Justin Long: The 'Mac Guy' Gets a Piece of the Action

Which is, incidentally, how he got into acting. Well, acting by way of football. Long was 4-foot-9, 85 pounds when he entered ninth grade in Fairfield, Conn. And he was obsessed with becoming a professional football player. (So he's not unfamiliar with the experiences of eager outcasts.) Two weeks into high school tryouts, his coach pulled him aside and asked if he'd ever thought about wrestling.

" 'You'd be the only one in the weight class,' " Long remembers the football coach explaining. "And that's when I was, like, well, 'I don't think sports are going to work out.' "

So he migrated to the drama scene instead, because his older brother was there and, more important, so were lots of cute, "cool, actress-y type girls."

"It was like a social, and I didn't have a lot else going for me. I wasn't cool or rich or big or play sports," Long recalls. "Then as I was going to college, I did so many plays I just fell in love with it. I knew there was nothing else I could do with my life."

With that in mind, he dropped out of college, moved to New York, got a job delivering pizzas and started showing up for every audition he could find.

And he knows how lucky he was to land an agent just a few months after that leap of faith. His mother was a working actress; his brother is still at it on a smaller scale.

"I know delusions of grandeur. I always thought, ideally, I'll get to do what my mom did. I'll do theater. And maybe the occasional radio commercial and, God in heaven, how amazing would it be if once in a blue moon I got a guest spot on 'NYPD Blue' or 'Law & Order,' " he says, during a phone interview from New York.

But it turned out his brand of adolescent-Woody Allen awkwardness was in greater demand than expected. First with 1999's "Galaxy Quest," then as Warren P. Cheswick on the TV drama "Ed." And, of course, as a sweatband-wearing weakling in "Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story" (2004).

And now as an asthma-afflicted hacker drawn reluctantly into the heroism business by way of Web prowess. When the bad guys try to debilitate society by shutting down telecom networks and power grids, it's his job to undo their evil coding, while Willis distracts them by launching cars into helicopters and dropping dudes into turbine engines.

"And the funny thing is, Bruce knows far more about computers than I do and was always on the computer, working the webcam," Long says. "I'm really, really bad with gadgets and any kind of computer thing."

A fact that evidently didn't bother Apple chief executive Jobs, who specifically cast Long for the Mac-PC commercials. "Apparently I reminded him of himself," Long explains. "Like a younger version of himself."

The ads are almost ubiquitous. And as a result, so is Long. So when people do approach him out of the blue, it always happens with a certain casualness. "They just refer to me as Mac Guy. 'Oh, hey, Mac Guy.' There's no excitement or awe in their voice. It's just like, 'There's a chair. There's a tree. There's the Mac Guy.' "

And that's fine -- technically inclined or not, he's just glad people refer to him as anything other than their pizza delivery boy.

That funny screensaver issue, though, will have to be referred elsewhere.