Confidence Man of Steel: Matt Bomer

Houston’s Matt Bomer is hustling up raves as a con artist gone good in TV’s red-hot ‘White Collar.’ Has the ex-next-Superman, channeling hometown heat and humility, at last learned to fly?

It’s a blistering summer afternoon in New York City: 98 degrees radiating off every surface, a day that makes even the most committed New Yorker wish he were anywhere, anyone, else. But Matt Bomer isn’t sweating. The 32-year-old actor has been shooting White Collar outside since 8AM, but breezing into an Italian bistro two blocks from the set, he’s the picture of cool. In a white V-neck T-shirt, gray shorts, boat shoes and a straw pork-pie hat, he’s in the seasonal uniform of the fashionable young urban dude, accessorized with thick-rimmed black glasses that evoke Clark Kent (ironic, considering that he was originally cast, then cast aside, as Superman in the most recent movie version of the franchise).

“Growing up in Houston gave me the wherewithal to withstand humidity,” he says with a grin, settling in for his first in-person magazine interview. In fact, Bomer seems well prepared to take the heat literally and figuratively, navigating with aplomb a path to stardom fraught with potentially devastating career setbacks—and relentless questions about his private life.

On USA’s White Collar, which airs through October, Bomer plays Neal Caffrey, an upscale criminal turned FBI agent. The show is a breakout, as is Bomer, who’s one of the most buzzed-about stars of the last few TV seasons. Named People magazine’s “Sexiest Newcomer,” he was also featured as the “Must List Summer Crush” in Entertainment Weekly—tipping a water bottle over his torso with pinup panache, his abs rippling through a soaked T-shirt. And he landed the cover of TV Guide in June. He modestly attributes all the attention he’s getting to the winning character Collar’s producers created for him. “We can all be con artists at one time or another,” he says casually, taking a hearty swallow of iced coffee.

In person, Bomer looks a bit ruddier and slighter than on screen, more regular-guy; he’s one of those performers who seem to conduct electricity in front of a camera. In conversation, he’s engaged and engaging, with an actor’s expansiveness—much animation, many hand gestures—and a screenwriter’s vocabulary (he calls living in New York City after 9/11 “a diaspora” and the People accolade “flattering, but not a meritocratic achievement”). Overall, his vibe is that of the high-school jock everybody liked, who sat in the back of the cafeteria drawing in his notebook. Which is essentially what he was.

Bomer was raised in the Houston suburb of Spring, the middle child of Sissi and John—Dad was a former draft pick for the Dallas Cowboys—with a younger sister and older brother. He grew up playing backyard football, along with just about every other sport. “Track, baseball, tennis, soccer, swimming, diving,” he says. “My parents pushed me into athletics at a young age. It was probably smart of them, considering they had two boys. We needed to run our energy out.”

But Texas football glory wasn’t on the horizon for young Bomer. “I wasn’t that great a player,” he says with a shrug. “I wasn’t going to get a Division I scholarship. I played because it was fun, a lot of my friends played. It also made my dad really happy. That was really important to me.”

Instead, he gravitated toward acting, an interest sparked when his mother took him to see E.T. In high school, he balanced athletics with school plays; he compares himself to the jock-turned-troubadour on TV’s Glee. (“I was a free agent, not an alpha male,” he says.) His frequent costar in stage productions like The Diary of Anne Frank and Platonov was Lee Pace, who recently starred in TV’s Pushing Daisies and appeared on the April 2008 cover of Houston magazine; the two still hang out.

In Bomer’s senior year, he left the football team for the Alley Theatre in Houston, where he played several roles in a revisionist production of A Streetcar Named Desire. It required him to get up before 7AM for school, commute an hour to the theater afterward, and arrive home after midnight. “It was crazy,” he says. “I remember being really, really exhausted. And having a blast.”