Bobby Cannavale, Broadway’s Hottest Outsider

Graeme Mitchell for The New York Times

Bobby Cannavale will play Charlie Castle, the movie star with a dark secret, in Clifford Odets's "Big Knife," which opens April 16.

It was a miserable morning, rainy, cold and Wednesday, so Barney Greengrass was mostly empty. Bobby Cannavale was there having breakfast with the actor Richard Kind. Cannavale buttered a bialy as Kind endured a vegetable omelet. "I've been dieting for 45 years," he said mournfully. Cannavale took his arm. "You look great, man," he said. The two friends share a trainer.

Macall B. Polay/HBO, via Everett Collection

On "Boardwalk Empire," Cannavale played a psychotically violent bootlegger. "You're laughing at him but also terrified," said the show's creator, Terence Winter.

"Here's the difference between Bobby and me," Kind said. "After a show, people wait at the stage door for him because they want to be near him, like maybe it will rub off. They don't need to touch me. They just tell me their mother likes me."

He is right about Cannavale, who became his own lucky charm in 2011, while starring with Chris Rock on Broadway in "The _____ With the Hat," by Stephen Adly Guirgis. Cannavale played a parolee trying to stay clean, unwittingly stuck in a love triangle with his addicted girlfriend and his sponsor. His high-octane performance was nominated for a Tony Award for best actor. After 20 years of slow and steady, the race was won; no one could get enough of him.

Cannavale never formally trained as an actor — he barely finished high school — and his raw talent pops from the stage, along with a big hit of beefcake. (He is versatile enough to have played gay as well, most notably as Vince, the sweet, dim cop who was Will's boyfriend on "Will and Grace." His scene with Eric McCormack, asking him to move in, had a dignity rare in sitcoms. Cannavale won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series.)

Last season, his "Hat" mojo got him cast in "Boardwalk Empire" as the psychotically violent bootlegger, Gyp Rosetti. And last fall, Cannavale fulfilled a lifelong dream to work with his idol, Al Pacino; they co-starred in a Broadway revival of "Glengarry Glen Ross." Before that, he shot Woody Allen's new movie, "Blue Jasmine," with Cate Blanchett and Alec Baldwin; it opens in July. In each case, Cannavale said, he was hired because someone saw him in "Hat."

Many actors on a roll like this would be off to L.A., but Cannavale, 42, is a different breed. He has always lived in New York, partly so he has the option of doing theater but mostly because of his son, Jake, 17. Since Cannavale's divorce in 2004 from the screenwriter Jenny Lumet ("Rachel Getting Married"), Jake lives with him every other week.

So Cannavale is staying put. With his newfound clout, he can play a part he always wanted, Charlie Castle, the movie star with a dark secret, in Clifford Odets's "Big Knife," which opens April 16. Produced by the Roundabout Theater Company, it is the first Broadway revival of the play since its debut in 1949. Cannavale fell in love with it 15 years ago, at the Williamstown Theater Festival, where he saw Kind in a production directed by Joanne Woodward. (Kind plays the same role, Hoff, the studio head, in this production.) When Kind auditioned for Woodward, Cannavale reminded him at breakfast, he was his reader, the up-and-coming nobody who takes a job running lines in the hope the director might hear him too. Kind looked blank. "He was at Joanne Woodward's apartment," Cannavale said, laughing. "He wasn't remembering me."

When he went to the men's room, Kind turned serious. "To have a friend like this, a guy who's so loyal, with a morality and a guy's ethos, he's like Clooney," he said. "You'd be shocked at how hard he works and how proud he is of being good."

I met Cannavale at his Upper West Side apartment one evening after his rehearsal. He is 6-2, long and lithe. His hair, some of it cropped, some of it hanging, is always on the move. What the cane was to Chaplin, the hair is to Cannavale; his hands are in it, on it, yanking, grabbing. At least it was clean.

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