Name: Paul Brooke

Age: 42

Job: Action-figure sculptor

Location: A cluttered basement in Cincinnati

His story: Like teenage girls across the country, Paul Brooke spends his days staring at dozens of photos of Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom. He obsesses over their eyes, studies the intricacies of their mouths and pays closer attention to what they wear than a married father of three probably should. Hell, he's spent hours running his hands over their hair.

Then again, it's his job.

Brooke is mooning over the two actors because he's trying to figure out how to translate their Hollywood glamour into a wax mold that will serve as the basis for an action figure for the upcoming "Pirates of the Caribbean" sequels. Getting the intricate folds of Depp's flowing, nappy locks just right is a rough job, but the low-key Brooke is glad he's the one doing it.

In the past two years he's crafted creatures for a series of "Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith" figures, sculpted My Little Pony dolls, worked on toys of the main characters for the upcoming Pixar movie "Cars," the Minotaur from "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" and, in his proudest moment, molded just the right clueless look onto a limited-edition talking Napoleon Dynamite clay statue.

All of this from the guy who made his name first by crafting Baby Alive eyes, then by dealing a mighty blow to the old "G.I. Joe" kung-fu grip.

How He Got Here: Why does a guy like Brooke get such prime gigs? Easy — he's one of the best. The work-at-home dad lives in a rambling Victorian near the University of Cincinnati campus, which is overrun by his playfully ghoulish paintings, homemade puppets, handcrafted train sets and kids' art projects, got his start drawing as a kid, later obsessing over the monsters in magazines like Cinefex.

After college, Brooke got work as a "doll-eye specialist" at Kenner Toys working on Baby Alive, when he discovered his real passion. "Pretty soon after that I started building models, and they bumped me up to a full-time model maker, which is when I got into sculpting," said Brooke, who used to play bass in local bands Red Math and Roundhead.

"I was a girl's-toy sculptor for a while then I got on boy's toys and toward the end of my time there I got on the G.I. Joe line and that's when I killed the kung-fu grip." Brooke had the unheard of idea of dropping the signature move for the macho doll and replacing it with the "gung-ho" grip, which featured added points of articulation and made Joe even more of a badass.

Brooke, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, is soft-spoken and moves slowly around his small basement studio, where a fat cat makes himself comfortable on a stool and trays of heads, feet and silver and flesh-colored hands are lying about. His work area is littered with soldering guns, crock pots for cooking his special molding wax, casts of various figures and, for no apparent reason, a "Beverly Hills, 90210" miniature hair dryer signed by Tori Spelling. He uses dental tools and homemade implements made out of looped guitar strings to do his sculpting, which involves hours and sometimes days of painstaking detail work to get something like the folds in Napoleon Dynamite's jeans or the clumps of Johnny Depp's dreadlocked hair just right.

When he was working on a Chewbacca for the "Original Trilogy Collection," Brooke used those tools to make the wookie move better than ever, with 16 points of articulation, some of which gave him 360-degree movement. How did he conceal those highly mobile joints? By covering them with layers of wookie fur, giving the hairy beast a more detailed look — down to his anatomically correct toes — than those smooth-bodied figures you remember from when you were a kid.

The Secret: "It's all word of mouth," said Brooke of his series of high-profile gigs.

Brooke got the Napoleon job after the creator of the doll couldn't get his usual Chinese artists to capture the character's quirky personality.

"They kept sending me back prototypes that looked nothing like Napoleon," said Jay Kamhi, the brainchild behind the Dynamite doll. "They didn't understand Napoleon and they couldn't capture that droopy, sleepy look. They'd get him physically right, but he'd look too happy. So I got Paul's name and he said he couldn't take on any new projects for three months, but when I told him it was Napoleon Dynamite, he said he'd push everything aside to do it in a week and he nailed it!"

What's Next: Brooke is working on a new line of dolls from the founder of the American Girls franchise, and he's even cooked up his own top-secret music-related project that he hopes will hit stores next year. "I can't tell you much about it right now," said Brooke, a sly smile crossing his face, "but I think they're going to be huge."

But first he's got to finish the logical successor to the Napoleon dolls, a talking "40-Year-Old Virgin" figure. "I've seen the movie and I'm in my 40s, so I thought it was hilarious," he said.

Due around Christmas, the jockey-shorts-clad figure will sprout 18 or so signature phrases and come with real flocked chest hair with painstakingly re-created bare spots.