Strangers know Richard Jenkins from everywhere and nowhere. Sometimes they think they went to school with the 60-year-old actor or they quiz him, "Where do I know you from? What have I seen you in?"

Jenkins says he gets into trouble if he singles out any of his six dozen film and TV credits. One man once responded to a particular movie with, "Why would I ever see something like that?"

But Jenkins immediately adds, "Most people are really nice," even if they cannot quite place the lean balding man with the soft voice. HBO viewers, of course, remember him as funeral director Nathaniel Fisher, the deceased patriarch in "Six Feet Under."

"The 'Six Feet Under' fans are really just incredibly loyal and terrific, and that changed the recognition level."

But he's happy to play the Everyman, which is why so many directors keep casting him in movies such as "The Kingdom," "Rumor Has It," "North Country," "Cheaper by the Dozen" and "There's Something About Mary."

In late July, he will turn up as John C. Reilly's father in "Step Brothers," and, come September, he'll reunite with the Coen brothers in the dark spy comedy "Burn After Reading."

With "The Visitor," opening today at the Manor Theater in Squirrel Hill, he jumps from character actor to leading man.

He is Walter Vale, a widowed Connecticut economics professor who befriends a young couple illegally renting his rarely used New York apartment. Walter is drawn into the world of undocumented immigrants and detention centers and also stumbles into an unexpected romance.

Jenkins seems a little overwhelmed by the publicity he's been garnering for "The Visitor," but he quotes a relative who liked to say, "It's better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick."

Besides, he's had a wonderful career. "I've been really fortunate. But, you know, I'm an actor and all actors think every job's their last. That's our M.O."

It was a serendipitous encounter three years ago with sometime actor and writer-director Tom McCarthy ("The Station Agent") that ultimately led to "The Visitor." They were staying in the same Los Angeles hotel while working on separate projects. One day, McCarthy suggested they grab some food and they chatted for hours.

A year and a half later, McCarthy called and said, "I wrote this part for you and I want you to read it and tell me if you'd like to do it," Jenkins recalled in a phone interview. "I read it and said, 'Yeah.' That's that old joke, let me think about it. Yes."

Until recently, Jenkins considered "The Visitor" a relationship movie, but, coming on the heels of "Under the Same Moon," it's part of a growing body of movies dealing with immigration issues.

McCarthy urged Jenkins and actor Haaz Sleiman, whose Syrian musician named Tarek is threatened with deportation, to visit a real detention center.

"We both went one night, and I talked to a man -- when I say talked, I just listened and he talked for a half hour or so. I don't know, but I don't think he had talked to anyone for a very long time. It was sad."

As in the movie, they spoke by phone across glass dividers in a center with the same sort of patriotic wall mural.

"I know that Tom says when you know someone, everything changes," Jenkins says. "I've always felt that the least we can do is treat someone like a human being. That really is the issue here. I don't even know how I feel about the whole issue of immigration, I'm just not sure, it's so complicated."

But, he added, "Why don't we begin there. I guess that's a good place to start and if it was my son or daughter [held], I certainly would hope they would be treated as a person."

In "The Visitor" Walter is searching for music in his life and tries to learn the piano before accepting Tarek's tutelage on the djembe drum. "I played the drums when I was young, but I played the set drums with sticks," although Jenkins considered himself "below average" in skills.

"And I wasn't getting any better so I quit. I played for about five years. I was not a natural drummer, but it did help me with this. I've been saying finally, something I did in my youth paid off."

When his co-star Sleiman was learning to play the drum, he was told it had to become part of him. Jenkins joked that for part of the movie, "Maybe my drum is my briefcase. I felt a little naked without my briefcase and my glass of wine."

Although it's never made clear, Walter's wife died seven years earlier and he's been sleepwalking through life since. He imagined that Walter's wife took charge -- "Walter, now we're going here" -- and he happily went along.

"He hasn't stopped looking, he hasn't stopped living, but he's kind of trying to look for the answers in the same places and getting the same results. So I always felt that about the character, that he just didn't know enough to break out of this same circle he's been in for his whole life."

But when Walter opens the door to his New York apartment, spots fresh flowers on the table and discovers a stranger soaking in the bathtub, he steps outside that circle and never turns back.