LOS ANGELES—A half-dozen years ago, Jeffrey Dean Morgan was 38 and had been acting for most of his life. However, things weren’t going particularly well. In fact, he began to question whether or not he had made the right career choice. He kept at it, and in late 2005 he got a call from the producers of Grey’s Anatomy. They wanted him to appear in a few episodes as the love interest for Katherine Heigl’s character, Dr. Izzie Stevens. Things changed almost overnight. He’s 44 today (April 22) and is scheduled to have four movies come out this year, including The Losers, which opens Friday (April 23). In an L.A. hotel, he says he got a little lucky. And he says his newfound success comes with responsibilities that were not a consideration in the early days of his career.

“Six years ago, I couldn’t pay my rent and I was questioning whether or not I should even be an actor. I had no idea what else I would do, so I just kept on going. Then this TV show came around and it reconfigured not only my career but me. It used to be, ”˜I will do whatever they want.’ I think my most important job now is making the right decision about what I am going to do. I spent 25 years doing whatever came along. It didn’t matter if it was Walker, Texas Ranger or [the Pamela Anderson series] V.I.P. or whatever. Now I find that there is a certain amount of responsibility to make the right choices. I take it very seriously. I am having a great time, but I work really hard and I don’t take it for granted.”

In The Losers he plays Franklin Clay, a colonel who is left for dead in the Bolivian jungle by the American government after a businessman (Jason Patric) blows up his unit’s helicopter. The group decide to find a way back to the U.S. and get their lives back. Although his men are suspicious of a woman (Zoe Saldana) who says she can help, Clay falls for her, possibly jeopardizing his men’s chances of getting home.

The responsibility that Morgan feels toward his career extends to the set. He says that when he was doing The Losers (directed by Sylvain White, he was always conscious of the fact that not only was his character in charge of the unit but he had the lead role in the film. He says he felt that, too, came with some obligations.

“I was there every day, even if I wasn’t in the scene, because it was important to me to set an example. I have worked with people who have showed up and they didn’t know their lines. That won’t be me. I take things very seriously, and with the position I am in now, I am not going to follow it up by being a dumb ass. I wanted to be the team leader on and off the set. I think I was the oldest person in our little group, so it was important to me to set an example. Not that my fellow actors were not consummate professionals, but I took my responsibilities very seriously. This is ”˜my shot’, as they say.”

Of course, it could all end as easily as it began in 2005. Morgan was able to move slowly into leading-man roles with the ensemble piece Watchmen and a second lead in P.S. I Love You. The new films are different. He is expected to put bums in seats for The Losers and the upcoming Red Dawn; for Shanghai, in which he costars with John Cusack; and for The Resident, which costars Hilary Swank.

“Right now, I am as good as my last movie,” he says. “If you make bad choices, and we have seen that happen to a lot of people, there is a good chance you will disappear. I have a good team and they know what I want to do, and I don’t care if it is television or film or if it has no budget or a huge budget. There has to be something on the page that I love, because it is such a collaborative process. At the same time, we actors take the hit if the film is a flop. Watchmen was Watchmen. People were going to see it because they wanted to see the comic book come to life. Losers is a little bit of the same in that it came from a graphic novel, but it doesn’t have the same kind of following. And this is the first time that the studios said, ”˜You are the guy.’ I am not going to lie. There is a lot riding on this film for me. I am nervous. I want people to keep taking chances on me.”