JASON UNMASKED

A ''baptism of flashbulbs.'' That's what he calls it. In the summer of 1991, a quiet, relatively unknown actor named Jason Patric went from obscurity to headlines by falling in love with a much talked-about movie star named Julia Roberts. The relationship was highly chronicled by the paparazzi, who hid in the shrubbery, ambushed them on the streets, and hovered outside restaurants, from the East Coast to the West. The very shy and private Patric was introduced to millions of tabloid readers standing by his woman, his lips closed in anger, his eyes turned down. He was a mystery man, drowning in the light. Suddenly he has surfaced again, head up this time. The astounding blue eyes he once shielded from the cameras now peer purposefully off billboards and magazine ads as the star of Geronimo: An American Legend, the ambitious Western epic about the capture of the Apache warrior. And once again he appears to have come from nowhere. Although Patric has never starred in a major box office hit, he has top billing over veterans Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall, and even Wes Studi (see story on page 24), who plays the title role. All this begs one question. Who the hell is Jason Patric? Without a doubt, his career is one of the strangest on record. He has been by turns underhyped (in films that were hits with critics but unseen by most moviegoers) and mis-hyped (as the reluctant costar of the Jason-and-Julia show). ''He's much better known among the community of actors than he is to the public at large, at least to this point,'' says Geronimo director Walter Hill (48 HRS.). Truly distinct in a town so motivated by the bottom line, Patric's clout owes not to proven box office muscle but to his extraordinary work in only seven films, notably the low-budget critical favorites After Dark, My Sweet (1990) and Rush (1991). In a world of yes-men, he is known for saying no. He recently turned away Paramount's blue-collar drama Dexterity, and he sat still for a year after Rush, saying no to Tom Cruise's role in The Firm. ''I have a reputation in town for not wanting to work,'' he says quietly, ''and that's not the case. It's just that I really, you know, didn't find anything of interest.'' Now, with the release of Geronimo, Patric once again finds himself in one of the most awkward spots in our pop-cultural mosaic. For while most audiences know him only as a photo in a tabloid, he is also-with only marginal room for argument-Hollywood's best actor under 30.

Sitting tall on a bourbon-coated horse called Whiskey, Jason Patric has paused for just a moment on a craggy rim of Hasley Canyon, less than an hour's drive north of Los Angeles. He looks over the brown, scrubby landscape, its edges charred by a recent brushfire. The hills roll quietly among a sparse population of ranch homes sprawling under red tile roofs, and the wind hollers above his silence. His eyes match the sky. Lately, Patric, 27, has become a regular here on the ranch of Rudy Ugland, the Hollywood horse wrangler whose credits include Heaven's Gate and Far and Away. It was Ugland who trained Patric to ride like Lieut. Charles B. Gatewood, a Southern gentleman who-according to the film-befriended Geronimo, persuaded him to surrender in 1886, then died in obscurity with the betrayal of the warrior on his conscience. It's a prototypical Patric part-compelling, complicated, yet far from flashy. The film, like Patric, is not an easy sell (and, in fact, opened to a quiet $4 million in its first weekend). ''I would be held back playing young males in love or the obviously leading-man-type roles,'' he says. ''That's not where I want to go. I've been lucky to play real character parts, you know, interesting parts.'' After Dark, My Sweet and Rush both play out against desolate, sunburned landscapes. But Patric's characters are lush emotional oases, rich in confusion, intelligence, rage, and-regardless of the role he's inhabiting- quiet nobility. ''You just take different strips of yourself,'' he says after parking Whiskey-the same horse he rides in the film-at the stables and retiring to the kitchen of the Uglands' ranch house. Patric is smart, friendly, even eloquent and funny when he wants to be, but he faces a reporter's questions the same way he deals with paparazzi-shyly, carefully, eyes turned south. He pours iced tea and tries his damnedest to explain his method: ''Like if I'm playing this, I have to find the brown part of me, and the black part, and the white part that yellows at the edge.'' Sensing, perhaps, that words are failing him, he puts aside his glass and illustrates his point with his square cinderblock hands, shuffling the imaginary pieces of himself delicately around the table. ''You sequence them and that sequence makes its own sort of music.'' Patric's