Jeffrey is a saber-toothed little comedy about living with AIDS that should have the Moral Majority reaching for their torches and pitchforks, and the rest of us helpless with laughter. The movie features some inspired casting. Sigourney Weaver is scarily convincing as a gay-bashing televangelist. Patrick Stewart, known in England as a Shakespearean actor and here as Star Trek's unflappable Captain Picard, plays a high-camp interior designer with just the right blend of honey and vitriol. Olympia Dukakis turns up in leopard-skin print as the mother of a very masculine-looking "transsexual lesbian". And Steven Weber, in the title role, plays a gay man so disheartened by the prevalence of AIDS and the resulting lack of spontaneity in lovemaking, that he vows to give up sex entirely.

Amid this kind of talent, you wouldn't think that a newcomer to film would stand much chance of being noticed. But Michael T. Weiss as Steve, the impetuous wooer determined to make Jeffrey forget his vow of abstinence, grabs and holds our attention from the film's first moments. A 32-year-old Chicago actor who grew up in Northbrook and took his first drama lessons at the Children's Theatre at Second City, Weiss went on to study acting at the University of Southern California, graduating in the same class as Ally Sheedy, Anthony Edwards, and Forest Whitaker. He put in five years on The Days of Our Lives and several more with Drew Barrymore on 2000 Malibu Road. But as actors often are, he was awed, even a little starstruck, by his fellow cast members in Jeffrey. "But I didn't let myself go 'Oh, boy!' until five weeks into shooting," he says. That could be because his attention was focused on transforming himself for the role.

Described by friends as shy, Weiss says that the biggest challenge was "getting in touch with a part of myself that's way out there" -- openly sexual, frankly flirtatious, fearless in the face of rejection. This is evident from Weiss's first scene, when Jeffrey, determined to substitute working out for sex, enters a New York fitness club that's a real temple of the biceps -- all glittering machines and glistening deltoids. When Jeffrey, unmuscular and tentative, asks for someone to spot him while he lifts weights, Steve, Michael Weiss's character, leaps forward. He's a hunk, a dreamboat, a piece of temptation in a vestigial blue tank top and form-fitting white Lycra shorts. His brown hair is cropped to show off the line of his forehead and jaw; his dark eyes are half closed beneath straight dark brows. Best, his face radiates something uncomplicated: liking, pleasure. With Steve's eyes on his face, Jeffrey, meltingly susceptible, staggers back like someone who's opened the door to a blast furnace. In a comic scene reminiscent of the photographer's vicarious lovemaking in Blowup, Steve crouches above and behind Jeffrey's head as he reclines beneath a barbell. His voice low and hoarse, Weiss's character croons as Jeffrey struggles to raise and lower the weight: "Come to me, you're there. Yes, yes, you are the best, you are the most, you are the king!" Finally collapsing, less from fatigue than from the sexual intensity of this barrage, Jeffrey slowly pulls himself to a sitting position. Still squatting behind him, Steve gently jostles Jeffrey's shoulders with his knees. It's a small thing, a movement so natural that it would be easy to miss, but it's a great gesture precisely because the obvious thing would be to lay a hand on him, and this is fresh. It's instant proof, borne out by the rest of the film, that Weiss knows what he's doing.

Asked about the repertoire of gestures that he used for the part, Weiss says, "When you see what's motivating a person, where they're coming from, you get into the physicality of it. Your body starts doing things you don't do. That's exciting. It doesn't always happen, but it happened here." In the trance of playing the part and flirting shamelessly, Weiss says he was totally unselfconscious. "Although, when I go to the gym, I wear five pounds of sweats. Here I was in these little skivvies." He groans. "I'd go home at night to the hotel room and think, Oh, my God! Oh, my God!"

But what lies behind this comic, frisky sexuality is an awareness of his character's bottom line. Steve is HIV positive. In Weiss' words, "He's got mortality at his shoulder, and it's made him much freer." Alone when he needs love most, he's not promiscuous so much as fiercely in earnest, trying to dispense with the trivialities. "The message is, If there's an opportunity for love, don't go at it 30 percent, go 100 percent, because none of us have that much time." The role obviously demands that Weiss walk a very fine line. "My first concern was to avoid being stereotypical. I wanted to make the character as grounded in reality as I could make him. That's the same concern I have approaching any role." The second concern was to avoid sentimentality. "There are moments of emotion; they're there, but you don't wallow in it." His favorite line demonstrates how understated the role is. Jeffrey, trying to let him down gently says, "Maybe we'll get together someday," and Weiss's character says bitterly, "That's the difference between you and me, in that one word: someday -- a real luxury item." And that's as overt as the matter of mortality gets. This is in keeping with the tenor of the film and the play on which it was based, both written by Paul Rudnick, the satirist who cheerfully skewers the wackiest excesses of the motion-picture industry for Premiere under the nom de plume Libby Gelman-Waxner.

A breath-takingly honest film, Jeffrey is also deliberately and defiantly silly, witty, sexy, irreverent, and fun. Obviously Rudnick believes that to muffle those qualities because the subject is serious, to let frivolity be drowned in the general woe, would be to surrender without firing a shot and let AIDS win. And so we get scenes like the outrageous catered benefit with a cowboys-and-Indians motif, where Steve, as a bartender in a cowboy hat, bumps into Jeffrey in a feathered headband. Jeffrey turns to the camera and in an aside defends his lowly status as a caterer's waiter. "I get to go everywhere," he says. "It's like the gay National Guard." The two then launch into a shared fantasy -- the film's one big parody of a production number -- of bare-chested cowboys and Indians pairing off in a flutter of napkins and whirling away. It's the kind of scene that will provoke an instant homophobic reaction in some people, but Weiss simply says, "As an actor I can't worry about controversy." He acknowledges with laughter that fans of his television work -- in which he has played heterosexuals -- will "get a big surprise from Jeffrey." But he turns aside questions about his own sexual orientation by saying, "I've kissed 12 million beautiful women and not once has anyone asked if I'm straight. Now one little kiss...," and his voice trails off. "If people seeing the film can't tell, I guess I did my job well, right?" In fact, Weiss's role in Jeffrey is less about being gay than about being likable. Weiss says he gets a lot of "hero roles," which is funny to him, since he feels no more wonderful than the next guy. "I've been coming up for more psychopaths lately, though," he says hopefully. "I'd love that because if I get that kind of a part, you just wait -- I'll scare the pants off you."

Unlike some actors who find certain roles emotionally draining even when they're away from the set, Weiss says, "It's all fun, because it's all make-believe. It's odd. We get paid to dredge up emotions the rest of the country wants to forget." After a moment's reflection, he mentions a day's shooting in New York, filming a scene in which he and a crowd of Jeffrey's friends, including the interior designer played by Patrick Stewart, pursue Jeffrey up Madison Avenue, trying to persuade him to accept happiness. "There were like 10,000 people watching and you could see them catch sight of Patrick Stewart and hear them go" -- here he lowers his already deep voice to working-class guttural -- "'Yo! Cap'n Picahhhd!'" He laughs. "That's what's so great. You can shatter the illusion with the next role you play." Asked what that role will be, Weiss cheerfully confesses he has no idea. "I feel spoiled; I took the leap from TV for such a wonderful vehicle. Now I'm trying to wait to pick up what I want. Right now there are a lot of TV offers: 'We'll pay you this much.' 'Well, how about this much?' And I'm turning them down." Weiss is devoting some of his time to a theatre group in L.A. run by Holly Hunter, Ed Harris, and Amy Madigan. Otherwise, he says, he's "playing beach volleyball and waiting for the next great thing."