Chris Ashworth

Ashworth
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Chris Ashworth can put on all sorts of accents: Austrian, Cuban, Irish, English and - as he's shown in his current role in "The Wire," a major HBO police series - even Ukrainian.

But he speaks in his own voice - in the Southernized tones of guy who grew up in Bedford County - when he talks about his newfound and startling success as an actor.

"A small-town guy comes up and starts his Hollywood career," he muses during a phone interview from Maryland, where "The Wire" is filming the 10th episode of its second, 12-episode season."You just have no idea what it feels like when you see yourself on television."

He stays centered, he says, by staying in touch with folks back home."I talk to them every day, to try and keep my head on straight."He says he feels bad sometimes when his mom calls and he has to tell her he's too busy and can't talk right then.

"She's really proud," Ashworth, 28, says."I think she knows how hard I worked to get here."

The here he's talking about is a supporting role on "The Wire" as Sergei Malatov, a smuggler involved in shady doings around the Port of Baltimore.The show airs at 10 p.m. Sundays and is run again during the week.

Sergei was introduced as a new character in the second-season premiere last Sunday . This Sunday the character emerges a key figure in the plot - especially, Ashworth says, during some "really intense" scenes in the last quarter of the episode.
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Ashworth says he didn't have much interest in acting when he was at Liberty High School, where he graduated in 1993.After he graduated from Averett College, he worked a series of forgettable jobs before deciding to devote himself to a modeling and acting career.

He worked with the Cherry Tree Players in Lynchburg and did a series of "cheesy local commercials" for Lynchburg and Roanoke TV stations ("there's still four or five running now," he notes).Then, in 1998, he signed up for a model search tryout, wowed the sponsors and ended up modeling for magazines in New York City and getting bit parts in several movies (such as Sentinel #38 in "The Replacements" and S.W.A.T. Team Leader in "The Watcher.")

His break came in December, when he got a call to audition for HBO.He got called back for a second look just before Christmas.Then in January, he got the big news.
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"It sinks in a little bit every day," Ashworth says in his Bedford County accent.

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