What’s a nice guy like Eric McCormack doing in a play like this?

The actor, best known for his role as the affable Will Truman on the television series Will and Grace, is playing an equally charming but much more sinister character in the cutthroat, profanity-riddled world of Glengarry Glen Ross, which opens at the Arts Club Theatre’s Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage next Wednesday (July 28).

None of the salesmen peddling worthless lots of Florida swampland in David Mamet’s 1984 play could exactly be described as a paragon of virtue, but McCormack’s Ricky Roma has a seductive charisma that makes him the most successful at this shady business.

“It feels almost 360 for me,” McCormack observes, sipping water on his rooftop patio overlooking Jericho Beach, “because pre–Will and Grace, I was always playing villains. I was always corporate-slick bad guys. I was the bad guy on Lonesome Dove for two years, so that was my thing.” Television, he reflects, “puts a stamp. You’re in people’s homes, and they can watch you at their leisure, and they can watch you a lot, and you become that guy. But this is the other side of me. It feels great to exercise it again.”

The idea for the project was hatched a couple of years ago, when McCormack, who divides his time between Los Angeles and Vancouver, was hanging out with some of his long-time actor friends here. “I think actors sitting around drinking beer inevitably come up with great ideas of things that they could do together and then inevitably the next morning wake up and go, ”˜I don’t even remember what we talked about,’?” says McCormack. “But in this case, we realized how we were the right age, we were the right group of people; there was no debate about who would play what. We did a reading just for fun and it stuck with us. We thought, ”˜Why let this be another one of those conversations that just goes nowhere?’?”

Mamet’s popular script, which was made into a star-studded Hollywood movie in 1992, hasn’t aged much in 25 years. “I think because it’s about the essence of men,” observes McCormack. “And that, unfortunately, hasn’t changed in a very long time,” he laughs. “But what I do love about it is that idea that these guys need each other, they need to have each other’s best interests in mind, and in the same moment, they’ll turn around and take what you’ve got. It’s about men as hunters and gatherers, it’s about how we measure our success in money and in other people’s success, how we relish others’ failures—that’s perennial.”

McCormack also sees a distinctly contemporary parallel: “The concept of the real-estate salesmen selling swampland in Florida—I mean, we just had major organizations doing it in the United States, selling virtually nothing. So that has come around again as a very pertinent topic.”

McCormack relishes the irony of playing such unscrupulous characters with a group of old friends, including Bart Anderson, a Ryerson Theatre School classmate whom he’s known for 30 years, and Vincent Gale, who was part of the initial conversation that launched the project. “The play is about how men stab each other in the back,” he observes, “and it was born of guys having each other’s back.

“And it’s not like we’re the first people that ever said, ”˜Hey, we’re friends, let’s do a play together!’?” he says. “I think it’s just how long we’ve known each other and how in a lot of ways our various roles echo our roles in life. And my buddy, John Pyper-Ferguson, who’s in the play with us, he came over last night for dinner. My mother-in-law said, ”˜So how are you enjoying the play?’ He said, ”˜I get to tell my old buddy Eric to fuck off five ways from Sunday every night. It’s fantastic!’ That’s what it comes down to,” he says with a laugh. “It’s fun to be able to tell friends to fuck off. And get paid.”