This month Kyle Chandler stars in Super 8, the latest from creative mastermind J. J. Abrams (Star Trek, ABC’s Lost), who wrote and directed the movie. Chandler plays a deputy in a small Ohio town in 1979. His son is one of a group of children who accidentally take film footage of a train wreck, which turns out to be not quite what it seems. “When I got to the set, I asked to see a script, and they said, ‘You can’t have a script,’” says Chandler, laughing. “They said, ‘You will be allowed to go into a trailer and we will close the door and you can read the script, but you have to leave it behind.’ I’d have friends and family ask me, ‘What is the movie about?’ And I was like, ‘I can’t tell you. It’s top-secret.’ They wanted to punch me. But it was fun. We’d joke on set, ‘Don’t talk about anything. People are listening.’”

Chandler, 45, was born in Buffalo but raised largely in Georgia, and his accent still lingers. “I’ve worked pretty consistently for about 20 years, doing theater, television, and features. I consider each job to be an acting class, and over the last decade I’ve been in some of the best acting classes that anyone could ever imagine.” Chandler is best known for his role as a Texas high-school football coach in Friday Night Lights (the TV series inspired by the book by V.F. contributing editor Buzz Bissinger). Last year he was nominated for an Emmy. “If I could use expletives,” says Chandler, “I’d say I’m the luckiest fucking guy in the world.”