NOAH WYLE DOESN'T KNOW WHERE TO GO. He's driving his best friend J.P. and me around L.A. in his big blue Bronco, and no place is the right place. J.P. and I throw out ideas: Pool at the Hollywood Athletic Club? "No, no pool." Noah's a big pool player, but sick of all the fuss that's been made about this particular biographical detail: "I played in this tournament the other night and I got my head handed to me," he says. "They'd all read what a good pool player I am. They were like, 'Hey hotshot, I hear you're the post-modern Minnesota Fats.'"

The Beverly Center (where Noah worked at about four or five different food stands)? Please, no. The Monkey Bar? Too trendy. J.P. suggests a spa, and suddenly Noah's zooming up La Cienega. "We're hot-tubbing at Splash!" he yells, momentarily elated, but the impulse dies quickly. After about twenty minutes, we end up at the Chase Lounge, a loud tapas bar on West Third Street, and order a bunch of food. The last time Noah was here was for an ER cast party, and he behaved just as a young Hollywood star is supposed to.

"I was so drunk....I forced John Wells, our executive producer, to tango with me, and when the band went on a break, our first A.D. Babu and I jumped on their instruments and just started wailing -- he was playing the saxophone and I was playing the drums."

Suzanne, our waitress, arrives and tells Noah that they're out of the soup he ordered.
"Is that right?" He looks up and smiles. "Not a problem."
"You okay?" Suzanne picks up on the smile. She wants him to be happy.
"I'm okay," Noah promises.
"You're sure? Because I have drugs in my bag -- heroin, Xanax," she teases.
Noah's still smiling, but carefully. He can see the tabloid headlines now. "Tell the truth Suzanne," he says.

THE TRUTH ABOUT NOAH WYLE, it turns out is that he's nothing like the Boy Scout I'd been expecting. He's funnier, less effete, sexier than his TV character, John Carter, the medical student who cares too much. He's just this loose, out-at-a-bar guy in a T-shirt and two-day stubble who smokes (a lot) and drinks (beer and bourbon).

Problem is, television is powerful, and like many TV doctors, Noah has acquired a potentially indelible nice-guy image. And because he's young (he can still get carded when he buys cigarettes), most of his fans seem to be teenage girls. "I'm sweet, wholesome, dependable, and apparently not like any guy in their school," Noah says with a shrug. A couple months ago, he commented in public on this prepubescent fan base and provoked an angry response. "This one girl wrote me saying, 'I'm fifteen years old, how dare you reduce me to a non-thinking blah blah blah. P.S.: Can I have your autograph?'" As Noah's mom cruelly puts it, "George gets racy pictures; Noah gets 'Here's me and my hamster.'"

"I wouldn't pay to see me as an action hero. I'm not a leaping-tall-buildings, swinging-from-ropes, shoot-'em-up kind of guy. I wouldn't pay to see me kicking anybody's ass."

Me-and-my-hamster is fine for TV. Useful, even. Someone you let into your living room once a week should be appealing in a comfy, low-key sort of way. Mean, dangerous hormone gods are for the movies. "I wouldn't pay money to see me as an action hero," Noah says. "I'm not a leaping-tall-buildings, swinging-from-ropes, shoot-'em-up kind of guy. I wouldn't pay to see me kicking anybody's ass." But Noah doesn't want to stay in TV forever (he is, after all, a Serious Actor -- someone who directed and starred in Sartre's No Exit his senior year in high school), so the hamster thing is something he'll have to shed.

Unfortunately, though, the nice-guy image is proving remarkably durable. During the past season, Noah's character started to develop some healthy shithead tendencies (abandoning a patient to take a bubble bath with his girlfriend, for instance), but nobody seems to have noticed. Noah himself goes out drinking with Ladies' Man George Clooney and plays pool with Real Guy Eriq La Salle, but that hasn't helped either. ("He's the little puppy dog you want to bring home and take care of," La Salle says when asked to describe Noah.) The task is particularly difficult because Noah really is a nice guy: He watches ER every Thursday with his mom; he loves his dogs; he's a spokesman for the Skin Cancer Foundation.

NOAH WYLE WAS BORN IN HOLLYWOOD on June 4, 1971, the middle child of three. His parents divorced when he was in the second grade, and Noah was sent to a kiddie shrink to deal with it. ("I used to tell him dreams that I never really had: My family dying. You know, that kind of stuff.") Around this time, his grandmother was killed by a drunk driver. His mother, also in the car, broke her back. "That's when I realized the fragility of life -- the unpredictability of it -- how you can't take anything for granted. You don't want to make any mistakes, leave anything unsaid."