music has never played to mass audiences, but even after browsing through more bankable stars, Columbia and Hill decided to cast him in Geronimo. ''I already knew about this legend-in-the-making,'' says the director. ''He's very calm, but beneath it there's some tremendous intensity. That kind of contradiction is one of the things that make him really interesting as an actor.'' It was Patric's performance as a punch-drunk ex-boxer in After Dark, My Sweet, director James Foley's low-budget screen adaptation of Jim Thompson's gritty novel, that clinched his reputation among directors and studio execs as an actor to reckon with. It was, he says, ''the role I had always longed for. It was surprising, familiar, and terrifying.'' Most striking about the performance is Patric's odd, frustrated walk as Collie, shuffling his feet like a damaged fighter refusing to leave the ring. ''I didn't want him to just be wandering,'' says Patric. He gets up out of his chair and re-creates Collie's moves. ''Although he's walking possibly nowhere, he's getting there in a hurry.'' To play a strung-out narc in Rush, Patric insisted on actually sticking hypodermic needles (filled with saline) into his arm. ''If you're going to do that and show the (drug) cooking, you don't back away from this,'' he says. ''That ritual is a big thing with junkies.'' At the same time, Rush director Lili Fini Zanuck says, ''Jason was constantly trying to infuse some humanity in what was really a very sketchy character because the poor guy had no dialogue. He did it wherever he could, either with a look, a glance, a tear. I know that all sounds cliche, but they weren't cliche (coming from) Jason.'' Like After Dark, the film received only a limited theatrical release, but it did inspire critic David Denby of New York magazine to label Patric ''the best young actor in American movies.'' With so many options, why did the notoriously picky Patric take on Geronimo? ''It wasn't the character, it wasn't the piece,'' he says. ''It was more something that maybe Walter had to say in connection to maybe three parts of the script and the scale of it, with horses and being outside, I wanted to connect to something larger. So as much as I've planned the trajectory of my acting or career-I hate that word career-something like this would never have come into my mind.'' He sniffs and looks down at the floor again. ''However, it just all came together in a way '' His voice trails off, and that question is as answered as it ever will be. Patric, in case you're wondering, is not a great talker. But get him started on his craft, on the difficulty of conveying fear and frustration while riding a horse in Geronimo, and the words bubble up like Perrier: ''My body was taken away,'' he says. ''I no longer had legs. My legs, the movement and connection to a given moment, to the ground, the scene, all of a sudden now went through another animal who had different blood, different pulses, and his own mind.'' The extra bodily fluids and organs didn't hold him back much. On camera, he manages a mean horse stunt, pulling the animal down, shooting from behind it, then remounting-all within a matter of seconds. Ugland says Patric, who had never ridden before getting the part, is ''just about the best student I ever had.'' No less a technical feat is Patric's clean, lilting, Virginia accent, for which he sought help from a vocal coach, and which never once sounds like something he picked up on the set of Hee Haw. Despite-or maybe because of-Patric's prep work, the Geronimo shoot wasn't easy. Hill denies rumors that they didn't get along, though he says he did occasionally encourage Patric to ''lighten up'' and enjoy the spectacular Utah scenery. The intensity has earned Patric a reputation in the industry for being difficult, though Zanuck, who has remained friends with him since Rush, says that is unfair. ''It could come from the fact that he has these principles and they're very strong,'' she says. ''He doesn't do a lot of things that are maybe seen as required in town for young actors. He never wanted to be part of a pack and he's kept his private life as private as he possibly can. He's hoping to be hired on the merit of his talent and not on his charming personality.'' ''I hate doing interviews and stuff like that,'' he admits. ''I also hate people who say they hate doing interviews. It's all self-promotion. Five percent is the movie and the rest is people selling themselves, in their living rooms, smiling, with their personal life.'' This is why he has borrowed the Uglands' house for this interview, instead of his place back in L.A. ''Celebrity is an occupation unto itself,'' he says, before disappearing to a bathroom to be relieved of several glasses of iced tea, ''one which, frankly, I don't want to be a part of.''