Shambling down a Manhattan street during an EW photo shoot, Homicide: Life on the Street star Clark Johnson sticks his head inside an XXX video store. ''Do you have Spread 'Em Wide?'' he asks. ''I directed it.''
Johnson's just kidding -- we think -- but he's dead serious about directing. In fact, he's in New York City to edit the second Homicide he's helmed, a child-abuse-themed episode shot in Baltimore (airing on NBC Jan. 10). ''I'm not a big fan of actor-directors,'' says Johnson. But he was a natural, coming up, as he did, through the ranks of production; he worked as an effects technician on films before landing the role of street-smart Det. Meldrick Lewis.
And you can't blame Johnson for wanting to do more than act, given the early limitations of his Homicide role. For the first few seasons, Meldrick was largely in the background. ''That was my fault,'' confesses exec producer Tom Fontana. ''I thought it'd be great to have a character who was totally unwilling to share with the people he worked with.'' But the suicide of Meldrick's original partner, Crosetti (Jon Polito), ''opened the door for us to find out more about how he thinks,'' says Fontana. Last fall, Reed Diamond joined the show as Meldrick's new partner, Mike Kellerman, and they quickly became two of Homicide's most powerful players. ''He's my partner on screen, and in real life it's the same way,'' says Diamond. ''He's an actor I can totally count on.''
Meldrick's other partnership -- his surprise marriage at the end of last season -- isn't going so smoothly. At least not on the show. In real life, the actress who plays Meldrick's wife, Karen Williams, is best friends with Johnson's wife, Heather Salmon, a model-turned-documentary producer. ''She's beautiful,'' Johnson says of his TV bride. ''I get to kiss her and then wave to my wife, 'I'm acting!'''
Johnson, 41, splits time between Baltimore and Toronto, where his two daughters from his first marriage live. A child actor who toured in musicals like Porgy and Bess and Finian's Rainbow, he moved from Philadelphia to Toronto as a teenager. He gave up acting for a brief -- and unsuccessful -- football career in the early '80s. ''I got cut by Buffalo twice, Pittsburgh once,'' he recalls. ''The CFL paid me 250 bucks a week one season to stay home.''
Eager to return to showbiz, Johnson soon found himself ''getting coffee and picking up racing forms for Lee Majors'' on 1981's action movie The Last Chase. He worked his way up to effects jobs on goremeister David Cronenberg's films. ''That's from The Dead Zone,'' he says, showing off a scar on his arm from an explosion he set up. ''Broken glass -- 38 stitches. Blood was pulsing up. Cronenberg came over with a pail. He has a very strange sense of humor.''
Johnson segued back into acting with parts on SCTV (''I played Black Guy in Tree, Black Man in Bar''), the ABC miniseries The Women of Brewster Place (he deflowered Oprah Winfrey), and as the voice of rapper Hammer in the cartoon Hammerman (''He was huge then
