No rest for the Weary

‘Animal Kingdom’ star dishes on working with Barkin

J ake Weary is only 27 — but he’s already quit show business once.

When he was 14 years old, the “Animal Kingdom” star had a role on “As the World Turns” as gay teenager Luke Snyder. “I was basically flunking out of school because I was working three days out of the week,” he says. “My parents were like, ‘We should take you off the show.’ The crazy part is that right when that happened my character on the show was struggling with his sexuality.”

The now-defunct CBS soap wanted to ramp up Snyder’s storyline, trotting out the character as “the youngest gay man on television,” but Weary would have had to work five days a week — allowing no time to play sports (or anything else). “I ended up leaving the show. I wanted to be like a normal kid,” he says.

Weary’s mother is daytime doyenne Kim Zimmer (“Guiding Light”) — and, when he left “ATWT,” one of the soap fanzines denounced his mother as a homophobe. “We felt violated. It was exploitative,” Weary says. “People thought they could rile her up and get her to say something.”

[Weary grew up in show business, had a cameo in one of his mother’s “ridiculous storylines” and took a very young Hayden Panettiere, who was on “Guiding Light” from 19982000, as his date to the Daytime Emmys when he was 13.]

Now, 12 years after quitting the soap, Weary’s “Animal Kingdom” character, Deran Cody, is also struggling with his sexuality. Deran is one in a family of superannuated boy gangsters micro-managed by their mother, Janine (Ellen Barkin), a bulletproof blonde who’s never far from a tumbler of vodka. Only Deran’s brother Craig (Ben Robson) officially knows Deran is gay and that he has an on and off boyfriend. That’s about to change, in a pivotal scene in Episode 4.

“Deran comes out to his mother in a very aggressive, volatile way because she’s manipulating him in her emotionally incestuous way,” Weary says. “And it’s driving him insane.”

Weary says the Bronx-born Barkin lives up to her reputation as a tough customer. “She’s kind of like my mom in that she doesn’t take any s--t from anybody,” he says. “She doesn’t feel like she has to edit herself. It’s risky. She’s a hard worker. You cannot slip with her. She’ll let you know.”

He starts blushing, as if afraid Barkin will find out he’s talking about her. But he really feels guilty because he hasn’t paid his costar a social call at her New York apartment. “She takes that very personally,” he says. “I’m going to have to do that ... or she’ll stop talking to me.”

Weary lives in the Highland Park section of LA, east of Echo Park where he “has a lot of pool parties and barbecues with my friends.” The vagaries of show business hasn’t left a lot of time for dating. Weary ended a two-and-a-half year relationship last August, admitting he didn’t talk to his ex for two weeks while filming the forthcoming film “Tomato Red.”

“I was completely immersed, emotionally, physically,” he says. “Everything was about this role. It destroyed our relationship.”

“Animal Kingdom” 9 p.m. Tuesday on TNT