Both his parents remarried, and he lived most of his time with his mom, Marty, and her new husband, Jim Katz. Jim had three kids too, from a previous marriage, so the family adopted a kind of Brady Bunch arrangement during the summers, when Jim's kids lived with them. Noah was a good boy, his parents say, who read all the Time-Life books about cowboys, donated his allowance to the End Hunger Network, and made friends with the kids nobody else would talk to. ("I think that's a nice way for my parents to say that they thought my friends were losers," says Noah.)

In grade school, Noah cherished pretty serious NBA aspirations. He shot hoops in the backyard five or six hours a day. Then in sixth grade, a kid named Mitchell Butler transferred to Noah's school, became his best friend, and, Noah says, "convinced me that short white Jews from L.A. don't make the NBA and tall black kids from Inglewood do. Now he plays for the Washington Bullets and I play a doctor on TV."

For high school, Noah went to Thacher, a somewhat weird but idealistic boarding school in the Ojai Valley where each freshman has to take care of a horse for a year. (If you ask Noah about Thacher, he'll shout one of the school's more disturbing mottoes: "There is something about the outside of a horse that's good for the inside of a boy!") When Noah was a freshman, his sister Alex was a senior, and because the usual neuroses of adolescence tend to be intensified in boarding school, Noah ended up with something of a little-brother complex accompanied by a tendency to idolize his sister's friends (J.P., two years ahead of Noah at school, describes Noah at that time as "Alex's little brother").

Except for all the acting he did, Noah seems to have had all the usual symptoms of a boarding school coming-of-age. He tooled around in a long black overcoat. He read William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg. He had a drum set. (Not anymore -- now he just dabbles on the congas.) On the baseball field his coach says he was known as "the Quaalude Kid" for being slow. He was awkward with girls.

"What's your worst erection-in-public embarrassment?"

"I don't really have one. I was pretty good at putting my notebook over my lap -- hiding it from the world. Of course, I do have vague memories of that moment of panic -- of having one and realizing that the class is about to end and I have to walk across campus. You start trying to shuffle your feet really furiously so the blood will flow to other parts of your body."

"When did you have your first girlfriend?"

"When I was fourteen, my freshman year of high school. It never got very far, that relationship. She'd kiss me and I'd punch her in the arm, that kind of thing."

"When did you first have sex?"

"A year before I had my first girlfriend."

"When you were thirteen? How old was the girl?"

"Eighteen, I think. I was on vacation."

"Was it weird?"

"It was terrifying. Completely unromantic. It was at a party. I think she was drunk and thought I was somebody else. But of course I fell madly in love with her. And then she went home. That was one of the reasons I was so awkward at school: I'd done something that not many other guys in my class had done, even though they all said they had. And it had been so terrible for me that I didn't see the point in doing it again. But I did. And now I enjoy it."

Now Noah's seeing a makeup artist named Tracy Warbin, who's three years older. They met on the set of a small movie that Noah acted in last May called The Myth of Fingerprints. Although Tracy does his makeup for smaller projects, she won't do it for ER. They've watched the VH1 John-and-Yoko interview. Maybe they know the pitfalls.

HE DIDN'T START OFF WANTING TO BE A TV STAR. Noah ruined Thacher's 100 percent college admissions record the year he graduated by deciding to go into theater and film. "I was working very sporadically, and the jobs I was getting I was only taking the money because I was really broke." (Including ER; he thought it would be canceled after seven episodes.) "That's probably the most depressed I've ever been," Noah says of his years as a struggling actor.

I ask him about his first acting job. "It was on a TV miniseries, Blind Faith. Most of my stuff was cut, but there's one fabulous scene at the wake when this young scrappy guy comes up and says, 'Hey, excuse me. What's going on down there?' And just as quickly as he comes onto the scene he leaves, but he steals that little moment like you can't believe. And that man's name is Noah Wyle."

He pauses. "Excuse me. I have to go to the bathroom and throw up."

These days, Noah Wyle tends to agree with the people who used to tell him -- before he was in TV himself -- that TV is the most powerful medium. After all, it's got him where he is. Bat at the same time, Noah's still recognizably that guy who directed No Exit: "Not to sound pontificating and preachy," Noah says, doing so, "but I think it's every actor's responsibility to know the history of the craft. I have very low tolerance levels for people who say, ' I want o be a dancer, a model, or an actor.' It's insulting to someone who stands at the foot of this craft and has great reverence and humility in front of it."

Asked to describe Noah as a single piece of clothing, Noah's high-school drama teacher says, without hesitation, "A leopardskin Speedo bathing suit."

