He’s trying to keep it inside

Mark Moses seems like a regular guy. He coaches his young sons’ soccer and baseball teams, he speaks adoringly of his wife of 16 years, and he sure likes to laugh.

Then why does a woman interrupt his lunch at the Aroma Cafe in Studio City to belt out, “You’re a murdering S.O.B.”?

Perhaps it’s because Moses has quickly become Public Enemy No. 1 in the minds of some TV viewers.

To them, he’s Paul Young, the “Desperate Housewives” husband who dug out his swimming pool in the middle of the night after his wife ceremoniously killed herself in the pilot, set a toy chest afloat with “grisly remains” in a lake and committed his adolescent son to a psychiatric ward, where he ordered doctors to “forget the Freud and stick with the drugs.”

He put his house up for sale, hired a hit man, and in his final act on the Nov. 28 episode, struck a meddlesome neighbor, Martha Huber, on the head with a blender and strangled her to death.

She had it coming, Moses explains over lunch, defending his on-screen alter ego. “She should have returned what she borrowed.”

Paul Young, you see, killed his nosy neighbor with the blender she had borrowed from his wife, Mary Alice, but never returned. Not only was she was presumably blackmailing Mary Alice, she didn’t have the decency to return the appliance after she discovered Mary Alice’s dead body in the pilot episode. In fact, Martha removed the label with Mary Alice’s name. The nerve!

“The writers had a good time with that one,” says Moses. “As an actor if you’re doing a lot of serious stuff, you want to do something funny. If you’re doing a lot of funny stuff, you want to do something serious and meaningful. In this show, at least the women get to do pretty much all of that. But depending on how you look at it, that blender could be pretty funny. Especially if it’s filled with a smoothie, that’s really funny!”

Moses, whose first Hollywood role was in “Platoon” in 1986 and who has guest-starred on “West Wing,” “ER,” and “The Practice,” also has plenty of sitcom experience. He was a guest on the first episode of “The Golden Girls,” which Marc Cherry, creator of “Desperate Housewives,” wrote in 1990, playing Rue McClanahan’s illegitimate son.

The men worked together again in 1995 on two of Cherry’s projects, “The Crew” and “The Five Buchanans.”

So Cherry was understandably perplexed when Moses walked in to audition for the serious role of Paul Young, the Wisteria Lane husband who is keeper of the show’s central secrets.

“He just had a gravitas and a coldness, which is not at all what Mark is in real life, so he was able to portray this in some kind of cold, distant way, and I thought it was terrific,” Cherry says. “He looked so all-American and wholesome and he looked like someone you would want to have as a neighbor. I thought that was an interesting juxtaposition.”

So many questions

Now, as one of the only male characters with his own story line, he also is at the center of intrigue. Why did Mary Alice kill herself? Why was she being blackmailed? What “awful things” are her 16-year-old son, Zach, remembering? What or who was buried in that pool and toy chest? Who is Dana?

“The character of Paul Young is very misunderstood,” Cherry says. “He’s basically a nice guy who’s been put in a horrible circumstance.”

But would you want to have him as a father? Paul and Zach Young could easily win the award, if there were one, for television’s creepiest father and son.

If you’re feeling sorry for Zach, who is grieving for his mother, “You won’t later!” says Cody Kasch, the 17-year-old who plays him.

Don’t forget -- Zach is the boy who punched his father and broke into a neighbor’s house to decorate the living room for Christmas, placing the Young family stockings on the fireplace, including his mother’s.

“There’s a father-son-type relationship between us, but it’s on a different level,” says Kasch, explaining the family dynamics. “There’s a lot of secrets, a lot of mystery, a lot of dark things. But there is a connection and we’ll see that later.”

On this December afternoon, Moses and Kasch are reshooting a dinner scene for the Dec. 19 episode. When they shot it the first time a month ago, Paul Young revealed a big secret. Cherry has now decided to hang on to the juicy stuff for three more episodes. (And we won’t tell you how the father and son are reunited either.)

But, as the show’s 23 million viewers have come to learn, any meal shared by father and son at the Young house is dramatic, no matter what is said at the table.

“The two of them at mealtime is very eerie,” Cherry agrees. “It’s Norman Rockwell-esque, by way of David Lynch.”

At their first breakfast scene, Zach is angry that his father didn’t bother to list an obituary for his mother in the newspaper and says, “Maybe when you die, I won’t put in an obituary.”

The father responds: “That will be your choice to make. Assuming you outlive me.”

In the Dec. 19 steak dinner scene, Zach confesses to his father that he is remembering “awful things” from his childhood. His father advises him not to dwell on the past, offers him mashed potatoes and says, “Sure is nice to be back to normal.”

“Every take with Mark has a different feel, which is what is great about being in so many scenes with him,” Kasch says. “Nowadays acting has turned into a lifestyle. But every once in a while you run into somebody who has been acting for 30 years, and it still means something to them. Mark is like that.”

Ponies and other theories

Moses claims the show’s mysteries are only shared with him on a need-to-know basis by the writers. But he was clever enough to figure out early that Martha Huber was the blackmailer, though he never imagined Paul would kill her with his own bare hands. After all, he had already paid a hit man $10,000. As for other mysteries, “I have a lot of theories,” he says, his voice deepening.

OK, let’s hear them.

Who is Dana? “My son’s pet Shetland pony,” Moses says. “He lived in the backyard and he was constantly in heat and he got so noisy that one night I went out and shot him and my son has never forgiven me.”

And the pony had a little wrapping blanket? “Something like that.”

So the pony is in the toy chest? “All we know is there are grisly remains in the toy chest. Grisly remains could be the grisly remains of many things. My speculation is that it’s a Shetland pony. What’s yours?”

What is wrong with your son? “Nothing outside of normal teenage behavior. If you give him the correct dosage of drugs, he’s usually fine.”

Does Paul know why Mary Alice killed herself? “Not really. That’s what’s so frustrating about it. But now there is a clue. He thinks she killed herself because she was blackmailed by Mrs. Huber. Paul knows whether or not Mrs. Huber is correct in her assumption about Mary Alice. I know that much and I can’t give it away.”

Paul, Moses assures, is not a bad guy. He misses his wife. Really. So is it fair for someone to accost the actor and call him a murderer?

“It was a crime of passion,” Moses says sadly of the fictional dead neighbor. “He’s a desperate husband.”