In a sea of dreamy studs with as much ambition and credibility as their perfectly coiffed hair can accord them, Stuart Lafferty is something of an enigma.

He seems to be a young man of talent and poise. He handles himself with an articulateness that drives home his points and shows clearly that he has a hold on the direction that his life and acting career is running off to.

But his hair … it’s perfect.

Lafferty is not a stranger to the acting game. At four he was being placed in spot commercials and recently he’s dabbled in television on the CW’s “One Tree Hill,” a show on which his older brother, James Lafferty, stars.

But Lafferty is looking to make his own niche in the acting world, and he’s gotten a big break with the upcoming release of Death Sentence, in which he acts next to Kevin Bacon. Lafferty plays Bacon’s son, a good boy with a healthy interest in sports who gets gunned down before his time.

Between movie and TV filming, Lafferty notes that filmmaking moves at a more relaxed pace, letting people think out their shots more and get more one on one time with the directors and co-stars.

“It’s because they have to get the show done in a week and a half. There’s not as much precision,” he says. “I got to hang out with the directors and really talk about the scenes.”

He liked it so much, in fact, that Lafferty’s on the road to producing his own movie, tentatively titled The Churchill Club, a film about a handful of young men in Denmark who resist the Nazi invasion in every way that they can.

It’s plans like this, a project of depth and scope, that declare to the world that it certainly hasn’t seen the last of Stuart Lafferty, after his death sentence, of course.

Death Sentence releases in theaters Aug. 31.