He’s doomed to succeed

Tim STORY was looking for an actor to play the father of all villains, industrialist Victor Von Doom, who turns into the steely-eyed Dr. Doom. In walked Julian McMahon, and within minutes the “Fantastic Four” director was convinced he had found his antihero.

“You have to see this Julian McMahon,” Story kept telling everyone, believing he had just discovered “new talent.”

New talent?

The actor who drove him to mad effusion is one of the two stars of “Nip/Tuck,” FX’s dark comedy/soap opera that ended with one of the television season’s most discussed cliffhangers: Miami plastic surgeon Dr. Christian Troy, played by McMahon, possibly stabbed to death by a masked serial rapist.

“When I started throwing his name out, especially to women, they were like, ‘Oh, my God, yeah!’ ” Story said. “Everybody was on ‘Nip/Tuck’ except for me. It was kind of better that way because then you’re just watching the actor in the room with you. But it was great to know there’s already a following there. I just knew him from walking in the door and thinking this guy is Victor Von Doom. He’s that gentleman, he’s that good-looking, he’s that ladies’ man, that powerful.”

McMahon, 36, who was nominated for a Golden Globe this year for his portrayal of Troy, likes that Story cast him for his first big commercial film solely on the merits of his ability to personify Dr. Doom, even though he’s grateful for the fame and popularity his small-screen alter ego has brought him. The Australian actor, who starred on “The Profiler” and “Charmed” before landing the role of boy-man Christian, says he was taken aback when he got the call, six months after the audition, that Story wanted him to play the insanely jealous, extremely intelligent Von Doom.

“That didn’t sound right,” McMahon said. “Because the Dr. Doom that I remembered as a child was covered with a mask, was just evil, pondering, mischievous and a never-will-die villain.”

And how exactly is that not like McMahon? This is the actor who scowled intensely when he tracked down killers on “The Profiler,” played a half-demon with sinful aplomb on “Charmed” and wanted to portray the pathos-ridden, sexually maniacal plastic surgeon so badly that he filmed an audition tape in his kitchen and mailed it in because the “Nip/Tuck” casting director wouldn’t even put him on a list.

“Don’t push me,” McMahon said with a smile, relaxing at the 101 Cafe in Hollywood with a Coca-Cola before heading to the “Nip/Tuck” set. Then he explained that he wanted to play one of his favorite comic book antiheroes for the same reason he was so attracted to Christian Troy.

“Nobody’s just a good guy. Nobody’s just a bad guy. Nobody’s just anything,” he said. “We’re all everything. We could be fantastic, wonderful, deep human beings one moment and shallow, horrible nasty people the next. That’s what interests me as a person and actor. Even if I play a small role on something, I want to take you on that trip a little bit. I want you to see all sides of that person. Christian is the ultimate of that, and that’s why me and the character fit so well.”

Troy is a bachelor as capable of sleeping with a blind woman and telling her he wants to break up with her because he can’t take her “handicapped ramps, superhuman sense of freaky smell and scary eyes” as he is of deeply loving a baby boy even though he later learns someone else is his biological father.

“That was blatantly cruel, but I thought it was wonderful,” McMahon said of Christian’s breakup with the blind woman, Natasha, played by Rebecca Gayheart. “It was so perfectly him. That guy, the stuff that comes out of his mouth, how many times do you want to go, ‘Put it back in your mouth and don’t say that’?”

Even in the pilot, Christian was out of control, and the actor reveled in his madness. The first scene McMahon taped in his kitchen was the first of many memorable fights between Christian and his business partner and best friend, Sean McNamara (Dylan Walsh); the second was a moment of weakness in which Christian fondles the breasts of Sean’s wife, Julia (Joely Richardson).

“What we were looking for, and he really was the only one to possess this, was somebody who had such contagious charm that it would neutralize the character’s amorality,” said “Nip/Tuck” executive producer Greer Shephard. “We needed somebody who could be both an urbane playboy and a really accomplished surgeon. Or, as we used to joke, someone who could wield a knife as well as a martini glass. Oftentimes those are obviously exclusive traits, and Julian possessed both. He is both savage and sophisticate.”

The haute couture stamp of approval

For series creator Ryan Murphy, who originally envisioned a Latino actor, everything turned when he glanced at the resume of the former model who had long ago gained international notoriety as the Levi Strauss hunk.

“I didn’t know Julian, but he walked into the room and I turned over his resume and it said ‘Givenchy Man of the Year,’ and I thought, ‘He’s in!’ ” said Murphy, a connoisseur of designer fashions. “I was obsessed with that. Boom! I brought him back. Julian had to audition eight times. I put him through the wringer. Of all the people on the show, he really won his part. And now you watch it and you can’t imagine anyone else doing it.”

About his Givenchy rating, McMahon quipped: “A man’s got to be something.”