The problem with Noah's seriousness is not that it's pretentious -- it's not, somehow, coming from him. At worst, it's the in-your-face intellectualism of the self-educated. And Noah is a good stage actor. In front of the camera, though, his seriousness tends to manifest itself in a series of irritating, actorish tics that make him seem bland and uptight. He's always pursing his lips and flaring his nostrils like he's trying to be John Gielgud. These tics bleach out a lot of what's charming and sexy about Noah in real life -- qualities that were apparently obvious to his high-school drama teacher, Tim Regan. When I ask Regan what Noah would be if he were a piece of clothing, he says, without hesitation, "a leopardskin Speedo bathing suit."

Regan has difficulty explaining exactly what he means by that, but he's onto something. It would seem that Noah's task as a screen actor is to find his inner leopardskin bathing suit and learn ho w to show it on-camera.

IT'S TIME FOR BREAKFAST. Noah Wyle knows just where to go. Barney's Beanery. He's been coming here since he was a kid, back when he was a Normal Person. He grew up nearby, within a block of where Hugh Grant and Joey Buttafuoco were arrested. He tried to make a joke out of this on Letterman, but he doesn't think it went over well. ("I drew David a little map of the crime scenes, with my house in between. He didn't know where the story was going. It didn't quite gel.")

While we're waiting for the waitress, Noah unveils a small surprise: his tattoo. A very tiny one. "One night when I was fifteen or sixteen, my friend Harry had a party and he was experimenting -- sticking a needle into a cork and dipping it in India ink. I don't remember this, but apparently I said that I wanted that white stick figure with the halo from the TV show The Saint on my arm. Harry started to do it, and either I came to my senses or fell asleep, one of the two, and I ended up with nine dots instead."

For breakfast, Noah orders on big, fat, greasy BLT and a plate of chili fries. "Today I feel like my friend Richard Massey," he announces. "I'm dressing like him, I'm smoking his cigarettes [Dunhill reds], and this is one of his favorite places." Richard Massey is another guy from high school. The fact that Noah is sitting here impersonating him goes some way toward explaining why he looks like a different guy this morning. Last night he was suburban grunge: big plaid flannel shirt, baggy pants, sneakers. This morning he's the dapper city boy: starchy white dress shirt, tucked in, and big, gray, woolly Hugo Boss blazer more suitable for weather forty degrees cooler. (He likes to dress up, but he's obviously still in fashion's experimental phase; he's sworn off shorts because his legs are too skinny, but he's been known to wear, of all things, a beret.)

Letterman aside, Noah is a great storyteller. He sets the scene, builds you up, keeps you waiting. Today he's describing an experience he had when he was nineteen or twenty -- the worst adolescent nightmare you can possibly imagine, magnified by a million:

"One night I was sitting in my apartment, the phone rang, and it was Tom Hale. Tom was a senior when I was a freshman at Thacher and I idolized him. Tom called. Tom called me. I couldn't believe it. He said he was going to meet some of his friends at a coffee shop and did I want to go. I jumped at the chance.

"He picked me up in his car and we drove to this coffee shop on Beverly. There were a lot of people there, all of whom seemed a hell of a lot more intelligent than me, and they were talking about things way beyond my comprehension. I was feeling extremely out of place, but gradually I managed to crack a few jokes and started to feel a bit more comfortable. At this point I should say that I always wear blue jeans or dark pants, but on this particular night none of them were clean, so I had put on a pair of khakis instead.

"Suddenly I had this sensation that I had to pass gas, but as soon as I did, I know that I'd shit in my pants. Usually, you're like, 'Did I? Oh thank God.' This was like, 'Did I? Oh my God, I did.' And here I am sitting with my hero and all these people. I got up and ran to the bathroom, and sure enough, there this nice brown streak sown the back of my pants. I threw my underwear in the garbage and washed out my khakis with a bunch of hand soap, but Tom had driven me there -- I couldn't leave. so I had to go back to the table and sit there for another two hours in a completely catatonic state. I cannot believe I just told you that."

Neither can Tom Hale, whom I naturally call up the next day. Like everyone else, Tom loves Noah. Also like everyone else, Tom reckons Noah hasn't changed much since he got famous. "There's a transformation a lot of people have to go through to achieve celebrity," Tom says, "a kind of twisting process, but I don't think Noah went through it because the whole thing was relatively effortless for him. He has this wide-eyed, openhearted attitude. There's some irony there, but at his core, he's pretty earnest."

IT'S LATE AT NIGHT. In fact, it's late last night, a few hours after we left the Chase Lounge. Noah's at home. He's on vacation. He's crying. He's sitting in his new house which he's just spent eight months decorating, and which is his refuge from all the stuff he doesn't want to seal with right now.

