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DERMOT MULRONEY

He's perfected the role of second fiddle, but after romancing Julia Roberts in 'My Best Friend's Wedding', the actor may finally turn leading man.

Flashback: Early '90s. Dermot Mulroney is in his trailer on the set of Point of No Return, a bad American remake of La Femme Nikita. (You're forgiven if you don't remember it.) He's playing the clueless boyfriend to Bridget Fonda's trained assassin. "I guess," he says, "that I'm the ingenue."

Now Mulroney sits in a West Hollywood bistro, four years and 12 movies later. Since then, he has been beau to Winona Ryder in How to Make an American Quilt, parter to Holly Hunter in Copycat, foil for Misses Drew Barrymore, andie MacDowell, Madelein Stowe and Mary Stuart Masterson in Bad Girls. "I've played the ingenue a time or two since, I'm afraid," he says. "No, I'm not afraid. It's just that I've been involved in a lot of women's films. But at least in this new one my status is raised to fiance, so I'm a more serious contender."

This new one is a big deal. My Best Friend's Wedding is the movie that returns Julia Roberts to her once lucrative turf of romantic comedy. Which means it makes Mulroney a serious contender in more ways than one. If it's a hit, the guy who spends his time onscreen caught between Roberts and Camerson Diaz may find himself in another enviabel position: wielding the unaccustomed clout to play something other than the ingenue, or the boyfriend, or the second banana. At 33, Mulroney could find himself a certified leading man.

"One of the reasons I cast him is that he was not the least bit intimidated by Julia," says P.J.Hogan, the director of My Best Friend's Wedding. "Other actors I read were definitely intimidated - and that's not a pretty sight, watching grown men quake. But Dermot came in, looked her in the eye and made her want him.

"I have no doubt that he could play those big romantic leads," Hogan continues. "But I don't know if he's interested in that. I talked to him about the roles he's turned down, and I got the feeling he's never really had any interest in being a movie star."

As for Mulroney, he tries to ignore the entire subject. Sure, the perks of relative fame are visible this morning: There's the vintage Chevy picup parked out back, gleaming in a color that might best be called metallic butterscotch. There's also the waitress who hovers excitedly because she's a big fan of the Low and Sweet Orchestra, the L.A.-based Celtic-folk-alternative band for which Mulroney plays mandolin and cello, although she doesn't seem to know he's also an actor. But as he sits here in black jeans, T-shirt and short-sleeved sport shirt, poking at a breakfast burrito, Mulroney is one of those actors who are amost afraid to show ambition. Drifting may not be the steadiest career track, but when you're not famous enough to takew charge of your own destiny, you won't fall short of your goals if you don't admit to having any.

"Ambitions?" he says cautiously, when thea word is mentioned. "I don't know. I've found that they only got me trouble, or disappointed me. So I just go with it."

It's possible, though, if you work at it, to coax Mulroney back to those days when he did have ambitions - or, at least, when he paid attention to people who had ambitions on his behalf. "I have no regrets or complaints," he says, "but when you get a big part just two and a half years after coming to L.A., that's your ticket, right? I got Young Guns, which was extremely big. And I didn't get a job for 11 months after it was released." He shrugs. "So it doesn't happen the way they tell you it's going to happen. Instead, it's happened on its own, and according to my tast, and at a manageable speed. Maybe it's a mistake, but I sort of leave things up to the wind."

That wind started blowing, aptly enough, in chicago. Mulroney had grown up in Alexandria, Va., the middle of five kids (Kieran, the youngest of his three brothers, also acts). He performed in highschool productions, and after graduating in 1981, he went to study theater, music and film at Northwestern University. " thought I'd probably end up working production crews in Chicago," he says.

But at the tail end of his senior year, Mulroney felt as if he'd finally learned how to act. And in 1985, he headed west - where his newfound confidence, combined with the right look ("the look of a rangy, troubled soul," says director Tom DeCillo), won him steady work, most of it in small movies. On one of those, 1989's Survival Quest, he met the gifted actress Catherine Keener, who soon became his wife.

They're interesting to watch when they work together," says DiCillo. "She'll sit off camera and watch every single one of his takes. Then they whisper together. And he does the same for her."

DiCillo got ample chance to observe the dynamic when he directed Mulroney's favorite of his films: Living in Oblivion. The acclaimed indie comedy was made only after Mulroney put up the money that got the project off the ground. Mulroney, says DiCillo, wanted the part of the film's harried director; when DiCillo said he envisioned and older actor, Mulroney suggested Steve Buscemi and took a smaller role as the sensitive, eye-patched cameraman. "I thought that was very magnanimous on his part," says DiCillo.

Mulroney and Keener also appear in DiCillo's upcoming Box of Moonlight, though the actor's part as an addled auto mechanic is small. Otherwise, the couple's career paths rarely intersect: he makes regular forays into the mainstream, she sticks to indie porjects. "If it's not an interesting script, she's not interested," Mulroney says. "It's a hard way to look at material. I love it."

Still, Mulroney doesn't practice this method himself. Instead, he works on what movies come his way. Or he plays in Low and Sweet, whose first album, 1996's Goodbye to All That, is an eclectic delight. The band has toured with and without Mulroney, and while he wants to make another album, he admits the dual career doesn't work. "It looked impossible to do both," he says. "It was. It is."

So, for now, it's back to movies. This fall, Mulroney stars in Goodbye Lover, a black comedy in which Mulroney, Patricia Arquette and Don Johnson play "a murderous, adulterous, ambitious family." First, though, there's My Best Friend's Wedding and the attendant hoopla that comes with co-starrring opposite Julai Roberts.

Mulroney laughs as he recalls an afternoon during the making of the film when he and Roberts shot scenes on a boat traveling under Chicago's many bridges. "On practically every bridge," he says, "some pedestrian would scream, 'Julia, I love you!' But about halfway through the day, we passed under a bridge and I heard a man go, 'Hey, Dermot.' And I thought, all right. It might be 100 to 1, but I'm on board." He shrugs. "It turned out to be a friend of mine from college." It would seem a bit too ambitious to admit disappointment, so Mulroney grins. "I resprect him for not screaming for Julia," he insists. "At least he had the dignity to say hello to me."