Thanks to a career-defining role on a television show about superheroes, Milo Ventimiglia has become a household name. But fans of his wholesome roles as Peter Petrelli on Heroes (and before that, as Rory's true love, Jess Mariano, on Gilmore Girls), had better steel themselves for Ventimiglia's latest character: a competitive, exacting medical student seduced into a game of sex, drugs and murder in Pathology.

Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor (Crank) wrote and produced Pathology, a dark thriller packed with slabs of dead bodies and plenty of medical gore -- but most importantly, filled with lots of Milo. It's the first starring grown-up role for the 30-year-old actor, but it won't be his last; he's already filmed an appearance in Neveldine and Taylor's next directorial project, the futuristic MMO-based thriller, Game. Think a character named Rick Rape sounds brutal? Check out Ventimiglia's twisted star turn in Pathology, where he goes head-to-head (and scalpel-to-scalpel) with fellow murderous docs Michael Weston (The Last Kiss), Lauren Lee Smith (The L Word), and Johnny Whitworth (Empire Records).

In Pathology you play Ted Grey, a medical student sucked into a deadly game...

Milo Ventimiglia: He's a forensic pathologist who's kind of at the top of his game, who finds himself in a world that he's not in control of.

Is this the darkest character you've played so far in your career?

MV: I think [I've] never quite played a character like this before, a guy who is involved in the sorts of things he's involved in, but I also play a pretty sick fucker in Nevaldine and Taylor's next movie, Game.

I was reading about that! I think that's going to be really exciting for your fans. I mean, your character's name is...

MV: Rick Rape! Yeah, I know -- he's not a likable guy. Can I describe Rick Rape? Moonraker, silver grill, with a latex outfit making him look like a bumblebee. [Laughs.] With I think the perverse nature of...a teenage boy on speed.

And is he a killer-type of character?

MV: Rick Rape? No, he's not a killer. He's just...not quite himself.

Neveldine and Taylor obviously wrote Crank, then Pathology, and now have enlisted both you and your fellow Pathology star Johnny Whitworth for roles in Game. Did you just meet them and immediately want to be involved in any crazy projects that they were doing?

MV: I think it was mutual. Mark and Brian are a very specific lot of guys. They had [wanted] to throw me into the things they were working in just as much as I wanted to be in their graces. I was a big fan of Crank-- of the movie and of the script. And when Pathology came around I thought it was just a clever, intelligent take on a story that anybody else could have just fucked up. I think I got very lucky in those guys saying hey, now that we know you, you're going to be in everything we're involved in -- whether it's one line, no lines, or a major role. Those guys, they pretty much know that whatever they're asking me to do, I'm in. They didn't even tell me I had an option or a choice in Game, they just said "You're playing Rick Rape, and that's what you're gonna play." And I said, "Ok."

What is it about them that they bring to a movie that makes you want to be in it, no questions asked?

MV: They're innovators. I think they really are onto something that's ahead of their time right now in filmmaking, from the technology that they use, to the classic, practical side of making movies, to their drive when they're making movies -- they're involved, hands on the whole way through. Even as writers and producers on Pathology, those guys were there every day, through every conversation and every shot. I think they're going to be the next big thing. Back in the 1990s, you heard a lot about Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, these guys who were up and coming for their Wild West attitudes and doing what they wanted -- that's Mark and Brian. But I don't want to compare them -- I mean, I think they're going to have the same kind of entrance as those guys did. Where people are like, "Holy f***, who are these guys? We have to work with them!" And if you look at their resume, or their IMDB profile, those guys are booked solid for the next year and a half.

Let's go back to Pathology. Your character is kind of unlike most protagonists, because his own morals are in question.

MV: Oh, absolutely. He's not a likeable guy; he's kind of the antihero. He's doing some really, really distasteful, dishonest, criminal things, but at the end of the film you're actually rooting for him to win. That was a hard line that we had to pay attention to -- making him in any way appealing to the audience. Because if the audience is not with him, if they're not sympathetic, if they don't want him to succeed at the end, it's going to be a waste of two hours for anybody watching. And that was always something, before filming, while we were filming, and after the fact, I always had conversations on to make it real and make him something that people were kind of salivating for.

And for Ted to succeed -- which the audience does want by the end -- means not for him to redeem himself, but to go deeper into that darkness.

MV: Yes, exactly.

Do you think the audience becomes implicated in that, because we want dark things to happen?

MV: I think people do want to see the ultimate ending that happens. I don't want to blow the ending, but I do think people want to see that.

Well, as one of the world's most squeamish movie watchers, I found Pathology to be excruciating to watch -- scalpels, bodies, autopsies, and those giant hedge cutters that cut into chest cavities...

MV: Yeah! That's what they really use; they use hedge cutters in the coroner's office. I think they are the fastest thing to get through bone. And the sound? The sound that they make in the movie, oh yeah. That's what it sounds like when you're crunching open a sternum.