Jay Tavare spent a considerable chunk of last year at the bottom of a ditch under a blazing hot sun. And, truth to tell, he loved every moment of it.

Chalk it up to the magic of the movies. Cold Mountain is a drama set during the American Civil War, so of course it was shot mostly in Romania. The lead male character, a wounded Confederate solider who goes AWOL to reunite with his sweetheart, is played by London native Jude Law. The sweetie, a Southern belle who's tending the farm back in North Carolina, is played by Australian actress Nicole Kidman.

And Tavare? He plays the hero's best buddy and comrade-in-arms, a brave Cherokee who fights for the Rebel cause. Given his Apache ancestry, Tavare notes with a laugh, he comes closer to being typecast than almost anyone else in the production.

"It was a wonderful experience," he says. "Right from the start, you just sensed you were working on something very special. It wasn't just that the director (Anthony Minghella of The English Patient) had won an Oscar. Just about every head of every department—the cinematographer, the production designer and so on—they'd all won Oscars, too.

"But I have to tell you: As much as I enjoyed it, Cold Mountain was by far the most physically challenging film I've ever done."

How so?

"Remember last year, when Europe had all those floods? Well, that's when we were there, in all that extreme weather. And, you know, I didn't realize Romania was that close to the Equator. There were some days when we were working in 110 degrees or above temperatures. And there we were, in these woolen Civil War outfits. For the first six weeks, we were shooting the Battle of Petersburg, so we were mostly inside a crater.

"In a situation like that, it didn't really take much acting to look like you'd been through a war."

Maybe so, but don't be fooled: Among the ranks of ascending stars, stands out. While still a student in European boarding schools, he produced and choreographed a Spanish dance troupe, earned a World Breakdance Championship, then graduated to acting in TV commercials. After making his movie debut in Street Fighter (1994) as Vega, a matador who manhandles Jean-Claude Van Damme, the handsome Tavare—born in Arizona, raised in Southern California—steadily honed his craft in other character parts. His persistence paid off in 2002 when he landed a small but attention-grabbing role in Spike Jonez's Adaptation as a renegade orchid thief opposite Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, and Chris Cooper.

Now in his early 30s, Tavare is poised to take his career to the next level. And while he's careful not to sound overly confident, he can't help feeling excited about his attention-grabbing roles in two major movies that are generating high-decibel Oscar buzz: Cold Mountain, based on the best-selling novel by Charles Frazier, and The Missing, a suspenseful Western drama directed by Ron Howard.

In the latter film, Tommy Lee Jones stars as Samuel Jones, a rugged southwestern frontiersman who deserted his family to live with the Apache people. After a 20-year absence, he returns to seek reconciliation with Maggie (Cate Blanchett), his long-estranged daughter. At first, Maggie rebuffs her father. But when her own daughter is kidnapped by renegades who sell girls into slavery in Mexico, Maggie joins her errant dad on a desperate rescue mission in an unforgiving wilderness. They get by with a little help from their friend Kayitah (Tavare), an Apache warrior whose future daughter-in-law also has been snatched by the slavers.

Unfortunately, the slavers are frustratingly elusive. Even more unfortunately, their ringleader—Pesh-Chidin (Eric Schweig), another Apache—-is rumored, with just cause, to be a "brujo" (witch).

"You have to hand it to Ron," Tavare jokes. "In this age of political correctness, he's been daring enough to have a villain who's not just a witch, but an Apache witch."

Which may explain, he laughs, why he was cast in the first place. "Early on in the project, Ron told me, ‘Jay, your job is actually very difficult. Because what I want from you, constantly, is contrast, contrast, contrast.'

"Seriously, though, it's good to show both extremes. Before the 1990s, every Western or period piece had Native Americans who were these double-braided, bronzed savages running around going, ‘Woo! Woo! Woo!' And after Dances with Wolves, the tables turned, and all the Indians were benevolent and all the white folks were evil. But our film strikes a balance—there's good and bad on both sides, like there is in real life.

"For me, it was crucial that Kayitah was a three-dimensional character," says Tavare. "He's a father, he's a warrior, and he's a medicine man. I know that in a lot of movies now there's this mystical element attached to Native Americans. But in reality, these Apaches are just human beings. If you cut us, we'll bleed."

(Oddly enough, Tavare originally auditioned for the role of Pesh-Chidin. "But Jay had this kind of goodness, a truly positive vibe," Howard says. "I'm sure he could play a villain, but I thought he was perfect for Kayitah.")

Tavare approached his participation in The Missing as "an honor as well as a responsibility." He traces his real-life roots, through his mother, to the White Mountain tribe. (His father, whom he never knew, was of Latin and Navajo ancestry.) But even though he's previously been cast as Native American characters—in Adaptation, for instance, he was a Seminole—Kayitah is the first Apache Tavare has ever portrayed onscreen.

"I became very emotional when I got this part," he says, "because the first person I met while preparing for the film was Elbys Hugar, who's a great-granddaughter of Cochise. She was one of the advisers Ron hired to coach us in Chiricahua Apache. That's how much attention Ron pays to detail. Chiricahua is a unique dialect—there are only about 300 people who speak it fluently. And we had two or three of them on the set.

"The thing is, Chiricahua is one of those languages that are slowly dying out, becoming obsolete, because they're spoken by so few people," says Tavare. "And I'll never forget something Elbys said: ‘You have to do this correctly, and I'll tell you why. When you appear in this film and you're speaking Apache fluently, and you do it right and well, all the young people in the tribes will see you and hear you. And maybe that will encourage them to be proud of who they are and to continue learning Apache so the language will continue to exist.'"

Smiling broadly, Tavare proudly reports: "We speak a lot of Chiricahua in The Missing—about a third of the movie has subtitles—and some of the other actors needed cue cards in some scenes or had to wear little earpieces to listen to the dialogue prompter. But I was able to speak all of my lines on my own."

Better still, Tavare also was able to convince Howard that the heavy drama needed a few moments of Chiricahua-style comic relief. Even as he played for laughs, however, Tavare remained serious about developing his character.

"Hollywood has forever created these stereotypes of the stoic, silent, emotionless Indians," he says. "And let me tell you: Breaking those stereotypes gave me tremendous pleasure."