He's got 'The Lying Game': Adrian Pasdar could take a pass on Texas

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - "Heroes" may be grounded, but Adrian Pasdar is still flying.

These days, it's between L.A. and Austin, where the Marple Newtown High grad's latest show, "The Lying Game" (9 p.m. Mondays, ABC Family), is filming.

Texas, it turns out, is more than hot enough for Pasdar, who grew up in Powelton and in Delaware County and interned at Malvern's People's Light & Theatre Company, but has lived on and off in Austin during his marriage to Dixie Chicks lead singer Natalie Maines.

"Both my children were born there," he said, but "it's just really, really hot. . . . It's, like, equatorial hot. All that's missing is a pitchfork and dancing flames."

So it wasn't the chance to move the family back from Los Angeles to his wife's home state that brought Pasdar to ABC Family?

"Oh, no, no, no, no. My wife wouldn't move back to Texas," Pasdar said earlier this month. "Texas was pretty hard on her."

Well, there's that.

"Yeah, there's that."

And then, as if reminded of the consequences of messing with Texas, he added, "My kids love their relatives [there] . . . but they're settled here. I'm flying home on weekends. Ideally, I'd like the show to come back [to L.A.] and film here."

It's their two sons, aged 10 and 7, that Pasdar said he had in mind when he got involved in "The Lying Game," a teen soap about separated-at-birth twins that stars Alexandra Chando as sisters who pull a switch on one twin's adopted family.

Not to be confused with the ABC Family's "Switched at Birth" or with "Ringer," the CW's new twins-who-switch-places show starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, it's from the same fiction-factory combo of writer Sara Shepard and Alloy Entertainment that's behind "Pretty Little Liars."

"It's nice to be part of some entertainment that's closer in reach to [his kids], in terms of what their interests are," he said, insisting they're not too young for the show. "They like the girls."

Pasdar, who joins the cast tonight in the show's second episode, seemed to be doing his best to avoid outright lies while maintaining an air of mystery about his "Lying Game" character, Alec Rybak, described by ABC Family only as "a divorced, single father whose personal demons leave him emotionally unavailable to his children."

He's also the godfather of one of the twins, and may be more involved in the show's central mystery than it first appears, he hinted. And as with many of the cable channel's teen-centered shows, parents aren't ignored.

"They're not cartoons. We're not shot from the knee down, you know, like the 'Charlie Brown' parents," he said.

He's not even the only actor on the show with a history of flying - or as he describes it, "hanging 60 feet off the ground on a little cable" - former "Supergirl" Helen Slater plays the adoptive mother of one of the twins.

"The Lying Game" might look like a walk on the mild side for an actor whose breakout TV role, in the short-lived 1996 Fox series "Profit," was as a devilishly handsome - and generally devilish - sociopath in a suit who spent his nights in a cardboard box.

Pasdar doesn't seem worried.

"Look, they hired me - this is not your general ABC Family show."