Role Player

If you think Notre Dame has changed since last season, you should see the guy who used to be the starting nose guard.

Andy Wisne was a 295-pound NFL prospect until a serious concussion -- the last in a series of draining injuries -- persuaded him to give up the game.

Now he’s a lean 190, with chiseled cheekbones instead of chiseled biceps, and has come to L.A. to try to make it as an actor.

“I basically gave up my identity,” Wisne, 24, said. “I don’t know if anyone would recognize me if I went back to Notre Dame. I gave up everything I took pride in. It’s all I ever knew.”

A diet of tomato soup and celery -- maybe half a Slim-Fast for breakfast, a little cold turkey for dinner -- and obsessive exercise helped him lose 100 pounds in five months.

“I’d have been stereotyped in bouncer roles,” Wisne said. “I want to speak a message, not be like Brian Bosworth.”

He has traded one longshot field for another.

“Football was my life, I gave my soul to it,” he said. “But everything, year after year, kept building up, emotion-wise, and I decided I’d had enough -- enough mental and physical frustration.”

He went from trying to deny his pain to trying to tap it.

“You have football, where you block everything out. You pretend pain or emotions don’t exist so you can keep going, because if you become vulnerable to it, you quit or break down emotionally, which you can’t do.

“Out here, you need all that emotion. You need to be available. When I realized how much I blocked out, the flood gates just opened. In the acting classes I’ve taken, the emotion is flowing.”

Though he has yet to get his first break, Wisne has an agent and a manager and has appeared in a small role on “Ally McBeal.” He auditioned for “The Practice,” as well as “American Dreams,” “Seventh Heaven” and shows on the WB network.

“There’s lots of rejection,” he said. “Somebody said you’re not an actor unless you’ve been rejected 2,000 to 4,000 times.”

His manager, Vicki Frantz of Frantz Management LA, tells him he’s doing well.

“In this business, you have to expect you’re going to go on quite a few auditions before you book a role,” she said.

Though he has one great connection -- an aunt, Pamela Wisne, works with David E. Kelley Productions and once was named one of the 100 most powerful women in Hollywood by the Hollywood Reporter -- Wisne arrived in L.A. with little more on his resume than a couple of student plays and an appearance on an NBC halftime show. NBC had featured Wisne and his brother, Jerry, a Notre Dame offensive lineman who went on to the NFL, and their father, Gerald, a member of Notre Dame’s 1966 national championship team.

His inexperience hasn’t seemed much of a drawback.

“He rather quickly has overcome that obstacle with his talent and his motivation, I think,” Frantz said. “He’s very talented and very much the showman, from being around sports and giving a lot of interviews and being a public figure.

“He’s had a lot of really good auditions where he’s met producers, so once pilot season comes along, I think you’re going to see his face on TV. I think he’s going to do very well.”

Wisne won’t be in town when the seventh-ranked Irish arrive this week for Saturday’s game against No. 6 USC. Instead, he’ll be visiting his family in Florida for Thanksgiving.

When he left South Bend, Ind., after his final exam in an acting class last December, he told Notre Dame to mail the diploma, and hasn’t gone back.

That doesn’t mean he hasn’t looked back. The Irish are 10-1 in Tyrone Willingham’s first season as coach.

“I would have loved to have played for Tyrone Willingham,” said Wisne, whose eligibility was up after last season, when Notre Dame went 5-6 in Bob Davie’s last season.

“The first couple of Notre Dame games I watched on TV, I broke down. I gave my whole soul to that game, and it’s just over, but I made the choice. I watch NFL games and I know I could be doing that.”

That isn’t such a stretch.

“I’m sure he would have had the opportunity to play pro football, had he stayed healthy that whole year, playing like he was early,” said Greg Mattison, Wisne’s defensive line coach at Notre Dame. “He was a very, very, very good nose guard for us.”

But big-time college football -- and the injuries and emotional demands that came with it -- gradually eroded Wisne’s commitment to the game.

“My Notre Dame experience was tough,” he said. “It was very emotional as I look back on it. I went through a lot of hard times, a lot of things nobody ever really knew or saw ... as did a lot of my teammates.

“I remember trying mentally to get prepared that you’re going to have to go through a day of hell and hitting each other and getting yelled at for two hours.

“Say it’s a Tuesday and you’ve got to be in meetings at 3:30. It’s all that’s on your mind. You’re trying to focus in class, or you’re in your dorm room just before you’ve got to go, and there’s guys across the hall drinking beer and playing Nintendo.”

