By David Keeps. Photographed by Francois Dischinger

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One day Chris Meloni would like to have a room completely in rugs. For now, he has killims and Persians and Turkish tent bands on the walls and floor of his downtown Manhattan loft. He also has a Chinese wedding arch and a statue of the Hindu elephant god, Ganesh. "I love symbols of spiritualism," says Meloni, a yoga dabbler who wears a medal of St. Dismas (patron saint of the incarcerated) and has a cubist-primitive crucified Christ inked on his left shoulder. Meloni’s wife, Sherman Williams, a film production designer, breezes in with a packet of bills from LA.

They were married five years ago. Not only was she the right woman, says Meloni, it was the right time. "Before, my career came first," Meloni says. "There were few search-and-destroy missions, but mostly I just couldn’t expend the time and energy going out hounddogging." The couple owns a parcel of land in Los Feliz, where they keep a vintage Airstream trailer. "It’s from the last year they made them with wood interiors, " Chris says, licking the air with his tongue.

We head out for coffee in his "trusty" Doc Martens, workpants, $3 Salvation Army shirt, a down vest someone left in his apartment, round eyeglasses, and a batik skullcap from Turkey, he looks more like an NYU grad student than a movie star. At his local beanery, Meloni has his usual: four shots of expresso with two sugars. He downs them quickly and tells me about his life.

"Christopher Meloni was born April 2, 1961 (a birthday he shares with Casanova, Marvin Gaye, Dana Carvey, and Dragnet's Jack Webb) in Washington DC. The third child of a second-generation Italian endocrinologist and a homemaker of French lineage, Chris was the baby; his sister was six years older; his brother, four. 'They used to call me The Mistake,' Meloni laughs. 'But I ignored it.' He was a garrulous boy who wanted to join the circus; his favorite childhood story was the saga of railroad man John Henry, who picked and hammered his way through a mountain, beating a new-fangled steam engine, then laid down his hammer and died. It taught him about faith and commitment: " You don't see too many examples of that in life - they're mythical." The first movie Meloni saw was either Dr. No or The Blue Max. Either way, he mostly remembers that Ursula Andress was in it.

"I had a screaming woody for her," he recalls, a sly grin crossing his face.

In school Meloni excelled more at sports than academics. He was the first quarterback to lead his team to an undefeated season in 25 years, but he wasn't an all-American droid. At 15, he lost his virginity, found AC/DC, and had a girl pierce his ear with a needle (hold the ice), though his dad ripped the post out. And at 18, as a sort of graduation present to himself, he referenced Steve McQueen in Papillon by getting a tattoo of a butterfly on his pelvis."

After graduation, Meloni enrolled at the University of Colorado. "The week I got accepted, there was an article about the school in Time,'" he recalls. "It said ‘Boulder, where the hip come to trip.’ I decided to take a Ph.D. in motorcycle riding and growing my hair long." But after his first year, he took a theater class and was pulled aside one day by the teacher, who told him he was good enough to pursue an acting career. "But," Meloni recalls, "I knew I couldn't declare a drama major and come home with a B in makeup and an A in 17th-century costume design, then ask my father to pay my tuition.'" So, filled with optimism and naiveté, he went west, arriving in an agent's office with long hair, a beard, and squashed bugs all over his leather jacket from the ride. Without so much as a headshot or resume – "I didn't even know what that was," - Meloni wasn't anyone's idea of an actor. After a month, including one night sleeping in LA's down-low MacArthur Park, Meloni headed north to San Francisco, where he proceeded to "get fucked up for two weeks straight. "