as a football coach, an offensive coordinator in Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday. Critical success Eckhart first gained wide exposure in 2000 as George, a ponytailed, goateed biker, in Steven Soderbergh's drama Erin Brockovich. The film was met with reasonable reviews, and was a box office success, earning $256 million worldwide. His performance was well received by critics; Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman wrote that Eckhart "may be playing a bit of an ideal [...] but he makes goodness as palpable as he did yuppie evil in 'In the Company of Men'." In an August 2004 interview, Eckhart claimed that he had not worked for nearly a year before he was cast in the movie. "I felt like I sort of was getting away from what I wanted to do as an actor. [...] I had nine months off, but it wasn't a vacation. Sure, I didn't earn any money for nine months, but every day I was reading scripts, I was producing my own material, I was taking meetings, I was working on my craft." Following the release of Erin Brockovich, Eckhart co-starred with Renée Zellweger in LaBute's Nurse Betty (2000). He next appeared in Sean Penn's mystery feature The Pledge (2001), in which he played a young detective partnered with a veteran detective, played by Jack Nicholson. The movie received generally favorable reviews, but it did not fare particularly well at the box office. The following year, he collaborated with LaBute in a film adaptation of the Man Booker Prize-winning novel Possession (2002). In 2003, Eckhart co-starred with Hilary Swank in The Core, a film about a geophysicist who tries to detonate a nuclear device in order to save the world from destruction. The film was critically and financially unsuccessful. Also in 2003, he appeared in The Missing, in which he played Cate Blanchett's lover, and in the action-thriller Paycheck opposite Ben Affleck. Paycheck, based on a short story by science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, garnered generally negative reception. Film critic Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film two stars (out of four), saying that he "enjoyed the movie" but felt that it "exploits [Dick's story] for its action and plot potential, but never really develops it." The following year, away from film, Eckhart guest starred in two episodes of NBC's comedy sitcom Frasier, where he played a boyfriend of Charlotte, Dr. Frasier Crane's love interest.