CHARLIE MCDERMOTT never expected that ABC's "The Middle" would be showing quite so much of his own middle.

"Every time I'm home [on the show], I almost always have my shirt off, which I'm starting to get used to," the 19-year-old actor from West Chester said last week of his role on the sitcom, in which he plays Axl, the oldest, most athletic - and usually least-dressed - of three children of Frankie (Patricia Heaton) and Mike Heck (Neil Flynn).

"I was kind of expecting that since I wasn't on a CW show, that I wouldn't have to take my shirt off at all, but I've been very frequently almost completely naked on the show so far," said McDermott.

Mothers of teenage boys everywhere will no doubt identify with Frankie's exasperation, though Axl's tendency to drift through the house in his underwear is actually the least of her problems in "The Middle," which premieres Sept. 30.

There is, for instance, her middle child, a daughter named Sue (Eden Shur), who seems doomed to fail at everything she tries, and her youngest, Brick (Atticus Shaffer), whose backpack doubles as an imaginary friend.

Oh, and if Frankie doesn't sell a car pretty soon, her not-so-brilliant career will be over.

McDermott declared his screen mother "awesome."

He'd first become a fan a few years ago, he said, while making the movie "Disappearances." Stuck in a house in Vermont for a month with no television, he was sent a season of "Everybody Loves Raymond" by his grandmother and watched it.

"I remember thinking, Oh, wow, if she ever did something else with kids, I could play her son."

Oh, c'mon.

"I'm dead serious. I think she resembles my mom. That's the first thing I thought is, she reminded me of my mom," he said.

"When you're an actor, you're always looking for people you can work with," he said. "My mom - when she wants to get something done, she gets it done."

As for Heaton, "she's such a normal person, and she's got like four kids [all boys] of her own."

His own mother, Barb, and his father, Charlie ("I'm the fourth"), are back in West Chester now, but they spent about a year and a half taking turns living with him in Burbank, Calif., before he turned 18, McDermott said.

The young actor, who was recently nominated for a Spirit Award for his role in "Frozen River," didn't have to leave home for his first professional gig, having gotten his start as "a glorified extra" with a couple of lines in M. Night Shyamalan's 2004 film "The Village," in which he's credited as "10-year-old boy."

He traces his interest in acting, though, to a very different film: "Star Wars."

"I went to my neighbors' house when I was like about 5" and saw the movie for the first time, he recalled.

"And then I saw there was a gun in it, so I said, 'Wait!' I made them stop and I had to go home and ask my dad if I was allowed to watch it," he said.

Permission granted, he returned, eventually seeing all three parts of the original trilogy over the course of the next couple of days.

"At that age, I'd never seen anything, anything like that at all. And I basically kind of knew, from then on, that I wanted to be in 'Star Wars.' And then when I realized that wasn't a possibility, I realized I wanted to be an actor so I could be in something like 'Star Wars,' " he said.

Maybe even something where he'd be issued a shirt. *

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