David Boreanaz is leading a tour of the Hollywood set of Angel’s vampire bachelor pad, which, it turns out, looks very much like the apartments that young mortal unmarrieds often occupy; dimly lit, decorated with used furniture and devoid of discernible food. No coffin. No closet full of capes. No tubes of fangpaste on the bathroom counter. Except for a few medieval-looking weapons, Angel’s home could be any guy’s, which means the refrigerator is likely empty save a six-pack of beer and an old pizza box. But that isn’t the case. Boreanaz opens the door of the vintage icebox and displays the contents--a cube of butter and two jars filled with gooey red liquid. “Blood and butter,” Boreanaz says, grinning. “Just give me blood and butter. Sounds like an album title, huh?”

Never underestimate the power of a hit show to put an actor in a joking mood, even one who plays a brooding bloodsucker. And Angel (WB, Tuesdays, 9 PM/ET), Boreanaz’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer spin-off, is definitely a hit. Since its debut on October 5, the action-drama hybrid about a vampire superhero in Los Angeles has become WB’s highest-rated show among viewers 18 to 49, and it’s the network’s No. 1 show among males. Those numbers prompted the network last month to order a full season of episodes.

Still, Boreanaz’s jovial temperament on this particular Friday night in October comes as a surprise, considering the past week has been marked by traumas: Seven days earlier, he filed for divorce from his wife of two years, screenwriter Ingrid Quinn. News of his marital troubles made headlines nationwide, and at least one tabloid quoted sources who said Boreanaz’s wife was frustrated by his fast-lane life and jealous of the on-screen chemistry between her husband and Buffy star Sarah Michelle Gellar. Also last week, Angel costar Glenn Quinn (no relation to Ingrid) abruptly left the series. His early departure led to speculation that the fledgling show was in need of a creative jump start, rumors that producers and Quinn discredit.

So there is reason for Boreanaz, 28, to be grouchy. Yet when he sits down to chat, he seems relaxed, dismissing as gossip the reports about the roots of his failed marriage. “My divorce, obviously, is a very painful ordeal that I’m going through right now. Nobody really knows what happened except the two people involved in the relationship,” he says. “The sad part is that the press takes it and twists and turns it around. Only I know what the truth is.”

As for Gellar, she and Boreanaz recently reunited to film Buffy-Angel crossover episodes (November 23 at 8 and 9 PM/ET), and according to Boreanaz, the sparks were flying--but only between the characters, not the actors. “It was very powerful, because we hadn’t seen each other in so long. Brings [Angel and Buffy] back together again, you could feel that fusion.” Regardless of their characters’ chemistry, which Angel executive producer David Greenwalt calls “amazing,” Boreanaz says Gellar is a “great friend,” but one he keeps his distance from outside of work. “My personal life is my personal life, and my working environment is my working environment.”

That being the case, Boreanaz seems genuinely sorrowful about Glenn Quinn’s quick exit, saying, “I love him like a brother.” Quinn’s character, the half-demon Doyle, was written out because he was too much like Angel, says Boreanaz. But Greenwalt says the similarities between Angel and Doyle were just one reason for the change. “Very early on we said to ourselves, ‘Let’s kill a main character.’ It makes for a wonderful twist.” With Doyle gone, Angel will get a new sidekick in Alexis Denisof as Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, seen last season in a recurring role on Buffy. “It’s upsetting, because I really enjoyed working with Glenn,” Boreanaz says. “But the best part is that now I can do something else with him.”

Looking on the bright side is becoming a habit with Boreanaz; it’s a trick he learned from his father, Dave Roberts, a weatherman at WPVI-TV in Philadelphia. (Roberts changed his name from Boreanaz in the 1950’s under pressure from TV executives who thought his real name was too Italian.) “I admire him because he handles things in such a very calm way,” Boreanaz says of his dad.

Boreanaz and his two older sisters--Bo, a costume designer living in Vermont, and Beth, a third-grade teacher in New York--were raised to understand that fame is fleeting. Roberts says that he and his wife, Patti, “always tried to impress on them that we were a normal family. TV is just the work I’m in.” Still, Roberts says he talks to his son daily, sometimes about the pressures of celebrity. “I was talking to him about this recently, and I said, ‘David, just hang in there.’” It’s advice that his son has apparently taken to heart: Despite the upset in his personal life, Greenwalt says Boreanaz has been a “prince” on the set. “Of all the stars on the [shows], this guy is Joe Professional, and loving and kind to people he works with.”

Boreanaz’s recent tabloid troubles aren’t the first time he’s been connected with controversy. In November 1998 he was sued by his former landlord, Roger Hostin, who claimed that Boreanaz and a roommate wrecked his home in LA, which they rented in 1994, by throwing wild parties, and refused to pay $100,000 in damages. Hostin died in October of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, but his attorney, Jayne T. Kaplan, is continuing legal action on behalf of his heirs. Kaplan says her research shows that Boreanaz and his friends lived in the $3,000-a-month home like they were the “Rolling Stones in the 1970s. There is substantial damage. My client went to his grave unable to come back to his house.” Boreanaz downplays the suit, saying, “The accusations of parties and a trashed house came, I think, from a very angry person. And that’s all I’m going to say about it.”

He will talk about his childhood, however. Boreanaz was born in Buffalo, New York, and moved with his family to Philadelphia at age 7. That same year, his parents took him to a touring production of “The King and I” starring Yul Brynner. Boreanaz says he was blown away by the actor’s passion for the role. “I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do,’” he says. But he never told his family about his secret desire to act, and performed onstage only once as a child, playing Horace Vandergelder in a junior-high production of “Hello, Dolly!”

“He was a jock,” his dad says. “He never did any acting.” At Malvern Preparatory School, a Catholic institution renowned for its football program, Boreanaz was a wide receiver and free safety until his junior year, when a knee injury sidelined him. He moved on to Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York, and studied TV and film, intending to work behind the cameras. It wasn’t until after he graduated in 1991 and moved to Los Angeles that he decided to give acting a try, taking classes and performing in regional theater.

In 1994, he was hired to play Kelly Bundy’s biker boyfriend on Married...With Children. His work on that show, Greenwalt says, brought him to the attention of Buffy’s producers, who were looking for someone to play a biker vampire named Angel on Buffy. During his audition, “David turned a rocking chair upside down and rode it like a motorcycle,” Greenwalt remembers.

The Angel character became so popular that the producers eventually decided to give him his own show. “I knew this was a Batman-level character,” says Greenwalt, who compares Boreanaz to Jeff Bridges. “He can do it all.” Or try, anyway.

Boreanaz admits that the hardest thing about having his own show is that he doesn’t have time for much else, including a movie career. “I was offered a role in ‘House on Haunted Hill’ and a film with Ben Affleck, but I couldn’t fit them in.” He also works more nights now, since the series is about a vampire. “I’ve gotten used to it, and I really prefer the evening hours,” he says, putting on sunglasses even though it’s dark outside. And then he smiles. “As long as the light doesn’t hit me, I’ll be just fine.