"YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT WILL GET YOU HIRED" Tuc Watkins, homegrown actor, lands movie role being victim of The Mummy

Watkins, formerly of Mission, has a featured role in the big adventure film that had a huge opening weekend. He played one of three American treasure hunters who stumble across a very unfriendly reanimated mummy. Watkins' character, in fact, is the first victim of the mummy, who steals his eyes and his tongue before finally sucking him dry.

"The director told me I got that role because he liked the way I talked with my tongue cut out," Watkins said in a recent phone conversation from Vancouver, British Columbia, where he is filming the new Showtime series "Beggars and Choosers." "You never know what will get you hired."

Watkins, 32, grew up in Prairie Village and Mission (his parents still live in the area). He spent his high school years in St. Louis. He studied acting at Indiana University, returning to Kansas City to appear in "Heaven's Heart," a Second Stage production at Missouri Repertory Theatre.

"Then I moved to Los Angeles in the fall of '89," Watkins recalled. "The only person I knew when I moved out there was Jordan Budde, the author of 'Heaven's Heart,' who offered to let me sleep on his couch. That's what I did for a month until getting my own place."

Watkins was lucky. With his first audition he landed a national commercial for Miller Beer. "I figured, 'Boy, this is easy. Why's everybody talking about how rough this business is?' Then I did another commercial for the U.S. Navy. After that I didn't work for a year. Suddenly I understood what everybody was talking about."

He and a college friend painted houses and auditioned. Finally Watkins landed a recurring role on "One Life to Live," which required him to move to New York. He stayed with the show for two years. "The soaps are really underrated," Watkins said. "They're the last medium in which you can get away with overacting, which is the most fun to do."

He also acted in an off-Broadway play, did a short-lived TV series and appeared in the independent feature "I Think I Do," which played earlier this year at the Tivoli Manor Square Theatre.

And of course he got his gig in "The Mummy," which was filmed last summer in Morocco and London. "We spent months in a little town on the edge of the Sahara desert that had a sign that said, 'Last gas for 3,000 miles.' It was great experience because everyone there got along. Every movie set has a resident jerk, but we didn't. I was starting to worry that it might be me. Because we were so isolated it was a lot like summer camp. And sometimes it felt like internment camp."

Among the crew members were locals responsible for ridding the set of poisonous snakes and scorpions. The worst part, Watkins said, was wearing a tweed jacket and bow tie in 125-degree weather.

Watkins got to participate in a couple of big fight scenes and found it was sometimes too real for comfort. "When you're a kid - or even when you're 32 - and find out you'll get to do a gunfight, it's real exciting," he said. "Then you're on the set doing it, and it's really scary. I had two guns and a knife and there were guys with broadswords charging me on horseback. It's all make-believe, but there's this big horse coming at you, and it feels as if you're really in a fight. Whenever they yelled 'Cut' the actors found we were actually shaking."

"Beggars and Choosers," which begins airing on Showtime in June, follows the day-to-day machinations of a TV network. Watkins plays the vice president for talent.

"I'm doing imitations of all the casting directors who wouldn't give me a role over the last 10 years," Watkins said.

Call it "Revenge of the Actor."

Check out our gallery for more pics from The Mummy