"You're welcome to join us, "he offers, his soft-spoken Kiwi accent somewhere between kind and cynical. He sounds like Russell Crowe, the waiter thinks as he shambles away, resigned to searching IMDB when his shift ends.

Chances are, he won't find the man. Marton Csokas (a Hungarian name, pronounced CHO-KASH, which the reporter practices out loud in the car before the interview) may be the best working actor in Hollywood that nobody knows about. Yet with breakout performances in Asylum and The Great Raid, two films slated for the tail end of this year's mightily summer lineup, we'll be seeing a lot more of him very soon.

However, six thousand miles across the Pacific, Csokas's talents are old news. After schooling himself in the arts while living on his own in London, Csokas returned home and graduated from the Te Kura Toi Whakaari Drama School in New Zealand. Equipped with eclectic and classical training, he began picking up acting roles in every medium he could. Csokas's first stage performance was as a naive idealist berating the racist status quo. On television he portrayed an epileptic, schizophrenic boxer on acid and, for his first film role, a jilted lover gone paranoid. All good beginnings for what has turned out to be a successfully varied career.

"I like to challenge myself," Csokas says, between sips of espresso. "As an actor there's nothing worse than doing the same kind of role over and over again. You become terribly stagnant."

Before he was cast as Celeborn in the final two films of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, he first surfaced in America - if you want to call it that - in the late '90s with a reoccurring role on "Xena: Warrior Princess" and a handful of other television shows with bad time slots that aren't really worth mentioning. When this is brought up, Csokas's laid-back demeanor suddenly breaks - into a wide smile.

"At that point in my career I would take what roles were presented to me and make them work," he explains. "A lot of actors experience that type of thing in the beginning. Sometimes I ended up with really great material or directors and other times I was just working to pay the rent."

Would that explain Kangaroo Jack? Csokas stifles laughter.

"Yeah, you bet. At least a funny story comes with that one: "I was in Australia doing Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and they were casting for Kangaroo Jack over the next couple weeks - or at least attempting to cast for it. All the other actors and I were sitting around backstage before the show talking about it and all of them said they didn't want to audition, they'd never audition for such a role, they had more respect for themselves than that. I was the only one who admitted that I was going to an audition and everyone kind of booed and made fun of me. But a few days later when I showed up to read, there were three or four of the exact same people from my cast sitting in the waiting room, practicing lines."

Now he allows the laugh to escape. "When I was starting out, I never felt that I was too good for a part. Technically, you can always learn things about the craft of acting, and I'd say I learned even more in the uncomfortable or unpleasant situations than any other time."

Drawing from Csokas's startling performances over the last few years, it seems as if he has learned a lot. He has tried to destroy the world in xXx, managed the worst band in all of Sydney in Alex Proyas's Garage Days, and fought Matt Damon in The Bourne Supremacy. In Kingdom of Heaven, the widely controversial and oddly belittled first blockbuster of the summer, he chewed up scenery as Guy de Lusignan.

"These are all broad stroke films, which means I am allowed to be a little exaggerated with each character. But I veer away from that because I always want to pull my character back to a realistic mindset, so the audience can identify in some way, even if it's just a thin thread. I want every character I play to have depth, because realistically that's what makes a character. No one in reality is ever completely one-dimensional."

He pauses, thinking, as the waiter swoops by again.

"But that's the art to these big ones," he continues, when the kid in the apron is out of earshot, "finding out when you can push a seemingly broad character's depth. I really explored this with Guy in Kingdom of Heaven. Ridley [Scott] recognized this, told me Guy could see everything but wanted it right back. So I moved between a seemingly numb, violent crusader and a very vulnerable, emotional character. Guy wants so much to be loved and looked upon as the leader and when this doesn't happen, his emotional response is anger and savage violence. Basically, there is an explanation for every action he makes - some are more extreme than others. I loved the role of Guy because of his flamboyance, that he bounced between two extremes of human emotion quite regularly: the civil and the primal. Through that, I found the essence of what made his character so human."

This quest for what makes each character human is even more evident in the upcoming emotionally violent masterpiece Asylum, a Patrick Marber script (Closer, among other plays) adapted from the Patrick McGrath novel and directed by the remarkably talented David Mackenzie. Csokas plays Edgar, a mad artist who has been confined to an insane asylum after killing his own wife. When he and a new resident psychiatrist's wife (Natasha Richardson) begin having an affair, the extremes of their passion grow wildly out of control. Think a much darker version of Lady Chatterley's Lover, only this time we follow the affair's indiscriminate path of destruction.

"Edgar was described in Patrick McGrath's novel as a big bear, so I bulked up a bit and kept that mindset. But in Marber's script there is a line about how Edgar, like all artists, had the inner fragility of a child. This was incredibly important to me, that while his character was so malicious and violent on the outside, he was just a very frightened little boy."

And this reminds Csokas of something, something personal from when he was doing television back in Australia. He leans forward, almost hunkering down, and lowers his voice.

"I remember back to when I was doing TV in Australia, they took me and my fellow cast to a maximum security prison for a sort of method acting exercise. I wasn't a big fan of being there because I've always been a big fan of imagination myself and I've never been one to enjoy observing someone else's misery. But there's one image that I'll always remember so clearly, that when they walked us to the solitary confinement cells, the men inside all looked like sad little children. While playing Edgar, I tried to keep their image in the back of my mind."

It shows. Csokas's performance is as delicate as it is ferocious. In fact, his portrayal of Edgar successfully covers such a wide gamut of emotions that he becomes as much a symbol of the ruthless, primal motivations of love as he does a character in a story. By the end, you pity him as much as you fear him.

In this month's The Great Raid, John Dahl's flawed World War II film, Csokas literally carries the first half of the film as Captain Redding, an American POW in the infamous Japanese camp Cabanatuan, who refuses to lay down and wait for help to arrive. He recently completed Aeon Flux [playing] the film's arch nemesis, Chairman Trevor Goodchild. While this may be Csokas's biggest role to date, opposite Charlize Theron, he seems unflustered.

"The more you immerse yourself in anything, the more you find rewards," he explains. "What you reap is what you sow, you know?"

Csokas will be sown into everyone's minds, soon enough. In the meantime, we'll be waiting.