He couldn’t even get arrested in L.A.

Christopher Meloni left Los Angeles in 1995 to become a working actor. “Whoever envisions not one but two series in New York?” he asked. It was a recent Monday morning in a Manhattan Starbucks, across the street from where he’d just been the lead guest on “Regis and Kelly,” discussing his first Emmy nomination for playing Det. Elliot Stabler, the cop-dude who gets mad and catches sexual predators on “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.” He’s been on the New York-shot show since 1999. From 1997 to 2003, he worked the other side of the equation as a sexual predator on HBO’s “Oz,” also shot in New York.

“Regis and Kelly” had warmed him up well, even if he had been up super-early and taken a nap in the car while a driver took him to the city.

He’d been up at the new-ish house in Connecticut with the family. Connecticut is where he got some weird phone call in early July. His wife took it and he went out water skiing and when he came back he found out he was finally nominated for an Emmy. He’ll be up against Denis Leary, Peter Krause, Kiefer Sutherland and Martin Sheen on Sunday for best lead actor in a drama series.

He is profoundly, unreservedly, sincerely grateful about this. He put one hand over his heart to describe his feelings. “It’s almost like official recognition, from this real entity. That as nebulous as it may be, here’s a real power structure. And the power structure said” -- he made big thumbs up -- “ ‘You’re doing great work.’ ”

Currently, Meloni is also appearing on Noggin, the preschool cable channel. He reads a story called “My Feet Are Out to Get Me.” So, the elephant in the Starbucks. If he cares so much about kids, isn’t his work on “SVU” a little troubling? Isn’t the strictly plotted police procedural, in which sex maniacs of every stripe teem and slobber and mutilate their way through New York City, just another way to say, Ooh, cities are so scary? Looked at one way, isn’t the show merely providing a way to vent those hardwired protective drives that the parents of America so rarely get to exercise in the childproof safety of real life?

“I don’t think at the end of the day the message of the show is ‘Beware of these sex predators, they’re everywhere,’ ” he said. “Sometimes when that comes down in the script I’ll question it -- is it too fear-mongering?”

For Meloni, the best explanation of “Law & Order: SVU” is that “it does shed light in dark places.” Sexual abuse survivors sometimes tell him that the show has helped them, emboldened them, he said. “I tell you, when that happens to you, when a survivor hugs you and you’re crying? And I’m biting my lip not to ... cry. It’s just heavy. It’s a heavy load,” he said. “I don’t walk around with a halo above my head or any kind of sainthood. But there is a power -- a beautiful, a wonderful byproduct.”

His macchiato was really dreadful and he sent it back. He chomped a little Nicorette -- he’s three years off.

He did five years in L.A. as a proverbial struggling actor. “Downtown was the new frontier,” he said of the L.A. that he left for steady work. “Now it’s the new chi-chi loft contingent. When I was there I was like, ‘Oh, this traffic ... .’ I don’t know what planet I’m living on, but I thought, ‘Oh, it can’t get much worse.’ Now La Cienega is the 405. Used to be, take the 10, get on La Cienega. How many moving parking lots can we have?”

He grew up in Washington, D.C., and went to college in Colorado. When he came back east to New York to start over he made a bunch of new friends, unfamous ones, one of whom, Meloni said, unfortunately described their group as the “fortysomething ‘Entourage’ ” recently.

Meloni and his wife came to that period in 2003 when a second kid was on the way, and they started house-hunting in New Jersey. No go! “I came back from Tenafly in Jersey, sweating, stammering! ‘I can’t do it, I can’t do it, you can’t make me do it!’ ”

He likes Connecticut. Recently he’d been on vacation at the house there after a long run of shooting and a play in Ireland. It’s not so countrified that they’re not making the two-lane road into a four-lane road. Still, Israel was in Lebanon for two weeks before he picked up a paper and said, What the ... ? The house backs a lake that he calls the 11-mile backyard that doesn’t have to be mowed. He just finished off a David Sedaris book and is on a biography of George Washington.

In Manhattan they live at 56th and Broadway with floor-to-ceiling views of Central Park. He said he’s not sniffing at it, but you can tell he’d rather live downtown.

Next he is going to be shooting a film in New Mexico, directed and written by Alex and David Pastor. He’s stoked to go down there. Meloni is a little macho, but his wristwatch has big chunks of turquoise. “There’s a reason the hippie-dippy crowd is selling their beads there. And why Indians lived in walls.”

He said his own spiritual life is still more about a search. “And it feels as though I know you’re there,” he said of God. “I just wish I had a system to bring him closer.

“I thought acting was that,” he said.

He got cornered by a fan then in the Starbucks. “It’s taken them long enough,” she said, among a bunch of other things, “to give you an Emmy nom!”