Profile : Red Hot on ‘Blue’ : The fall’s breakaway actor finds his ‘NYPD’ fame ‘incredible’

David Caruso isn’t actually a new kid on the block. He’s been kicking around Hollywood for 13 years, appearing in such movies as “An Officer and a Gentleman,” “First Blood” and “Mad Dog and Glory.” Fans of “Hill Street Blues” might recall Caruso playing an Irish gang leader on the first three episodes of the famed series.

None of his previous experiences, though, prepared Caruso for how dramatically his life would change as the star of the fall’s most talked-about TV series. His riveting performance as intelligent, world-weary veteran police detective John Kelly on ABC’s controversial “NYPD Blue” has made Caruso the hottest redhead to hit TV since Lucille Ball.

“Oh, man. Geez,” Caruso is saying, shaking his head. “You wouldn’t believe it. It’s unbelievable. I tell you, it’s incredible!”

It’s noon Sunday and the 37-year-old Irish-Italian actor is munching on a chopped salad at a cozy Santa Monica restaurant. Caruso had flown in the night before from New York, where the acclaimed Steven Bochco and David Milch police drama was shooting sequences for several upcoming episodes. The majority of “NYPD Blue” is filmed in Los Angeles.

“Things have changed literally for me,” Caruso is explaining, “in the respect as an actor who people knew to somebody they have a relationship with now. They are so into the show and so supportive of the relationships and the characters.”

And they know Caruso by name. “I was up in Harlem the other day and two Puerto Rican girls come up and say, ‘Go back to your wife’ (referring to Kelly’s recent divorce on the show). They pull the car over to tell you things. They’re very personal now. I heard these fantastic stories from Lincoln Center to Times Square. It’s just incredible.”

Police officers, Caruso says, also have voiced their support of the series which, in a cinema verite style, depicts the day-to-day grind and horrors of being a big-city cop. “Cops are very, very courageous people,” Caruso says. “They’re very moral people. I’ve played a few other police officers, so I understand them. We’ve got a great technical adviser on the show, Det. Bill Clark.”

Ironically, Clark is from the 112th precinct, the same precinct Caruso grew up in in Queens. “There’s a very strange element of fate involved in this whole show for me,” he says. Much like Caruso’s early connection with Bochco, who co-created “Hill Street Blues.”

“There are so many kinds of overlaps that happened,” Caruso says. “When Clark saw ‘Mad Dog and Glory,’ he called them because they were looking for (Kelly) and he said, ‘There’s this guy, man, who is the real thing. I don’t know if you are aware of this guy or not, but you really should look into it.’ It turned out to be me.”

Caruso has found it eerie that “NYPD Blue” was shooting in his old neighborhood haunts, “where I have a deep previous history. Sitting in an unmarked police car on Queens Boulevard ... oh, man, I’m telling you.”

Growing up in a lower-middle-class area of Queens, Caruso never dreamed of becoming a cop. “My father’s mother, my grandmother Josephine, she pretty much had a civil servant job picked out for me,” Caruso says, laughing. “You know, she’s still trying to convince me to become a fireman.”

The twice-divorced father of two never excelled in school. The reason? “I was distracted. There was too much going on for me to sit in more classrooms. I wanted to kind of get onto the playing field, so to speak, and go after it. I needed to get out there.”

Caruso had a few acting jobs in New York but moved to Los Angeles in 1980 to “broaden” his horizons. “When you grow up in New York, it can really be a claustrophobic place,” he explains. “There’s a certain mentality and tradition there that’s hard. When you’re an Irish-Italian Catholic from Queens and say, ‘I want to be an actor,’ you are not going to meet with all that much support.”

So, Caruso knew he needed to leave home in “order to invent this thing I was after. I had no previous show-business family connections.”

The cinema always spoke to Caruso. “To me, great film takes reality and improves it and makes it a super reality. I think that a lot of life in Los Angeles--and why people come out here--is about that process. It’s about taking their reality and improvising and making it more valuable and more interesting. So I made the right move coming out there. I had to get away from my roots and start this kind of creation.”

“NYPD Blue” created enormous controversy even months before its Sept. 21 premiere because of its frank dialogue and brief nude scenes. Thirty of ABC’s 225 affiliates refused to air the premiere. The Rev. Donald Wildmon’s conservative American Family Assn. launched a highly publicized campaign to get advertisers to boycott the series. It all proved to be much ado about nothing. The series is shaping up to be one of biggest hits of the new season, and several of the hesitant affiliates have begun airing the series.

“There’s nothing in the show that’s wrong or exploitative for its time period,” Caruso says. “That’s my opinion, of course.”

Caruso maintains that “NYPD Blue” initially incurred problems because “people don’t change easily. When Bochco came out and said he was going to change the format of network TV, you are going to expect a response. You have to change (network TV) in order to have a future. The response so far to the show says the viewership is there.”

“NYPD Blue” airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on ABC; it is preempted this week by “The Barbara Walters Special.”