When we met for an interview at the Four Seasons hotel this morning, Aaron Eckhart ordered a cup of coffee. With any other actor, that wouldn’t be noteworthy, but Eckhart was raised a Mormon, and if he was still a strict believer, he wouldn’t imbibe caffeine. So thinking he might be someone with colorful stories about movie-star merriment, I asked him how he had spent his free time while he was filming the comedy “Meet Bill” in St. Louis two years ago.

“I quit drinking a few years ago, I don’t smoke and I don’t go to nightclubs,” he said. “So I spent a lot of time riding my bike.”

He said he also took his Leica on short photo safaris around the Central West End, where he went looking for interesting faces.

Eckhart’s own face is square-jawed and handsome, but that’s not the reason he became an actor. In college at Brigham Young University, he met a playwright named Neil LaBute. They shared what Eckhart called “a dark sensibility” that made them campus outcasts. After graduation, when the two collaborated on a low-budget workplace psychodrama called “In the Company of Men,” it essentially launched both their careers.

Echkart made several other films with LaBute–”Your Friends and Neighbors,” “Nurse Betty” and “Possession”–and he’s starred in such high-profile movies as “Erin Brockovich” and the upcoming “Batman Returns” (during which, he says, he as stunned by the performance of the late Heath Ledger).

Eckhart, who turned 40 last month, says he now wants to steer his career in a hopeful direction to counteract the toxic values that have taken hold of the culture. He says he’s no longer impressed by the shiny toys and velvet-rope access that come with stardom, and he’s worried about the toll that our obsession with celebrity is taking on a generation of actors.

“It’s literally killing people,” he said.

When I tell him I will have to go back to the newspaper and report that Aaron Eckhart is a clean-living actor who is serious about his work, he smiles and says “That’s not much of a story, is it?”