Getting Mike Vogel to dish the details on his latest film, Cloverfield, is like pulling teeth—which is to say, it’s damn near impossible. Because the 28-year-old actor, who endured years of braces and mouthpieces as a kid, didn’t let a dentist anywhere near his mouth for 10 years.

    But on this mid-December afternoon, the Warminster native finally—albeit reluctantly—honored a dental appointment scheduled by his ex-model wife, Courtney. As he fields a reporter’s questions following a four-cavity excavation, Vogel’s still flying from the prescription pharmaceuticals he popped to calm his nerves. But drugs have done nothing to loosen his tongue regarding exactly what it is we’re seeing in those jittery, hyper-cryptic Cloverfield trailers.

    “We had to sign a 15-page nondisclosure agreement,” he explains. “We literally signed our lives away by threat of lawsuit. But surprisingly, a lot of people don’t want to [know]; especially people close to me. They’ve all said, ‘This is the only movie that I want to see this year. Don’t ruin it for me.’”

   

    For months, advance teasers for the enigmatically titled film, which opens Jan. 18, have been giving YouTubers anxiety precisely because of what they don’t show: an unseen, just-beyond-the-horizon horror that’s leveling half of Manhattan. A group of partying twenty-somethings (one of whom is Vogel) can only gape in horror, run like hell—and film the carnage with a camcorder.

   That’s the high-concept hook of Cloverfield, produced by Lost and Alias mastermind J.J. Abrams. But are any of the Internet conspiracy theorists accurate? Is this monster a certain Tokyo-totaling, fireball-belching behemoth? Or is it a not-for-laughs reinterpretation of Gamera, the campy Japanese flying turtle? Or could it be ‘90s volleyball glamazon Gabrielle Reece, angling for career reinvention in a remake of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman?

“That’s exactly who it is,” says Vogel, laughing. “You keep that quiet!”

Clearly, we’ll have to see for ourselves this Friday.

   “I’m a baseball addict; I play on three different teams throughout the week. It’s funny hearing the guys on my team: ‘Aww, dude, it’s a giant lion.’ I mean, the theories you hear! And to everyone I say, ‘That’s exactly what it is.’”

     Here’s what he can say: He and the rest of the cast—all relative unknowns, save Vogel—auditioned for the project solely on the basis of the J.J. Abrams name (Matt Reeves, who co-created and shot episodes of Abrams’ TV series Felicity, directed the film). Vogel saw no script, received no thumbnail description of the plot, and had no idea what kind of character he’d ultimately play. He auditioned with pages from an old Alias episode.

    “I was the first one cast. They called me into the office to tell me, and…said, ‘So, what do you think this movie is?’ The buzz around town was that this was Star Trek under a different name. So I said, ‘Well, this has to be Star Trek; that’s what everybody’s saying.’ And they just laughed their asses off. I was like, ‘What—did I just sign on for porn here?’”

 

     Hardly. Adult films don’t have budgets of roughly $25 million—all of which, Vogel insists, is up on screen, to create an ultra-surrealistic, Blair Witch Project-meets-Godzilla effect. He screened a rough cut of Cloverfield in late November, and even minus some key special effects sequences, he was floored.

     “I can honestly say, no one has ever seen anything like it,” says Vogel. “I remember sitting through the screening, and the end hit. There was dead silence. All of a sudden, you heard a woman…” he mimics a sigh. “Like, it was the first time she breathed the entire movie. That’s what it does. From the second everything goes wrong, it grips you the entire way and doesn’t stop.”

  

     Will the film also adrenalize the career of this affable thespian with the pretty-boy pout? The 1998 graduate of William Tennent High first began hearing that kind of talk just prior to the 2003 release of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Betting on films, he had walked away from his cushy gig on Grounded for Life, the Fox sitcom that brought him to Los Angeles. It wasn’t the first high-stakes gambling he’d done: Back in Warminster, he’d cut short his studies at the Philadelphia College of Bible to pursue acting, leveraging his win in a modeling competition to audition for roles in New York City while working for his dad, a plumber. According to Vogel’s handlers, all that hard work and sacrifice would be handsomely rewarded with Chainsaw, a remake of the 1974 splatter classic.