Noah's been pretty upset lately. A lot of people have called and he hasn't called them back. People write him letters and he doesn't write back. He makes plans he knows he won't keep. One of the reasons he's avoiding people is that he's depressed about a number of things but feels like he can't talk about them. It's the usual problem: Lot's of things about being famous truly suck, but he knows he will sounds like a brat if he complains. "There's not a lot of sympathy out there for someone who's got everything he wanted," Noah says. "I've read articles about actors bitching and thought, "Shut up, you pussy." Nonetheless, my problems are my problems and they make me feel the same way anyone else's problems make them feel. But I tend not to talk about them, so they just sit there inside and consume me."

Noah worries a lot. He's not as depressed now as he has been in the past -- like that time a few years ago when he was working very sporadically, had no money, and had just broken up with his girlfriend of three years. That's when he went into therapy for the second time. But now he has new stuff to worry about.

"I probably won't measure up as a person to people who see me on the show," he says. "I have fits of extremely low self-confidence. I'm prone to depression. I'm prone to anger. I've hurt people. I've been hurt by people."

Sometimes, when Noah's depressed, an especially troubling specter rises up to haunt him. That specter is Ted Danson. Not Ted Danson personally -- Ted Danson as Noah's ghost of Christmas future. Ted Danson, in other words as What Can Happen to You as an Actor When You're Part of a Successful TV Show.

"Ted Danson is Sam Malone," Noah muses morosely. "If he's in Three Men and a Baby, he's Sam Malone. If he's in Cousins, he's Sam Malone. Because in television you play the same part for so long that you become very identified with that part, and people don't believe that you can do anything else. Ted Danson, Tom Selleck, Mark Harmon -- you could make a list of guys who had a lot of fame in television, tried to make the jump over to film, and then found that people wouldn't let them."

The sobering prospect of joining this list is one of the reasons Noah gets a little freaked out when he thinks about his ER contract. He's signed on for five years, and after two, he is only just beginning to figure out what it means to be a TV star. It means being famous and being recognized everywhere he goes, but it also means that he could be known as John Carter, the medical student who cares too much, for the rest of his life.

NOAH DOESN'T WANT TO GO TO A PSYCHIC. He has to be at a rehearsal at three, but he graciously agrees to let me drag him here, even though he suspects (rightly, as it turns out) that it will make him late. Fortunately, he knew offhand where a psychic could be found: around the corner from where he used to live. There's a big sign saying PSYCHIC READINGS -- OPEN in neon letters in the window. We ring the bell. No answer. We ring the bell again. Finally, the psychic answer the door. She's a Mediterranean-village-grandma type with a gold neck chain and a big, brown flabby arms. Her name, as I later discover from a coupon she gives me in lieu of a business card (ENCOUNTER LOS ANGELES' MOST RENOWN PSYCHIC -- INTRODUCTORY OFFER, TAROT CARD READING ONLY $10 -- CONVENIENT FREE PARKING) is Angela Arman.

We sit down, and Angela starts laying out tarot cards on the little table between Noah and her. "You will be a man to live on two continents," she announces, after a minute. "You've been experiencing a lot of déjà vu lately. You're meant to be in entertainment, but you're not meant to be in front of a camera." Noah laughs. "Oops!" he says. Angela glances up quickly and gives him a scrutinizing look. "You are meant to write or direct," she declares. She's been in L.A. too long. Noah nods seriously.

"Listen to your mind, not your heart," Angela warns. "Put love on the back burner for now." Noah scratches his ear. "How far back is the back burner?" he asks. "Just don't make commitments," Angela tells him. "You need a couple of years to reach your peak. Right now you don't want to be where you are, but it pays the bills." "That it does." Noah sighs. Five years. Five years.

"There is a lot of hurt," Angela suddenly announces, dramatically. She's moving toward a climax. "Inside you, it's a battle. You don't know where you want to go. Nothing is satisfying like it used to be." Noah is nodding. "That's definitely true." "You're thinking you're ready to get out, to move on now." Noah is still nodding, and twisting his silver ring round and round on his index finger. There is more Angela could tell him, but she thinks it would be better to speak in private. Noah looks up. "I'll definitely come back," he promises.

Pause. Angela sits back, and in a different voice asks, "So what are you doing right now?" Noah tells her he's a television actor, and she asks him which show.

"ER."

"Oh, I watch ER!"  Angela peers at Noah, but fails to recognize him. She shrugs apologetically. "All those TV doctors look alike to me."