If you'd asked Andrew Walker 10 years ago, he would have told you he expected to be playing professional football by this point. Instead, the 22-year-old Beaconsfield native is smooching in front of the cameras with sexy model-turned-actress Angie Everhart.

Walker is getting up close and personal with Everhart in Wicked Minds, a made-for-TV thriller that started shooting in town last Tuesday. It is the second high-profile gig for the busy young actor in 12 months. He spent the last year in Los Angeles starring in the WB Network sitcom Maybe It's Me, opposite Julia Sweeney and Fred Willard. He had only been back in his home town for a couple of days when he nabbed the co-starring role in Wicked Minds.

The switch from football to acting came suddenly for Walker. He had been on West Island football teams throughout his high-school years, made the club at Vanier College and had been invited to go to Boston College and join its team. Back at Vanier playing out his last season, he tore his ACL, the anterior cruciate ligament. He said it ended his pro-football aspirations on the spot.

"They have a huge pool of athletes in the U.S.," Walker said. "Once you're damaged goods, you're finished."

But Walker didn't spent too much time moping around lamenting his missed opportunity. Instead, he decided to be pro-active. He had already been doing some acting, and things picked up on the TV front shortly after the football accident. He landed a leading role in the Montreal-shot series Back to Sherwood and he hasn't looked stopped working in the biz since.

"I did five hard months of physio and the first weeks after surgery were devastating," Walker said. "But I tried to channel my energy into different avenues after the accident. I tried to turn something bad into something good."

After Back to Sherwood, he nabbed a regular role in the sitcom Radio Active, which was produced here and ran for a couple of seasons on YTV. When Radio Active bit the dust, Walker figured the time was ripe to take his shot at small-screen glory in Hollywood.

In January of last year, he and his pal and fellow Radio Active star Ryan Wilner drove across the U.S. in a run-down 1988 Volkswagen Fox to compete with hundreds of other actors during pilot season, the annual rite of winter in Los Angeles when the networks shoot a bunch of pilot episodes for several possible future series.

Soon enough, Walker landed a part in Maybe It's Me, a sitcom about an offbeat family that was created by two-time Emmy Award winner Suzanne Martin (Frasier). The comedy centres on 15-year-old Molly, played by newcomer Reagan Dale Neis, and Walker has the role of her delinquent older brother. Their parents are played by Julia Sweeney from Saturday Night Live and Fred Willard from Best in Show. The WB Network will announce in the next couple of weeks whether or not it is renewing the show for another season. It airs locally Mondays at 5:30 p.m. on Fox (WFFF-44) and will begin airing on CTV on Friday nights at the end of May.

Walker calls the time in L.A. "the best year of my life. It was a great learning experience. It was like the best acting class I could ever have."

Now he's pleased to making the move from comedy to an edgy thriller.

In Wicked Minds, he portrays a young man who's returning home from Harvard and is having a hard time coming to grips with the fact that his father has married a much younger woman, played by Everhart (Bandido).

Soon, he and his hot young stepmother are in the midst of a passionate affair in this film, produced by Montreal-based JB Media.

"It's great that I have this opportunity to switch to a completely different character," Walker said.

As for the chance to do a few steamy loves scenes with Everhart, Walker figures that's simply "a little bit of a bonus."

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