     “I remember my agents at my old agency coming up to my parents at the premiere [and saying], ‘Your son—his life is about to change; things will never be the same.’” Certainly, the film hit during a resurgence of the horror genre that continues unabated nearly five years later. But co-star Jessica Biel, not Vogel, was the one anointed with Next Big Thing status.

     Then came another seemingly sure-fire remake of a Seventies pop culture classic: the 2006 disaster-at-sea saga Poseidon. After much hand-wringing, Vogel chose a part in that project over a skimpier but flashier role as the winged mutant Angel in X-Men: The Last Stand. The fact that his last name is German for “bird” might have been fate’s way of suggesting a different course of action.

     “The way they were talking about Poseidon, I was thinking, ‘I’m going to have to be building 12-foot privacy fences around my house just to keep the paparazzi out!’ And then…”

     His knowing laugh is refreshingly free of rancor. The film underperformed in the States, and the biggest star to emerge from it was Fergie, who had a pre-solo career cameo as the ship’s singer. “It all works the way it’s supposed to work,” reasons Vogel. “It hits when it hits, and [I] can’t get consumed with saying, ‘Oh, this is it,’ because nine times out of 10, [it’s] the one that you’d never expect. Cloverfield—when I signed on to that, never in a million years would I have ever expected that that would turn out to [be] what seems like it’s going to end up being. And even then, that’s no guarantee. Who knows?”

     Recently, Vogel was considered for the role of a fledgling Captain Kirk in the aforementioned Star Trek reboot, which Abrams is directing. That role seems similarly destined to launch a lucky young actor (Chris Pine ultimately got the part). But Vogel says he and Abrams mutually agreed that he’s a bit too baby-faced to pass for a budding Starship captain, and that the iconic role was a no-win situation that would forever brand Vogel (think Christopher Reeve and Superman)—and potentially rile as many tough-to-placate Trekkies as it would please. “It was an honor to even think about being considered for something like that,” he insists. “But I’m happy things have worked out the way they have.”

He’s not the type of guy to sit at home and wring his hands over his place in the Hollywood pecking order. A former skater and motor bike aficionado who twice broke his wrist and ruptured his spleen during adolescence, he’s always turned to unconventional and extreme pursuits to blow off steam—although he admits to downshifting a bit since the birth of his daughter, Cassy, last February.

     “Some buddies of mine went cliff-jumping this summer. There’s this 50-foot cliff that everyone’s jumping off of. I got to the edge of it, and I’m like, ‘Y’know, a year ago, I would have owned this thing, [but] I just don’t need it right now.’”

       These days, when he’s not logging airtime for his pilot’s license (Poseidon co-star Kurt Russell is his flyboy mentor), Vogel chops tree trunks for a hearty cardio workout. And during his frequent visits to his much-missed hometown, he’ll even throw on a plumber’s uniform and run calls with his dad.

     “I love it—I LOVE it!! I used to swear, ‘When I finally have the money to pay someone to do this, I’m never going to do this again.’ [Now], I’m literally breaking things in my house all day long so I can fix them. I just love that work ethic that was instilled in me, but I didn’t appreciate it until I got older. My neighbors all call me—‘Hey, this is leaking.’ I’m literally Mr. Fix-It. So when [acting] doesn’t work, I’ll just start my own plumbing business, and I’ll be good to go.”

Cloverfield opens in wide release Friday, Jan. 18; There are screenings of the film at the Ritz Five (214 Walnut St. Philadelphia) on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday  (Jan. 14-16) at 7:30 p.m.

See Vogel on the cover of this month's Men's Health.

More on the women Vogel has worked with later this week on Philly EDGE.com.