Jesse Bradford has been in the acting game since infancy–he did a Q-Tips commercial when only eight months old and appeared in “Falling in Love,” alongside Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep, as long ago as 1984, when he was just five. But the twenty-two year old Connecticut native made his first big cinematic mark at thirteen, starring as a resourceful Depression-era youth in Steven Soderbergh’s wonderful “King of the Hill” in 1993. Since then Bradford has graduated from public high school, gone on to Columbia University where he’s in the final stages of the undergraduate film studies program, and appeared in numerous other features. He’s worked with directors such as Baz Luhrmann in “William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet” (1996) and James Ivory in “A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries” (1998) while making–among others–an edgy independent feature (Nicholas Perry’s 1999 “Speedway Junkie”), a high-tech action adventure (the 1995 “Hackers”) and a mainstream teen comedy, (2000’s “Bring It On”). Now Bradford is starring in his first big family film since the 1995 boy-and-his-pooch outdoor yarn “Far from Home: The Legend of Yellow Dog.” It’s “Clockstoppers,” a teen sci-fi adventure comedy from Nickelodeon Pictures, and it’s directed by Jonathan Frakes, veteran of “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” In it, Bradford plays a high schooler who, with the aid of a special watch, can pass into hypertime, where he’s moving so quickly that he’s invisible to others. He uses the power not only to get a girlfriend, but to save his scientist father from a gang of crooks.

“I want to be able to run the gauntlet, personally,” the young actor said about the variety of roles he’s done during a recent Dallas interview, as he lounged in socks sans shoes on a couch in an elegant hotel suite. “To do the edgy independents as well as the lighter comedy like ‘Bring It On’ and now, a kid family film. I like to think that I’ll be able to do anything. I hope that’s the case.”

It was, in fact, the unexpected success of the high school cheerleading comedy in which he starred with Kirsten Dunst that opened the door to “Clockstoppers.” “I had just finished ‘Bring It On,'” Bradford recalled, “and the film was way more successful than any of us thought it would be, and my agent was getting a lot of calls. A lot of people were interested in using me, which was a pretty nice feeling. I’m usually doing the chasing after jobs, and it felt like jobs were chasing after me. This [‘Clockstoppers’] was one of the best opportunities that came my way– from a creative standpoint but also from a business standpoint. It seemed like a great idea. It was a major studio picture–lots of money, lots of great special effects, [producer] Gale Anne Hurd [who’d made ‘The Terminator,’ ‘The Abyss,’ ‘Aliens,’ ‘The Terminator 2′ and ‘Armageddon,’ among others], John Frakes–and they wanted me to be the guy! It seemed like a no-brainer. You get opportunities to do this big kind of movie when you come off a movie that does so well as ‘Bring It On.’ It seemed like a good opportunity, so I went for it.”

The large number of effects sequences in the story, however, required Bradford to act in circumstances different from the ones he was accustomed to. “It’s not so much that they’re complicated,” he explained. “It’s that they’re horribly, horribly, horribly uncomplicated. With the special effects, it’s hard in a very different way [from scenes complicated by a lot of motion and dialogue], because you’re sort of stripped of stimuli–you’re just surrounded by green fabric as opposed to some semblance of reality, be it a sound stage or an actual location. Either way, usually films are trying to replicate reality, and working with a green screen is the exact opposite of that. It’s like working in a big green fishbowl.”

In “Clockstoppers,” Bradford’s character of Zak Gibbs is an avid bicyclist, doing tricks as he speeds around town, but the actor admitted most of them were the work of an expert stand-in. “I didn’t do very many at all–about 3% of them,” he laughed. He was, however, responsible for the guitar riffs that Zak does in an early scene. “That’s me,” he said. “I’m happy with that, because it’s cool that it’s been kind of immortalized now.” Originally, though, he was reluctant to repeat a bit he’d just done in “Bring It On.” The scene, he explained, “was not in the script. Frakes came up to me and said, ‘How about in that scene where you’re playing video games, you’re playing guitar instead?’ And I said, ‘I don’t want to be the guy that plays guitar in all these movies.’ And then I said, ‘But if you’ll buy me a guitar, if Paramount will supply me with a lovely guitar that I then get to take home, then we can talk.” Minutes later, Frakes returned to ask him what kind of guitar he’d like, and with an impish grin Bradford recalled choosing a Gibson Flying V. “I still have it,” he added with satisfaction.

Bradford seems to have remained very grounded while pursuing his career, noting that as he was growing up, acting “rarely infringed on my life outside of it, and it rarely wasn’t fun.” Though he tried for a time to continue his studies at Columbia while doing pictures, eventually he decided to separate the two, skipping terms to take roles and then returning to school full-time; “it’s one or the other or working at a distance,” he said, and he chose the former. Still he’s completed all his major requirements and is only fourteen elective credits from graduation–with a film studies degree that emphasizes theory over practice. “They [the professors at Columbia] don’t want you out making a movie,” he explained. “They want you to be thinking about movies. That’s precisely what their focus is.” The emphasis was perfect for him, Bradford added, because it’s complemented what he’s gotten from experience in working toward the goal of eventually directing pictures himself. The prospect first occurred to him, he recalled, when he had a part in “Presumed Innocent” in 1990 and watched the late Alan Pakula at work. “I thought, ‘I could boss people around,'” he joked. “Since then I have tried to observe–sort of watch and learn.” The effort has paid off especially since he began work at Columbia. “It helps to have a basis,” he explained. “Since going to film school, I’ve been able to absorb so much more.” He looked back with special fondness to observing James Ivory at work. Describing the director as “phenomenal,” Bradford said: “He’s so, so good at telling you exactly what he wants. He just nails it–exactly what’s important about each scene.”

Until we can see the fruits of Jesse Bradford’s film studies and what he’s learned from other directors when he finally gets behind the camera, however, audiences can enjoy watching his work in front of one: “Clockstoppers” is a co-production of Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Movies and a Paramount Pictures release. And after completing his interview about it, Bradford headed down the hotel hallway toward the elevator, having donned his shoes and decided to take advantage of this stop on the promotional tour by trying a Tex-Mex restaurant for lunch.