What McMahon never wanted to be was the lawyer he set out to be in college. The son of former Australian Prime Minister William McMahon and the glamorous Lady Sonia McMahon, who caused a stir in the Nixon White House with a certain skirt, he left Australia as a teenager to model around the globe and find himself. Along the way, he married and divorced twice. He shares custody of his 5-year-old daughter, Madison, with ex-wife Brooke Burns.

As for the career he was not sure he was cut out for until he landed his first prime-time role, in “The Profiler” in 1996, McMahon admits there seems to be a pattern emerging: The toddler who was raised running around the halls of Parliament has turned out to be awfully good at playing bad. Even in “Prisoner,” an independent film directed by David Alford that wrapped in Nashville in June, McMahon portrays a man who evolves into a “wonderful human being after he is forced to face his demons” while behind bars, he said.

“Whatever you do, you’ll be put in a category,” McMahon said. “If you’re Gary Oldman doing 20 characters, then you’re put in the ‘He does lots of characters’ category. As human beings, we have to slot you somewhere, and this is what happens. But if I wanted to step out of this category -- which I’m not saying I do or I don’t -- then I have to find the role to do that.”

One option might be the next James Bond, a role for which McMahon is happily still a contender. But for now, the actor is focused on what is immediately ahead, the July 8 premiere of “Fantastic Four,” which also features Ioan Gruffudd as Mr. Fantastic; Jessica Alba as the Invisible Woman; Chris Evans as the Human Torch; and Michael Chiklis as the Thing.

“I was ready to go as soon as I met both of them,” Story said of McMahon and Chiklis, the star of the FX series “The Shield.” “At the end of the day, what’s great about television now, especially cable television, is that the line between TV and film is breaking up. I never felt like I was getting ‘TV actors.’ I was getting really amazing actors. When you think of Julian and Chiklis, you can’t wait to see them in a dramatic piece because they’re already doing that kind of filmmaking on television.”

For two-thirds of “Fantastic Four,” McMahon endured hours of makeup and prosthetic applications on his face and hands to make Dr. Doom’s disfigured, sinister appearance as realistic as possible.

“I wanted to play a villain we hadn’t seen before, and the script gave me the ability to do that because he started out as a billionaire magnate who pretty much runs the planet,” McMahon said. “It’s fun because it’s totally out of the norm. But the scars and prosthetics took from three hours to nine hours to put on, and that was trippy. It was definitely beyond challenging, mentally, physically and emotionally.”

As an actor, McMahon is so thorough, said Story, that as late as three weeks ago, McMahon called to inquire if he should redo a line he was insecure about for the movie.

“That’s the kind of actor he is; he gives you 180%,” Story said. “He comes prepared, and he’s one of the funniest guys in the world. It gets me excited about the idea of working with him again.”

A paradoxical character

Indeed, on the first week of production of the third season of “Nip/Tuck,” McMahon was fully channeling Christian Troy, alternating between cracking jokes after takes and obsessing over his entrance in one scene and his delivery of certain lines. But none of this, he warned, should indicate that Troy is alive and well. Christian, said McMahon, is dead. Or he might be a ghost. Or his scenes might all be flashbacks.

“Christian is dead, Christian is dead, Christian is dead,” McMahon said hypnotically. “But sometimes the dead come back.”

For the first time since the second season ended in October (the show returns in September), McMahon is getting to savor the viewer frenzy over his character’s fate. When the finale aired, McMahon was in Vancouver working on “Fantastic Four,” oblivious to the “fan riot that was taking place down here,” Shephard said.

“He has found a way as an actor to seize the paradoxical sides of the character of Christian into this singular, addictive presence,” Shephard said. “Christian’s intimacy issues and his predisposition to cruelty is tied to childhood traumas that Julian is able to invoke with such pathos and vulnerability. He can transition from sobbing to growling, and you never feel the character is behaving inconsistently. We in the writers’ room, like the fans, find ourselves fluctuating between despising the character and loving the character.”

So much that they killed him off? There is, after all, a new doctor in the house, Quentin Costa (Bruno Campos), the Atlanta plastic surgeon who worked on Sean’s face in one episode after the Carver scarred him.

“We’ve always maintained that this show is a love story between two men,” said Shephard in an attempt to (not) answer whether Christian survives the Carver’s blade. “That love carries over into death, and this show has always been about this relationship surviving unbelievable circumstances, and this season will honor that storytelling principle.”

Whether Dr. Troy is dead or alive, McMahon and Shephard agree on one thing: The opening scene of the third season is brutal in the way that only “Nip/Tuck” knows how to be.

“You get to see a side of Christian you’ve never seen before....” McMahon said. Considering that McMahon has more sex scenes than any other actor on television, and often appears nude, this is not a riddle that is easy to figure out.

”... The inside,” he added, with a naughty grin that called to mind Dr. Christian Troy, Dr. Doom and who knows how many other bad boys who will surely come his way.