Age: 29
Home Base: Chester, Virginia
Where You’ve Seen Him: Sex and the City, Law & Order, Line of Fire, Monk
Martial Arts Experience: karate, first degree in hapkido.

Eli Harris was a rambunctious youth. At age 13, his parents enrolled him in karate class to help him burn off some of his surplus energy. “I had attention-deficit disorder, and they wanted me to channel my energies instead of getting into trouble,” he says.

His older brother, a competitive judo player, provided him with additional exposure to the combat arts. That was when they started reading Black Belt, he recalls.

Now a student of hapkido under Michael Bugg in Chester, Virginia, Harris holds a first-degree black belt, but he insists he’s out of practice. “I doubt if I’m at that level now,” he says modestly.

Because of his innate interest in entertainment, Harris vowed to seriously pursue his dream even before he was discharged from the U.S. Army. Soon thereafter, his face became familiar to viewers of Sex and the City, Law & Order and Line of Fire. Among his other portrayals are a freed slave in The History Channel’s Dark Side of Lincoln, a police lieutenant in HBO’s The Wire and a con artist in USA Network’s Monk.

His most recent big-screen work was in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed. Scheduled for a 2007 release, it stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon and Jack Nicholson. Harris plays a cadet at the police academy.

Harris has taken great strides as an actor, earning himself the opportunity to work in pictures with little if any fighting, but his desire to do more martial arts roles led him to shift his professional emphasis. His first effort was to write, direct and act in his own martial arts movie, Saga Tier: The Highest Saga. It’s set for a DVD release through York Entertainment just before Christmas 2006.

So what’s next for the rising star? “We completely redid the script of Saga Tier, and I’ve been talking with Michael Jai White for the past month or so,” he says. “When Mike and I first talked, he said, ‘You’re the guy that looks like me.’ I gave him a copy of the DVD and the revised script. He’s looking over it to see if he wants to get involved in a remake.”

Harris has mixed feelings about his first project. “The story itself is awesome,” he says. “The only problem is that I wasn’t able to get the fights I wanted. Most of the people involved were very timid—and some were supposed to be black belts! That’s why I decided to rewrite it and get in touch with Mike. I told him he could do whatever he wanted with it. Hopefully, he’ll take a liking to it and get involved.”