Sheridan’s Deal : Actor Trades His Past and Skills for a Little More Control

Some actors’ lives are far more interesting than the parts they play.

Take Jamey Sheridan, for instance. Lucky just once--in NBC’s acclaimed 1989-91 series “Shannon’s Deal”--Sheridan has been stuck in supporting roles in numerous film flops: “All I Want for Christmas,” “Quick Change,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “A Stranger Among Us,” “Whispers in the Dark.”

Yet few could miss his leading-man potential--rugged profile, soulful eyes, devilish smile, Angst- laden coming of age. His new TV thriller, “Killer Rules,” Sunday on NBC, hints at his complexities.

“I play a young man raised with a silver spoon in his mouth by a Mafia chieftain,” Sheridan says. “He’s slipped out of Sicily at the age of 3, goes to private schools in Switzerland and England and ends up as an investment counselor with a graduate degree from Harvard.”

Along the way, he pays his dues as a Mafia hit man, but now he wants to clean up his act.

“It’s pretty exciting to play someone who kills people in order to stop killing people,” Sheridan says. “It’s a very convoluted story. There’s a certain kind of puzzle quality to it.”

Filmed in Italy, “Killer Rules” pits Sheridan against Peter Dobson, a Justice Department investigator who is protecting a witness Sheridan has been asked to eliminate. One complication: The two men turn out to be brothers. Another complication: They fall in love with the same woman, played by Sela Ward. “The movie counts down the moments until these two finally cross paths,” Sheridan says.

He considered playing the other brother but decided on the hit-man role “because he is so different from me. He’s very precise, like a clock. The whole time I was playing him, I could hear him ticking.”

Sheridan, on the other hand, has a more carefree California surfer-boy nature. “If someone asks me to play myself, I’ve got problems,” he says. “There’s more pain involved.

Growing up in Los Angeles, Sheridan began life in a stable environment. Then when he was 11, his father died. He recalls with some embarrassment how he and his two brothers subsequently tormented their mother.

“My dad was a really violent Australian guy who was raised as an orphan,” Sheridan says. “He’d smack us and hit us with belts and stuff. We were pretty tough kids because of that. My mother couldn’t control us, so as a last resort she’d say, ‘I’ll do what your father did.’ So she’d get the belt out, buckle first, and come at us.

“Of course it would hurt, but we’d look her coldly in the eye, getting hit, going sarcastically, ‘Ow, Mom, ow! Oh, that really hurts, Mom. Ow-i-ow-i-ow!’ There we were towering over her, and we’d crack each other up. We were young enough to be that cruel. What a humiliating thing to do to your mother.”

When he was 17, he was arrested on a burglary charge. “I was getting a record player,” he explains. “We were really poor, and I wanted my rock ‘n’ roll real bad. I was even buying records, and I didn’t have a record player. A friend of ours was a janitor at a public junior high, so we emptied the joint.”

But then the cops came, and he was kicked out of his Catholic all-boys high school.

After graduating from a Los Angeles public school, Sheridan took a year off. “I was more self-destructive at that point than anything else,” he recalls. “I don’t know if I’d have continued in a life of crime. I was into drugs at the time. I got worse for about a year before hitting the bottom of that particular barrel. My big brother saved me. He sent me to a climbing school in Oregon for a month, and I woke up.”

Sheridan also credits acting with helping straighten him out. “Acting didn’t come and just clip me on the nose,” he says. At UC Santa Barbara, he began dancing and writing. “Because I was writing verse, my instructor suggested I study Shakespeare. The Shakespeare teacher insisted you couldn’t understand the text without seeing it on its feet.”

At 27, Sheridan went to New York; he supported himself with odd jobs and soon landed the lead in Sam Shepard’s “Tooth of Crime.” He later starred on Broadway in “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” “Biloxi Blues,” “The Man Who Came to Dinner” and “All My Sons,” for which he received a Tony nomination. Four years ago, he moved back to Los Angeles to pursue a TV and movie career. He recently took a step in a conventional direction by getting married--for the first time--to actress Colette Kilroy.

Although his life seems to be running smoothly, he insists he is still struggling.

“I’m like a guy hanging down from a horse’s belly trying to establish control,” he says with a laugh. “On a scale of 1 to 100, I’m at 1, and I’m trying to get to 2. The older I get, the more I enjoy control, because I’ve lived out of control for a long, long time.”

“Killer Rules” airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on NBC.