It’s said the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and that’s too true for Patrick Fabian’s character in the horror movie The Last Exorcism, in theaters today and directed by Daniel Stamm. His Louisiana preacher Cotton Marcus has been pulling fake exorcisms for years in order to help rid people of their “demons” and decides to take a documentary crew as he goes on one final jaunt. But he quickly finds out that the possession of a young farm girl named Nell (Ashley Bell) may be far more real than he ever expected. It’s a signature role for Fabian, who has been kicking around for 20 years as a supporting actor on TV, in everything from Friends and Veronica Mars to Saved by the Bell: The College Years and Big Love. He stars alongside Helen Slater and Grace Gummer (the real-life daughter of Meryl Streep) in the TeenNick show Gigantic beginning in October, but he begins a new role as dad beginning mid-September. That’s when his wife, actress Mandy Steckelberg, is due with the couple’s first child, daughter Abbey Ray. (First name is for Abbey Road Studios in London; middle name is in honor of Steckelberg’s grandfather who ran a Western wear store and saddlery in Oacoma, S.D.) “Whether the movie’s a hit or not, I don’t think my daughter’s gonna care,” Fabian says with a laugh. I had a chance to talk with the Pennsylvania native about his role, his career and what he really thinks about exorcisms, so read below for our conversation and check out this clip featuring him and Bell in The Last Exorcism.

Photos courtesy of Mackel Vaughn, Lionsgate

For you, what was the main appeal of playing a preacher in a horror movie?
If you ever saw Burt Lancaster as Elmer Gantry and all those types of preacher roles, as an actor, those are just fun to inhabit. It comes with the territory – playing a preacher, you’re already playing somebody who’s already standing up in front of a congregation or a group of people who’s telling them, “I know what’s right. Follow me.” There’s a breath of egotism in that and theatrics that are just built into being a preacher that any actor worth his salt would enjoy embracing. Plus, I grew up on horror films. I wish I could talk French cinema with you. I could maybe lie and string along a conversation, but the fact of the matter is, I’m a white kid from the suburbs. I loved scary movies growing up, watching something on Saturday nights in the basement downstairs in the winter. You watch a scary film and you shut off the lights and you get a little creeped out walking up to go to bed. If I can be a part of a film that makes some teenage boy just lose his cool a little bit, that’s awesome.

I read that you encountered an alligator your first day on set in New Orleans. What else freaked you out?
The whole situation where we’re working at. There’s a real sense of ghosts down there, and just the nature of the work we were doing. We’re working at night for half the shoot and there’s swamp rats running around and more crickets and bugs than you can possibly think of making noise. And you’re dealing with somebody who’s possessed or is she possessed or what’s going on and who’s saying what and bumps in the night and darkness around the corner, and it starts to pervade you. I’m not saying people were getting creeped out, but we weren’t working on a musical.

Could you sleep at night?
It’s still a movie, but you get a little restless. It’s like taking your work home with you, like everybody does. If you’re a waiter, you have waiter nightmares where your food doesn’t get out on time, and if you’re an accountant, maybe you can’t come up with all your right numbers. If you’re an actor, you’re missing your cue, missing your audition or living your role, so yeah, absolutely. There were days when I was preaching in the church, we did that for two or three days, and in the middle of the night all of a sudden I’d wake up thinking, “Oh, I need to change this sermon!” You just get naturally tired when you’re shooting a film anyways. But I didn’t wake up with cold sweats or calling for my mother.