His years in South Bend were far from the Irish norm.

Notre Dame had losing records in two of Wisne’s four seasons, and though he wears a Fiesta Bowl ring from the 2000 season, much of his career was spent watching Davie’s job dangle by a thread.

“You can feel it change,” he said. “As the pressure is put on the coaches, it’s a chain reaction, and it’s put on us. Coaches love football, and they really push. And I don’t believe they realize what it does to a lot of players inside.”

It wasn’t just that. It was what football was doing to Wisne’s body.

He had a painful deep knee bruise, back problems and reconstructive surgery on his groin and shoulder. He tried to fight through injuries when he could.

“When you miss practice you’re looked at as weak, or they don’t believe you that you’re really hurt,” Wisne said.

Then, before a road game against Boston College last October, he and teammate Darrell Campbell collided too hard during a pregame hitting drill.

“We had fans behind us screaming, yelling, cussing at us, everything. It just motivated me. Usually we’re about five yards apart. This time, me and Darrell were about 10 yards apart. We were both just completely psyched, emotionally on a high, and we ran at each other full speed.

“That’s really the last thing I remember that day except little pieces and flashes. They said I got back up and kept doing the whole pregame warm-up. I don’t remember doing that.”

The team medical staff examined Wisne and took his helmet away. He was too dazed to safely play in the game. As it turned out, he never played another down.

“I just remember standing on the sideline, looking at the scoreboard, seeing faces just flash. I got really confused and kind of hysterical. I remember I started to break down and cry. I don’t remember a lot, but I remember that.

“The next day, I sat down with my family and they said, ‘Andy, you’ve had enough.’ And I said, ‘I know. I can’t take all the stuff I’ve had to endure.’ ”

While the Irish finished the season, Wisne started making the football body he had worked so hard to build disappear.

“I used to be an avid user of creatine [a legal dietary supplement]. I liked creatine,” he said. “No steroids. You can’t really get away with that.... Ephedrine, I took it for practice one time, and I felt like I was about to fall out.”

The pounds slipped away. Jerry Wisne -- drafted by the Chicago Bears in 1999 and signed to a free-agent contract by the St. Louis Rams on Tuesday -- says if he hadn’t known, “I might have thought he was a long-lost brother or something. I’ve never seen him that skinny, even in his youth.”

Andy pressed on, driving himself obsessively in the gym as he tried to recover from the end of his football career as well as the end of his relationship with his fiancee.

“I was running away from everything. It was a very hard time for me, very dark,” he said. “A lot of times I’d stay in the gym and people would look at me like I was crazy on the exercise machine, I was pushing so hard.

“During practice, sometimes, I’d go back to my room and have a stick of celery or something and feel just utter confusion about life.”

Maybe Wisne eventually could have gotten medical clearance after the concussion to continue his career. But in his mind, he had moved on.

“My fifth year, I took my first really strong acting class at Notre Dame and I found out I really have a love to do it,” he said. “After that Boston College game, I made a decision right then and there, I was going to come out here and act.”

Since Wisne arrived in L.A. a little less than a year ago, his many acting classes have included sessions at the highly regarded Larry Moss Studio and private coaching with Marnie Cooper of the Marnie Cooper School of Acting, who calls Wisne “very gifted.”

“When you have someone who’s so macho, there’s usually a front they put on,” Cooper said. “He doesn’t do that at all. He’s got a great look, a great presence and a lot of talent. I think what he has going is his intensity and focus, which I think is something he learned in sports. He’s completely focused, and he doesn’t ask why.

“I’m sure it’s like when a coach says do it, you do it. He’s a hard worker, I’ll tell you that. I definitely think he’s going to be working [in this business].”

For now, he’s honing his acting skills, trying to make connections. He never overlooks a Notre Dame angle or alumni in the business, and he is pitching a script about the Irish titled “Gipp,” by writers Bill Fuller and Jim Pond.

The great irony of it all is, he probably couldn’t get cast as a Notre Dame nose guard anymore, not at 190 pounds on a 6-foot-2 frame.

That doesn’t mean his years in South Bend meant nothing.

“We do these exercises and tap into emotions,” Wisne said. “I found when I tap into it, there’s something very powerful because of my experiences at Notre Dame. I feel like it’s given me so much power.

“I know I can do this. I know I have the stuff inside of me.”