After coming on hot and heavy last season in "Burn This," actor Michael T. Weiss returns to the Huntington Theatre Company on Friday to play a different kind of heartthrob.

"When I played Pale I thought he was a devil on the outside and an angel on the inside," says Weiss, best known for his starring role in TV's "The Pretender." But in 'Les Liaisons Dangereuses,' Valmont is the exact opposite."

In Christopher Hampton's sharp drama, the Vicomte de Valmont engages in a sexy and sinful game with his friend La Marquise de Merteuil to seduce her former lover's innocent bride-to-be. As they plot and plan, deception and attraction merge in a story line that becomes as much thriller as love story.

Weiss says director Daniel Goldstein is turning the play's 17th-century setting on its ear."We're doing a sexier version of the story, and the costumes move from the 17th and 18th centuries to modern dress and also work in nudity, tattoos and leather," he says. "There's also lots of kissing, so if anyone gets sick it will go through the cast like wildfire."

Although he's accustomed to playing handsome heavies, Weiss says Valmont is a challenge.

"I've always wanted to play this role," he says. "He's deliciously manipulative and swashbuckly, but he's also more effete than most of the guys I get to play."

But Weiss seems able to maneuver Hollywood typecasting fairly well. He's got no less than five films waiting for release in which his characters range from a drug lord to someone involved with the fashion industry. With a busy schedule on the West Coast and a possible New York play in the offing, how does Weiss fit in work at the Huntington?

"I fell in love with Boston when I was here for 'Burn This,' which was the first time I'd been on stage in more than a decade," he says, "and I just wanted to get back here."

He was so eager, he enrolled at Harvard last summer for an art history course. ("I got an A-, too," he says proudly.)

"You don't appreciate it when you're here all the time, but it was just so cool to be on that campus in Cambridge," he says. "And, as an actor, all those cliches about Boston audiences turn out to be true. They're smart, they listen, they get it."

"Les Liaisons Dangereuses," presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Boston University Theatre, Friday-Feb. 5. Tickets: $15-$70. Call 617-266-0800 or go to bostontheatrescene.com.