The Last Exorcism may end up being your breakthrough role 20 years after you first started in Hollywood. What kept you around?
A lot of actors come out to Los Angeles because they want to be a star, they want to be famous. That goes part and parcel with you wanting to have money and recognition and good parts to work on. Along the way, that didn’t happen, but I got to be a working actor, which is something I didn’t expect to happen. It’s such a fortunate happenstance that I’ve been able to cobble together this again and again. People know me from things here and there, but I’ve never been a series regular. I’ve shot 11 pilots that haven’t gone. Like a lot of the guys who are my age now out here, we all had a chance to audition for all the big hit shows of the last 20 years: Friends and ER and all the sitcoms and the things that are out there. Those shows run for their time – 5, 10, 12 years – and they leave, and you realize you guest-starred on them. You turn around in your early 40s and you go, “Wow, I’m still standing,” and you’ve managed to cobble this career together. You’re gonna get what you’re gonna get. You can’t get everything. I’m sure Tom Cruise gets jealous of Brad Pitt, and vice versa. Somebody told me once, “The only thing worse than an actor who’s not a series regular is an actor who’s a series regular.” You’re never satisfied! Pretty soon you have the series regular job and then you want something else. However, I’m willing to see how dissatisfied I might be as a series regular. I’m open to that. [Laughs]

You run triathlons, regularly play volleyball and stay pretty active. Did that help with some of the physical and more stressful days filming The Last Exorcism?
Absolutely. In Los Angeles, it seems like everybody’s in shape and trying to get a six-pack. I myself am not looking for the six-pack. That seems like way too much effort. I think a nice fitted shirt is an easy fix to that. In your 20s, of course, you can go go go go, and especially in Los Angeles you go go go and you do all those things you did in your 20s. I’m in my 40s and I don’t do those things anymore. I find that there is a direct proportion of the amount of sleep I get to how big the bags under my eyes are. I’m a big proponent of getting to bed. I like to get up early and work out, and that’s where I’m at now. It does help because on those long shoot days, craft service has those tables full of sugar and salt, and it’s all really good but if you’re in a little better shape, you don’t have to necessarily take the candy temptation. Although I will admit, I’m completely addicted to caffeine. There’s not a coffee I haven’t met that I didn’t want to drink. By the end of the day, I might think that I’m really calm, and the sound man may be like, “OK, this is unusable. He’s talking way too fast.”

So, do you actually believe in exorcisms and ghosts?
I totally believe in ghosts. I totally believe that there’s evil in the world. I think everybody has either a friend or first-hand experience of being in an apartment by yourself and having something walk past the hallway and you flicking around and you knowing no one’s there and that gooseflesh goes up. Everybody has that, and it’s one of those moments in the retelling of the story you want to tell them, “No but it was real!” You need them to believe it and you can tell in your eyes they don’t because they weren’t there to experience it. In terms of exorcisms, much like the film explores, I think people believe they are possessed by the devil and people commit heinous acts, which could arguably be said are the devil’s work. But does that mean actually Satan and his minions have infected somebody, and religious ceremony or invocation can release and scare the devil out? I’d firmly be in the camp of maybe I need to see it. You can see stuff on the Internet, you can YouTube a thousand different things, but there’s a healthy dose of skepticism. However, for people who feel they’ve been possessed and they’ve been in the presence of a holy man and a holy man has somehow taken that possession out of them, who am I to say? Also, just hand in hand with being a kid watching horror films, there’s a part of you that wants to believe, a part of you that really wants to say, “Oh yeah. That’s real.” I don’t know if that helps explain anything in the world, but there’s a weird comfort in saying, “There’s something else out there.”

Are you a spiritual kind of guy?
I was raised Catholic, and like many of my friends, drifted away when we were on our own in college. I haven’t really gone back to a practicing faith like that so much. I’m going to sound very fruity and nutty – as my father used to say, the fruits and nuts of California – but I like meditation and that sort of thing. I’m not saying I’m good at it or I do it every day, but I find that sort of thing very spiritual. What I really find spiritual is being able to walk my dogs over to Legion Park, and we have a horse and we get to go horseback riding about four or five times a week. The horse doesn’t care what show I’m on or what clothes I’m wearing. The horse just wants to go out for a walk. You get up on horseback in Los Angeles high above Hollywood, and there really are no problems. That’s a pretty spiritual place.

Do you have a next horror movie lined up yet?
I’ve already floated two ideas to Lionsgate and Daniel. One of them is The Last Exorcism: Exorcism in Paris. The other one is The Really Last Exorcism: Exorcism in the Caribbean with the Girls Gone Wild. It’s a franchise idea I’ve been talking around. [Laughs]