Paul Iacono’s “Hard Times” Truth, Heart, and the Love Below

Paul Iacono is en route to an excellent kind of infamy. With MTV’sm headlong leap into scripted television, the 21-year-old thespian has found himself playing the title role on “The Hard Times of RJ Berger,” officially the raunchiest high-school sitcom on the air. “It’s a story of the underdog,” Iacono offers. “A story of this little loser kid in high school who otherwise would have gone unnoticed, but nature has given him this gift and he’s going to use it. He’s mad as hell and he’s not gonna take it anymore.” The gift Iacono is referring to is RJ’s healthy endowment, which when inadvertently and fatefully exposed to the entire school during a basketball game, leads the dumbfounded coach (Marlon Young) to declare, “He’s a goddamn Buick Regal!” It was Iacono’s first pilot season when he was handed the script, and he hit paydirt. “I went in on Wednesday and by Friday I had the role,” he humbly relates.

Though it’s rife with roiling hormones and guilty of a cliché or three, there’s an earnestness and warmth in places you don’t expect. RJ’s parents — standouts Beth Littleford and Larry Poindexter — are hyper-sexed swingers, but they’ll love and support their kid come hell or high water. Perfect-girl Jenny Swanson (Amber Lancaster) may cause RJ’s ill-timed tumescence during the school play, but it’s actually quite touching when she begins to see him for the person he’s struggling to become. “I think the coolest part about it is there is an underlying heart to it,” the die-hard New Yorker relates. “There’s accuracy in depicting this sexually overt high school experience, but there is a lot of truth and a lot of heart as well. It starts from there and once you see that you’re coming from an honest place, you just want to tell the story honestly.”

And no matter how outrageous the circumstance, RJ and his best friend, Miles (Jareb Dauplaise), can count on classmate Lily (Kara Taitz) to take it up a notch. “Lily is a fantastic character,” Iacono declares. “She says the most disgusting, raunchy stuff. Even in the second episode, which really doesn’t have much to do with the whole penis motif, you can always rely on Lily to come in with one or two ‘vampire buffet in my panties’ lines.” Who would Iacono prefer if he were in RJ’s shoes? “I’ve always gone for the quirky chick in real life,” he reveals. “That’s just me. Or rather, not since my days of middle-school insecurity have I ever gone for the popular blond girl. I guess at some point you break out of those ideas of conformity, and the quirky chick works!”

Iacono found his calling early on. As the story goes, he was three years old and “my parents turned off the Frank Sinatra CD mid-song and I continued to sing the rest of the song, acapella, from my car seat. So that was my schtick at a young age; they would put me up on a barstool and I’d belt out ‘Summer Wind.’” He honed his skills at Manhattan’s High School of Performing Arts, and in 1999 won himself roles on soaps “The Guiding Light” and “As the World Turns,” and on stage in “Mame” with Christine Ebersole and “Sail Away” with Elaine Stritch at Carnegie Hall. He also workedm with Lili Taylor in “Landscape of the Body” and earned his first role in a major motion picture as aspiring filmmaker, Neil Baczynsky, in last year’s remake of Fame. Iacono is currently planning a staging of his pet project, “Prince/Elizabeth,” about the young adulthood of former child actors. “It’s sex, drugs, and rock & roll — and theater,” he grins. Meanwhile on MTV’s single-camera haven of adolescent lustful impropriety — created by Seth Grahame- Smith (author of the best-selling Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) and David Katzenberg — Iacono hints that it’s time for RJ to “own up to himself and take life by the balls and say, ‘This is me and this is my time. This is it!’” ▼

Catch new episodes of “The Hard Times of RJ Berger” on Monday nights on MTV and Tuesday nights on MTV2.