When actor Garret Dillahunt was about to celebrate his 17th birthday, tragedy struck that was to change him forever. His older brother, Eric, was killed in a drunk-driving accident. He was a passenger in the car. “That threw me,” Dillahunt says.

“That throws your whole family ... That also helped me react about giving up. I was just determined, and you know how kids think. I was determined, ‘Well, I can never die. I saw what that did to my mother. If I get hit by a bus, I'll pull what's left of my body out of the wreckage and continue living so my mom doesn't have to go through that again.'

“Foolish thoughts,” he admits. “You can't do that. But that's how I felt. I felt oddly, conversely, you can go at any time. So do something you love. Stop worrying about how it's going to work. How are you going to make a living? What makes sense on paper? ... So, I found something that I enjoyed, and I found this.”

“This,” of course, is acting. And Dillahunt has been doing it ever since he was forced to take a drama class to fulfill his English requirements.

“I was terribly shy and horrified and terrified of that,” he says.

“But I loved it, and that was my last year of college, then I was out. And I thought, ‘That's what I want to do. That was it, what I've wanted the whole time.'”

He wangled a full scholarship to do graduate study in drama at NYU. “I kind of just drifted through college, really. I studied journalism just because that was my plan before my brother was gone. It (acting) was a real escape for me, hiding in other people, and I just got used to it. It's funny, you develop this habit of sort of running and hiding. And I'm still doing it.”

Today he's hiding in a big, bushy brown beard. He's hardly recognizable from his role as the clueless dad-grandfather in Fox's “Raising Hope,” or from his roles in “Damages,” “Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles,” “ER” and “No Country for Old Men.”

The beard ornaments his newest role in “Justified,” which airs Tuesdays on FX. Dillahunt plays a mysterious stranger in town who's buying up parcels of land. While he's reluctant to reveal any of the plot, Dillahunt admits that he's “a certain part of an antagonist force.”

He's an old pal of the show's star, Timothy Olyphant. “Tim and I worked together in ‘Deadwood' 10 years ago. We'd run into each other, and he's been saying, ‘I keep trying to get you on the show,' but we shot at exactly the same times, and it never worked out. But when my show (“Raising Hope”) ended I sent him a text, ‘Hey, I'm available.' He said, ‘Hang on.'”

Dillahunt thinks their symbiotic experience working on “Deadwood” spoiled them. “We try to bend other projects to that sort of environment, which is very creative and very unique,” he says. “He's done that on ‘Justified' with the help of an incredible group of writers. They don't settle for good enough.”

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