The Professional Jerk

By Joel Stein/Los Angeles

He didn't mean to create the devil. He just wanted a job. But when Seann William Scott quit his gig stocking shelves at Home Depot to audition for the 10-line part of Steve Stifler in 1999's teen-sex comedy American Pie, he unwittingly invented the icon of the Generation Y frat boy, the Eustace Tilly of the Maxim set. Scott's Stifler, who returns this Friday in the Pie franchise's third installment, American Wedding, is a rich kid dedicated to humiliating those who appear to be his friends. In the first film, he slipped a laxative to a public bathroom--averse buddy at school. He is also 100% id: in a move so testosteroney even Maxim wouldn't endorse it, he kissed a guy just to get two women to make out in return. If there is someone to insult, Stifler is there. If there is a bet to be won, Stifler will drink from the spit bowl.

Yet somehow one of the most despicable characters in recent cinema became beloved. The secret was combining the classic protagonist and antagonist from teen movies: Stifler is both John Belushi's drunk moron Bluto and the Waspy frat president Greg Marmalard from Animal House. He's a jerk, but he sure is fun.

In person, Scott, 26, is soft-spoken, with a Minnesota accent--far more like a middle-school principal than a yob. But his actual personality is irrelevant to his appeal. To his fans, there is no Seann William Scott. Only Stifler. In the hour we're together at a Los Angeles coffee shop, two guys tell him how much they love Stifler. The night before our meeting, a bouncer at a nightclub told him, "Anything you need, Stifler. Anything." This conflation of actor and role is partly because of Scott's limited onscreen profile. His other film credits include Dude, Where's My Car? and Bulletproof Monk. But it's also a tribute to how seriously Scott took what was originally a throwaway role. "He was really just an a______," Scott says of the way the character was written. "I said, 'Don't make him funny. Make people remember him.'"

Scott says he doesn't quite know why Stifler appeals so much to young guys: "I guess he's the guy who says the things you want to say but don't have the b____ to say. He's never had the intention of hurting people's feelings. He just doesn't know." The third Pie movie, which Scott says the studio persuaded him to do by offering him a good script and better cash, focuses on Stifler's lack of character growth as he enters his mid-20s. "At the end of the movie, he does something good without disappointing the people who like him," Scott says. "He's still an ass."

Despite the dismal performance of April's Bulletproof Monk, Scott believes he's best suited to be an action hero (he does have really large biceps), though he realizes that he might forever be known as Stifler. And he has been known to Stifler it up sometimes. For the Bulletproof Monk promotion on MTV, he went out on a date with VJ La La and, he says, pretended to be drunk to make the experience feel more like spring break. He rarely goes out, he says, and rarely drinks--never when he's on a set. "I don't want to get home from work and wonder if I could have done better if I didn't go out that night. What you're doing is going to go on the big screen and go down in history." This from the man who made Dude, Where's My Car?

Scott promises that American Wedding will be the end of Stifler, though he might do comedy again because he really liked being a cohost of last month's MTV Movie Awards with Justin Timberlake. But first he's backpacking with a friend through Europe. Then he'll return to promote this fall's The Rundown, a Peter Berg--directed action movie with the Rock, in which he hopes the serious Scott can break through. "I know people will say it's Stifler and the wrestler," he says. But he's O.K. with that. It turns out, he says, that more women walk up to him interested in Stifler than angry at him for the character. Those Maxim dudes know what they're talking about.