Entertainment

11:33 AM CDT on Monday, July 3, 2006

ROCKWALL – Prison Break co-star Lane Garrison hit the road for Hollywood right after graduating from Richardson's J.J. Pearce High School. His triumphant return to these parts is a bona fide rags-to-riches story in a business where many of them are made up.

"My friends threw me a going-away party and they all thought I was crazy not going to college," he says of heading west on his own with just $400 to his name. "I grew up pretty much coming from nothing."

He had taken some theater classes in high school but devoted most of his out-of-class time to Pearce's football and wrestling teams.

"I didn't really have time to be in any plays, but I always knew that acting was what I wanted to do," he says.

Mr. Garrison, 26, first took up residence in a $19-a-night motel in Koreatown before finding work in commercials. He made enough money to take acting lessons, assemble some publicity photos and even eat reasonably well. His first film work of any consequence came in 2004's Quality of Life, an independent feature about a Bay Area "street artist." Now he's David "Tweener" Apolskis, one of Prison Break 's escaped cons, in a second season being filmed entirely in North Texas.

The sweet smells of success can be bittersweet, too. Mr. Garrison's mother, Lisa, died in 2000, and his father, Lee, in 2004. They're memorialized in a tattoo on his left shoulder. "Coming home obviously conjures up a lot of stuff for me, a lot of memories," he says. "It's great being here, but it's also difficult. You try to use it in the work."

His Prison Break character is on the lam with the Fox show's nastiest fugitive, Theodore "T-Bag" Bagwell (Robert Knepper), who had his hand lopped off on the show's first season finale. Rumor has it that the hand somehow will be reattached in one of the second season's early episodes.

"It's TV! You do whatever!" Mr. Garrison says, laughing.

In real life, he's already shown that just about anything's possible. "I'm proof to other kids that you can have that dream if you go after it with all of your guts and your instincts."

Ed Bark