"You can do so much with the eyes," says the actor, who has never had an acting lesson. "Look at Steve McQueen. He never talked that much in his movies. Anyway, I don't think you can learn acting. That's like telling a woman to be charming. She is or she isn't."

Perhaps it is no coincidence that Mr. Van Damme's most expressive features in "Timecop" are his eyes, gray verging on blue. Opened wide, they can convey moist, spaniel-like longings; narrowed into angry slits of resolve, they promise mayhem down the road. Words come harder to him. Still, for someone who has long been expected to act only with his pecs and his abs, this represents progress.

"I have a decent body," he says. "I'm always training in the gym. So up to now, the producers and directors of my movies want to show muscle shots. These are no-budget movies. What else can they show? An explosion? A jet crashing? Not enough money. So they show muscles. The kids go wow. I end up being a piece of meat."

No more. While he continues to weight lift every day, at 180 pounds (down from 200), he is clearly not one of those bull-necked titans who threaten to split their shirts up the back simply by inhaling too deeply. In fact, your first impression, as he strides across the lobby of the Regency Hotel one recent summer evening in Manhattan, is that of a provincial European gym coach on a night out. His hair is brushed back in a modified pompadour. Large gold-rimmed glasses lend a studious note to his face. His flesh is pink and naturally picks up the light -- one of the benefits, he claims, of sweating profusely during his workouts.

He likes it that he very nearly gets the stuffing beaten out of him at the end of "Timecop." "But I win," he notes, "because my wife and my family give me courage. They give me heart. You know, if I do five movies in a row where all I do is kick butt and nothing else, I may make money. But I'll go down the toilet. I have to do something different."

MR. VAN DAMME, WHOSE real name is Van Varenberg, was raised speaking French in Berchem-Sainte Agathe, a small town to the west of Brussels, where his father, Eugene, now retired, was a florist. A skinny, hyperactive towhead in his youth, the actor lived in a dreamworld much of the time, shaped partly by such American movies as "The Sand Pebbles," "Ben Hur," "The Cincinnati Kid" and "Cool Hand Luke."