Peter Facinelli plays two completely different doctors in ‘Nurse Jackie’ and ‘Twilight’

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\“Nurse Jackie\”

Actor Peter Facinelli is stubborn, especially when it comes to his work. When he was just starting out he refused to play any Italian-American roles, though his parents are from Italy.

“I said, ‘No, I don’t want to do that, because with the last name Facinelli that’s all I’ll do for the rest of my life.’ So there were roles I would just say, ‘No! I don’t want to do that. Let me go play the Irish kid.’”

For a beginning actor, that stand proved a sizable risk. “It’s a lot easier if you do one thing well,” he admits. “They know where to put you. When you’re always having to prove yourself, that you can do something — it’s, ‘Well, I’ve never seen him do it. I don’t know.’ But that’s why I WANT to do it.”

Right now Facinelli is playing two physicians: He’s the kindly vampire doctor in the “Twilight” saga (the second in the series, “New Moon,” opens Friday). He’s also the cocky Dr. Cooper on Showtime’s “Nurse Jackie.”

Facinelli isn’t worried he might be typecast by playing two doctors simultaneously. “I don’t really play the occupation. I play the person. They both wear a lab coat. But the people in those lab coats are so dynamically different,” he says.

“They’re 180 degrees, a world apart. So it’s fun to be able to play characters of the same occupation. There are people when they meet me know me from ‘Nurse Jackie’ and don’t even realize I’m in the ‘Twilight’ series. When I look back on my years, the fun part of the things I’ve done is that everything’s a little bit different.”

He’s always been true to his conviction. He’s played characters as diverse as a blind mountain climber, a slick cop, a loopy art student — even Jesus. “And when you stack up the characters I’ve done, the character from ‘Damages,’ Dr. Cooper from ‘Nurse Jackie’ and Dr. Carlisle from ‘Twilight,’ they’re all different. And for me as an actor that’s what makes it fun to do what I do.”

Facinelli recalls he first got the idea of acting when he was in the third grade. “There was a picture biography book on Robert Redford and I was looking at this little biography book and all the films that he had made. I remember thinking, ‘That’s interesting, an interesting career.’ Then I saw ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’ when I was a little bit older and remember seeing Paul Newman and Robert Redford having so much fun onscreen. I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do.’”

But he was so shy, his parents didn’t take him seriously. “My family kind of laughed it off because they didn’t think it was possible. For a long time I didn’t do anything about it. But when I got to college I realized, ‘I just don’t think I’m going to be happy doing anything else.’ So I transferred to NYU and studied theater there.”

He was originally studying pre-law at St. John’s University, but conned his parents into thinking that acting would help in that career. “I thought the whole courtroom-drama thing really enticed me. Then I went to work for a law firm, just running packages, and realized they spent most of their time trying NOT to go to court, trying to settle out of court, looking for precedents in books to keep them out of court. I thought that’s not fun. So I told my parents, ‘I’m going to transfer to NYU because as a lawyer you need theatrical skills to win over the jury.’

“They kind of bought it. My plan was to go to NYU and get a degree and go to law school after that. But I was just about 15 credits shy and I started working. And I never looked back. “

Facinelli, 35, is married to actress Jennie Garth and they are the parents of three little girls, 1, 3 and 6. “Jen and I have been together since ‘95 so it’s 14 years, almost like a million years in Hollywood.”

They make it work, he says, by honoring their commitments. “My wife and I have so much history together it’d be a real shame to throw that all away and have to start all over with somebody else,” he says.

“When you’re in a relationship, no matter how bad it feels like it gets, unless it’s abusive, throwing in the towel doesn’t make it easier, it just makes it more painful in some ways. And at some point you’re going to get to a crossroad in another relationship and have to make the decision again to throw in the towel or leaving that one. You jump from relationship to relationship or you actually stick through the painful times, and believe it or not, sticking through those painful times can make the love deeper.”

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Chris Rock will be voicing Marty the zebra when “Merry Madagascar” arrives on NBC Tuesday. He says he likes doing voiceovers because he can have as many takes as he wants.

Rock thinks that he really had no choice but to be a comedian. “It’s like a calling. It’s like being a priest or something. You end up there one day. Yeah. I love comedy, loved comedians ... just interested in that. Some kids take apart radios and they grow up to be electricians. I would take apart jokes.”

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Anthony Michael Hall is back in school, only this time he’s matriculated to junior college. Remember Hall as the shy little kid from “Breakfast Club”? He’s all grown up now and starred in his own sci-fi series, “The Dead Zone,” but he’ll be back on campus Dec. 10 when he guest stars on NBC’s “Community.” He plays a bully who challenges Joel McHale to a fight.

After costarring in a series of John Hughes movies, Hall seemed to disappear.

“I never really stopped,” he says. “I just had to stay at it and survive in whatever ways I could. Sometimes I was doing episodic work on ‘Touched by an Angel’ or ‘Diagnosis, Murder.’ I valued the job that much more because I was there for only a week at a time. There were many interesting transitionary points in my career, I had to really dig deep and make sure this is what I wanted. It’s like being a traveling salesman almost — all you have is who you are and what you can really bring to the role when you go for a job.”