Star Sean Bean happy to take 'The Hitcher' . . .

'I went to see

The Hitcher

when I was younger, when it first came out in 1986," Sean Bean recalls. "I went to see it in Yorkshire, England, where I grew up, with my girlfriend. It made a big impression on me, and I thought it was very scary, a good film with good performances."

The original The Hitcher starred Rutger Hauer as John Ryder, a hitchhiker who torments a young man named Jim (C. Thomas Howell) and a waitress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), randomly killing people and framing Jim. Not a blockbuster in its day, the film developed a cult following over the years, but Bean - who grew up to star in the British Sharpe television movies (1993-1997) and play Boromir in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), and counts among his other credits Goldeneye (1995), The Island (2005), and Silent Hill (2006) - admits that he hadn't thought about The Hitcher in ages.

Not, that is, until Michael Bay, who had directed him in The Island, asked Bean to play Ryder in a remake he was producing. The result is a new version of The Hitcher, directed by first-timer Dave Meyers and opening nationwide today, with Bean as Ryder, who, in a variation on the original, puts a major and bloody crimp in the spring-break plans of a young couple, Grace (Sophia Bush) and Jim (Zachary Knighton).

"I wouldn't have thought I'd be in it," Bean concedes, speaking by telephone from a Los Angeles hotel. "It's not anything I was expecting or waiting for. It kind of came out of the blue. I'd worked with Michael before, so I knew that I was in good hands with him. I saw some of Dave Meyers' work, and I knew he had a good eye, visually.

"They sent me the script," he continues. "I suppose I had certain reservations. I thought, 'We're making a version of a film that was good in the first place.' But having read the script and talked with Michael, I thought it'd be quite a challenging piece and a refreshing version of the original, particularly the part of Ryder.

"He was quite sparse," Bean explains. "There wasn't a great deal of dialogue, which I quite liked, and there was certainly a lot of room for me to maneuver and experiment and explore different parts of my psyche. So I suppose that was the spur, seeing what I could do with this character."

Ryder shoots, slashes, stabs and finds other inventive ways to kill everyone he meets - everyone, that is, except Grace and Jim. As in the original, however, Ryder doesn't spell out his motives. He's simply a demented, sadistic madman making life hell for Grace and Jim - and, Bean says, he liked that, too.

"There wasn't anything, was there?" he says. "There is no back story, there's no history. And I didn't, to be honest, create a back story, because I thought the appeal and the disturbing thing about the guy was the fact that you didn't know where he came from. He's like this Angel of Death, this phantom that's wandering the desert and the freeway, and I thought that was more disturbing than actually knowing anything about his previous history.

"It really disturbs the kids in the movie," the actor continues, "because they don't know what I want or where I'm from. I didn't want their money. I think that's the disturbing thing, that you don't know what he wants, and I don't think he knows what he wants. He's a disturbed guy and can't sit still from one moment to the next. He's quiet, and not an aggressive type of villain. When he says something, it has a lot of weight to it.

"I didn't want to play him as someone overpoweringly aggressive or physical," Bean says. "Ryder is a man who plays with people's minds and plays games with them, and he takes pleasure in that. He may want to pass something on to Grace, whatever that may be, and it could be this decaying evil that's swilling around his brain. But there is no pattern to his behavior, which made it exciting for me, because I could do whatever I wanted."

Bean, who lives mostly in Los Angeles and has three young daughters back in England, has completed two other coming films: He costars with Bob Hoskins in a British crime drama titled The Outlaw, and in the drama True North he plays a soldier returning home from the war in Iraq.

The actor knows that it's only a matter of time before some new sci-fi, horror or fantasy role comes his way, however, and he says that he'll probably take it.

"I think people like to see stuff that takes them out of their own world or that gives them a jump or a shock," he says. "I think people like to be scared. I don't know if I like to be scared, but it's a strange sensation.

"I'm not particularly drawn to those kinds of films," Bean says, "but I've done things like Silent Hill, The Dark (2005), and The Hitcher, and I have quite enjoyed making them. It's nice to do things that are more normal, too, but you always want to mix it up, just to keep it interesting for yourself and the people watching you."