored shirts.’ ”

The cesspool of the moment is a CIA operative on the tail of some missing money in the Jamaica-set, Denzel Washington-starrer “The Mighty Quinn” opening Friday.

“There are only nine or 10 of us who do what I do,” Walsh says of his character-actor status. “How it happens is you get old and decrepit and bald and finally they start hiring you. It’s not that you’re good or anything. They figure if you’ve survived, you must be talented.”

He laughed. “One learns one’s craft, has a couple of lucky breaks, like ‘Straight Time’ with Dustin Hoffman, ‘Blood Simple.’ I’ve done a lot of movies--59 of them. And my career has been helped a lot by cable. Suddenly, people are looking at movies from 20 years ago, saying, ‘Look, that’s Emmet Walsh. He had hair, he wasn’t fat.’ ”

Walsh is equally self-deprecating about his current gumshoe role in the NBC crime-solving series “UNSUB” (“They waved a great deal of money at me, which was very hard to refuse.”) and the upcoming film, “Chatahoochie,” with Gary Oldman and Dennis Hopper.

“Hollywood has finally recognized me as a sex symbol,” the actor boasts, “realized I could be trusted in certain types of roles. So they gave me a love interest in ‘Chatahoochie.’ Of course, it turned out to be another male prisoner who likes to wear dresses. . . .”