FLIRTING WITH FAME IS HIS GAME

Brian Kerwin, who plays the title role in Stephen Metcalfe’s “The Incredibly Famous Willy Rivers,” which premiered last week at the Old Globe Theatre, is not incredibly famous yet, but would like to be--at least some of the time.

“When you’re a hot commodity, then you do get the better projects. . . . There’s no question but that, with my status in the business, any script will go through Jeff Bridges, Keith Carradine, Kurt Russell and a lot of people before it sifts down to me,” he said. “And I would much rather be in Jeff Bridges’ position when it comes to getting a script. I’d rather be in my position when I go into a coffee shop and try to get a sandwich.”

Of course, “Willy Rivers” is not just about the difficulty a star has in getting a sandwich--it is about a rock star who is shot by a crazed fan and has to somehow work up his nerve to go out on stage again. The 37-year-old Kerwin is not unacquainted with celebrity. Last year, he appeared as Sally Field’s husband in “Murphy’s Romance.” He was also a star in “Sheriff Lobo,” a television series that played from 1979-1981.

During the “Sheriff Lobo” years, he lived some of the things Rivers experiences--the temptations of eager women (“Rock stars get hit on more than anyone in the world. . . . I can only relate on a minor level.”) and a fan’s obsession. Kerwin’s fan called him from high school every day for three months, leaving messages on his answering machine that he never answered.

“He was a very disturbed young man,” Kerwin said. “Messages went from him introducing himself to saying we have a lot in common to saying he’s glad we’re such good friends. After a month, he wanted to know since we’re such good friends, why don’t I call him back? . . . One time a friend of mine came over and answered the phone. . . . He gave up soon after that.”

Kerwin describes the “Sheriff Lobo” series as a very stressful period of his life. But it was also the time, after five years of acting, that he finally decided to take his profession seriously.

“I took the craft very seriously right from the beginning, but I never took the career very seriously,” he said. “I just waited for it to fall through and it never fell through. By the time I realized I should commit to it (in the middle of ‘Sheriff Lobo’), I already had a backlog of work.”

Kerwin grew up in a suburb of Chicago that he describes as a “semi-affluent, country club, postwar bedroom community, great for kids.” He graduated from the University of Southern California with a degree in cinema and moved to Oregon, where he fell in love with a girl he later followed to New York.

Kerwin’s girlfriend wanted to be a model. He decided to open a store featuring “handcrafts from the Pacific Northwest--mainly macrame and stained glass.” His girlfriend started getting modeling assignments but he got bored with the store, closed it and began trying out for acting parts. He got them.

One year later he went to Los Angeles for his sister’s wedding. There, after a friend told him they could “make a mint” writing television scripts, Kerwin decided to give up acting and try writing in Los Angeles. Three months later they had sold nothing. Broke, he got a job as an usher in a theater across from the Lee Strasberg Theater, then tried out for a part there and got it.

What happened next was classic Hollywood. “There was a girl in the cast of that show whose mother knew a lady who knew an agent and that agent was talked into coming. The agent came to see the girl. She (the agent) thought I looked like Nick Nolte. And he was hot.”

It was early 1976 and Nolte had just made “Rich Man, Poor Man.” The agent signed Kerwin, not the girl.

Kerwin does not look much like Nolte anymore. As he describes it, “He puffed up and I leaned out.”

In 1977, Kerwin joined the cast of “The Young and the Restless,” a soap opera in which he played Greg Foster, a lawyer who defends his brother after the brother tries to pull the plug on their terminally ill father. Kerwin’s “father” wasn’t the only one who was terminally ill. After six months and 40 episodes, the producers called him in and told him they weren’t even going to bother writing his character out. “Foster” was just going to walk upstairs and never come down.

“I remember thinking, ‘That’s it. The career’s over.’ But it just so happened that one hour after they called me in, the people at the MET (Meredith Experimental Theater) called to tell me, ‘We have this guy who is not working out.’ I walked right into a play. That led to another play. That led to the career starting again.”

Kerwin started “Sheriff Lobo” in 1979 and when it ended two years later, he faced what he describes as “my only struggle . . . trying to drop out of TV work. . . . Coming out, you can get all the ‘Love Boats’ (He did one.) and ‘Fantasy Islands’ you want. But (I decided then) if I’m going to act at all, I want to do it right. And if you do it right, there’s no reason to do TV any more except for the money. I’ve got the money now. . . . And I’d much rather be doing ‘Willy Rivers’ or Equity or some movie that pays scale.”

Three years ago, Kerwin acted in Metcalfe’s “Strange Snow” at the Globe, for which he won the San Diego theater critics’ outstanding actor award.

One moment Kerwin seems to reject the price of stardom.

“After one gets into the business a little and is exposed to hugely popular people, you see the hugely restricted life style they have,” he said. “One wonders if that is something to strive for or hope for.”

At other times, he seems almost envious. “The first film Dustin Hoffman made was ‘The Graduate’ and he was a star. And just think of Jack Nicholson. . . . Who would see ‘Goin’ South’ if he weren’t a star?”

Kerwin likens the dilemma of to star or not to star to the crisis his Willy Rivers character goes through.

“People commercialize art and artists,” he said. “And that is most obvious in the case of stars where an artistic individual creates something and all of a sudden becomes a commodity. . . . What seems always to be the case is that it is so easy to become a commodity. It is hard to make the effort to sustain integrity. . . . It has certainly come up with me. But I’m not that big a commodity.”

But when asked to describe himself, this long, lean non-commodity pushes his frame back in his chair and blows out air.

“Gee, that’s a tough one.” He thinks a moment, then grins. “About 6-foot-1, 175 pounds, blond hair, blue eyes. Write that down.”