'Wire's' Doman a Philly native

There are fans of HBO's "The Wire" for whom acting Police Commissioner William Rawls will always be the equivalent of that Russian "Sopranos" fans were forever waiting to see come out of the woods.

In Rawls' case, though, it's the closet, not the Pine Barrens, thanks to a brief glimpse of the character, way back in Season 3, off-duty in a gay bar.

John Doman, the Philadelphia-born actor who's played Rawls for five seasons, knows they're wondering.

"People always say, 'You're gay, aren't you?' " said Doman, who seems to get a kick out of his character's backstory (which got a playful nod in the Feb. 24 episode, in which Rawls alluded to liking some "kinky s--- every now and then").

"At the beginning of the season, I had no idea what ["The Wire's" creator, David Simon] was going to do" with Rawls' secret life, the grandfather of three, who now lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., said in a phone interview on Monday.

"I told him, 'The more outrageous, the better' . . . But he doesn't like to do the obvious stuff."

In a series where the line between heroes and villains was always shifting, Rawls, a political animal in a police uniform, would probably fall squarely in the villain category for most of us: fudging crime stats, shutting down important investigations, putting his own career ahead of just about everything.

But is Rawls just misunderstood?

"I think so. He was just playing the game, as he knew it," said the actor, a former New York advertising executive who grew up in Fishtown, graduated from North Catholic and the University of Pennsylvania, and after a three-year tour in the Marines that included service in Vietnam, got his M.B.A. from Penn State.

Though he came to acting later than most, the seeds were sown, he said, on his way back from Vietnam in 1969. He'd stopped off in San Francisco to see a girl. She wasn't there, and he ended up going to the movies two nights in a row, catching "Midnight Cowboy" and "The Graduate."

"I was so impressed with Dustin Hoffman, to go from Ratso Rizzo [in "Cowboy"] to this college kid" in "The Graduate," and thought that acting might be something he'd be interested in pursuing, he said.

"It took me 20 years to actually get around to doing it," Doman said, but in the meantime, he read books about acting and "took some classes here and there," eventually breaking into commercials and gradually into TV and movies.

Now appearing at New York's Public Theater in a play called "Unconditional," Doman said "The Wire" boosted his career.

"It's made me very visible within the industry, for sure. Because the show has gotten such great critical acclaim, it's hard for anyone in the business to ignore it." *