Hot and Bothered

Insecure, Bespectacled and able to cut his opponents down to size when his TV persona is riled, Malcolm Gets shares a problem with a lead character on ABC's Lois and Clark. "When most people meet me, they don't know me," admits Gets, who plays Caroline in the City's acerbic Richard Karinsky, TV's newest champion neurotic. "I don't wear glasses, and God knows, I tend to dress a lot more casually."

Gets, 31, describes his alter ego as the type who's "got a pocket copy of Kafka so he has something to read on the train." But the two are similar. "I always imagined that if somebody was to draw a cartoon of Richard, he'd have a cloud over his head....I have moments when I can feel like a thunderstorm myself."

An award-winning stage actor trained at Yale Drama School, who yearns more to have a role in a Kenneth Branagh-directed Shakespearean production than "to worry about whether Entertainment Weekly is going to pick me as sexiest man of the year," the New York-based Gets feels alien in California, where his show is taped. "It's built on one industry," he explains. "You get the L.A. Times and people breeze past headlines to see what's happening in entertainment. I'll never give up New York entirely," he says. "I love it and the theater. I love Kevin Kline and Mandy Patinkin because they go back to do a play. I'll make sure that happens [to me] because I could never give it up entirely."

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