Jeffrey Dean Morgan is one of my latest crushes. Have you seen this guy? He is smoking hot – great body, great voice, kind eyes and a beautiful smile. Swoon! I’m a little late to the party, I realize. I don’t watch “Grey’s Anatomy”, that’s why I’ve only started liking him now. I’m not alone – he’s about to break out in a huge way, if Watchmen is the kind of success some are predicting.

Morgan plays The Comedian, “whose murder kick-starts the story” according to the LA Times (is that a spoiler? I doubt it.). Eddie Blake, a.k.a. the Comedian is a brutal son of a bitch, an anti-hero who, according to Morgan “rapes, murders and pillages his way through the movie.” The LAT has a pretty good interview piece with Morgan:

After years as a struggling actor, the 42-year-old Morgan has been receiving an intense indoctrination in the ways of celebrity. First, the Seattle native took on the role of Denny Duquette, the doomed hunk with a heart, on “Grey’s Anatomy” and connected with fans and the show’s producers so deeply that the character was brought back from the dead (sort of) to become a spectral lover for Katherine Heigl’s confused Izzy Stevens. That made him a haunting heartthrob to millions of viewers. And now, as a star of “Watchmen,” the hotly anticipated (and debated) superhero epic that reaches theaters Friday, Morgan finds himself becoming an instant icon to the millions of fanboys who approach the “Watchmen” graphic novel as something close to a sacred text and the Hollywood adaptation as a sort of spandex-cinema equivalent to “The Passion of the Christ.”

“These people take [‘Watchmen’] very seriously, and with good reason,” Morgan said last weekend as he enjoyed a much-needed smoke after several smothering hours at WonderCon, the massive pop-culture expo at the Moscone Center. Thousands of fans had waited in line for hours to hear Morgan and fellow cast members talk about their characters and themselves on a panel that, within minutes, was pinging across the globe thanks to flip-phone cameras and the Internet.

On “Grey’s,” Morgan was “the ultimate nice guy,” as he put it, but fans of that show are in for a nasty shock if they decide to take in a weekend matinee of “Watchmen.” In the movie, an adaptation of the landmark 1980s graphic novel by writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons that presented a political and operatic tale of superheroes living in an alternative version of America in which Richard Nixon remained president into the MTV era and a mysterious conspiracy threatens the world. Morgan portrays Eddie Blake, a.k.a. the Comedian, a scarred, leering “hero” who “rapes, murders and pillages his way through the movie,” Morgan said with some delight.

“It’s not Denny Duquette,” he said, “not by a long shot.”

Morgan is still trying to carve out a Hollywood profile apart from his roles (at industry events, he has been approached by well-wishers who mistake him for last year’s Oscar winner Javier Bardem), and right now an odd trademark seems to be developing: On “Weeds” and “Grey’s Anatomy,” he was the ghost of the past, the lover lost too young; and in “Watchmen,” his murder fills the first five minutes of the film and serves as the catalyst for the unfolding conspiracy plot.

“I do some of my best work,” Morgan said, “when I’m dead.” People are noticing too: Jimmy Kimmel introduced him as “the unkillable Jeffrey Dean Morgan” during his January visit to Kimmel’s late-night talk show.

In “Watchmen,” Morgan and costar Jackie Earle Haley (who plays an obsessive masked misanthrope named Rorschach) are the actors getting the most early praise for their work in an ensemble that also includes Billy Crudup and Malin Akerman. The Comedian’s name is ironic (just like the Joker, last year’s most memorable comics character on screen), and he barrels through the movie as a ferocious government operative who delights in his black-bag assignments and, for a time, shrugs off casualties in his personal life. The role could have easily slipped into two-dimensional thug, but fans of the film say Morgan’s portrayal has more layers.

During the film, the antihero is seen murdering a former lover, sexually assaulting a fellow hero, assassinating a president and gleefully plowing through a battlefield littered with charred corpses. Morgan said the graphic novel, the script and director Zack Snyder helped him find a way to commit ugly acts but still look the audience in the eye.

“When I was reading the graphic novel and the script, I kept thinking: Why is it I don’t hate this guy? He is so well-drawn there is something close to sympathy for him as a character even though he’s a monster. The writing brings out the humanity in him, and that’s what I looked for when I got in the costume.”

Morgan is proud of his time as the beyond-the-grave nice guy on “Grey’s Anatomy,” but, after all the syrupy YouTube tributes to the soapy character, the bad boy in him is clearly enjoying the flamethrower tour of duty in “Watchmen.”

During the panel in San Francisco, a fan at the microphone asked Morgan to talk about a memorable moment during the filming in Vancouver, Canada, and, with a deadpan baritone, Morgan said: “I loved the rape scene.”

After some gasps from the audience and a long, perfectly timed beat, the former nice-guy-turned-Comedian grinned and said: “Joking!”

[From the LA Times]

Rape jokes. Not funny, New Crush. But I can totally understand how he would want to be seen as more than a dead husband on some soapy doctor drama. Look at him! The man’s a machine!

Watchmen was directed by Zack Snyder, who did 300. My guess is that the film will do for Jeffrey Dean Morgan what 300 did for Gerard Butler – make him a household name with the big film projects to back it up. Butler and Morgan have actually worked together before, in that absolutely horrible, depressing movie P.S. I Love You. Let’s hope the two hotties get to work together again, this time in a film with a lot of nudity. Fingers crossed!

Here’s Jeffrey Dean Morgan at the ‘Watchmen’ premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood on Monday. Images thanks to Fame.com and BauerGriffinOnline.