Return to roots helped ground actor

PASADENA, Calif. — Eric Mabius is one actor who insists that you can go home again. In fact, he and his wife did. After his popular series Ugly Betty was canceled, Mabius was heartbroken.

“I just focused on my boys,” said the father of 5- and 7-yearold sons. “And I brushed myself off and picked myself up. And the big key to the evolution of feeling content is getting rid of everything. We sold everything in California and moved back to Massachusetts.”

Now he is starring on Signed, Sealed, Delivered, a sprightly original series on the Hallmark Channel. Mabius plays the chief of postal detectives in the deadletter office.

The team’s mission is to return errant mail to its intended recipients, sometimes years later. A missive can make a difference.

As it turns out, a canceled show can, too.

“I didn’t want (to live) the Catch-22,” Mabius said recently. “I have to work to pay for this big house. My kids don’t need a big house. They just need to be with their dad and their mom. That’s part of turning your focus outward as opposed to inward — and it’s not about your ego.”

Mabius has tried to keep ego at bay.

“You spend your life in an inward way as an actor,” he said, “but when you have children, you’re forced to turn your attention outward — so it makes you more complete as a person.”

When he and his wife, a

“When people asked me what I did, especially when I first moved to L.A., for quite a while I would say that I was a janitor, just to see their responses— because everyone said they were an actor.” — Eric Mabius, on the early days

ceramist, moved east, they bought a small farm situated behind a larger horse ranch.

“I cleared almost 2 acres, milled the wood at a friend’s mill, had the wood mill build a 36-foot woodshed, got nine cords up before the fall came, and took raw earth and tilled 25 tractor buckets of horse manure from the horse farm.”

The ability to redirect his life wouldn’t have been possible early in his acting career.

In those days, he waited tables and lived with a roommate.

“When people asked me what I did, especially when I first moved to L.A.,” he said, “for quite a while I would say that I was a janitor, just to see their responses — because everyone said they were an actor.”

He scored nicely early on when he co-starred in two independent films that were roundly praised at the Sundance Film Festival — Welcome to the Dollhouse and I Shot Andy Warhol.

He went to Los Angeles with his girlfriend with no intention of staying.

“We were visiting her mother in Santa Monica, and I said, ‘Let’s just not go back.’ . . . I just stayed. I thought: ‘Oh, I can do this. Maybe I can.’”

Scores of pilots followed. Most were not picked up. He eventually landed numerous guest spots; co-starred on The L Word, The OC and Ugly Betty; and made the series Outcasts in South Africa for British television.

Signed, Sealed, Delivered, he said, is a show he sees as a positive rendering in an oftennegative landscape.

Mabius, 43, is a perfectionist about his work.

“It’s a constant work-inprogress, the way you imagine a scene.”