Entertainment

Sigourney’s boy toy

Showing off isn’t too much of a stretch for Billy Magnussen in “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike.” Christopher Durang’s comedy also gives him plenty of hands-on experience with Sigourney Weaver.

Showing off isn’t too much of a stretch for Billy Magnussen in “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike.” Christopher Durang’s comedy also gives him plenty of hands-on experience with Sigourney Weaver.

Showing off isn’t too much of a stretch for Billy Magnussen in “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike.” Christopher Durang’s comedy also gives him plenty of hands-on experience with Sigourney Weaver. (
)

Showing off isn’t too much of a stretch for Billy Magnussen in “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike.” Christopher Durang’s comedy also gives him plenty of hands-on experience with Sigourney Weaver. (
)

Buff, blond Billy Magnussen says he has the best job in town: “They’re paying me to make out with Sigourney Weaver and pinch David Hyde Pierce’s nipples!”

He does both in “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” Christopher Durang’s Chekhovian mash-up of a play. In it, within the cozy confines of Lincoln Center’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater, he even strips to his briefs and shakes his booty in the faces of the folks in the front row.

So far no one’s complained.

“I’ve had people, like, bongo-drumming on my butt,” he says happily. “Sometimes I do two people at once!”

His co-stars couldn’t be prouder.

“The wonderful thing is that he can play someone as ridiculous as Spike without being ridiculous himself,” says Weaver, whose cougar character, Masha, brings Spike home to meet her siblings. “Billy invented all the nipple-tweaking and motorboating and throwing me in the air. None of that’s in the script!”

Pierce credits Magnussen’s “ingenuity and devious mind” for taking a cue and running with it — usually half-naked and hellbent toward the audience.

“There’s a stage direction that says ‘He strips down to his underwear,’ ” Pierce says. “There are a lot of different ways to do that, but Billy does it his way . . . It’s a wonderful, explosive, athletic performance, but always under control.”

At lunch the other day, the object of their affection showed up in a long-sleeve henley T-shirt, chewing gum, a Leo DiCaprio-esque shock of hair spilling over his forehead. Magnussen, 27, has the hearty air of someone who grew up yodeling in the Alps. Or tipping cows in Wisconsin.

In fact, he was born in Queens — Woodhaven — and grew up in Georgia, the son of a bodybuilder-turned-carpenter and a personal-trainer mom. His dad used to take him to the gym when he was a kid, urging him to “play with some weights.” His mom put him on a strict diet after he bulked up to play a psychopath in the film “Twelve.”

“I just wanted everything tight to play Spike,” says Magnussen, who lost 20 pounds subsisting on strawberries, coffee, raw vegetables and pickles. And yes, he “constantly, constantly” works out: a former jock — football, wrestling, soccer, hockey, lacrosse — he took an acting class in high school only because he ripped a hamstring and couldn’t take gym.

It was love at first “Grease.”

“All the girls are in theater,” he says, removing his gum and digging into some beef stew. “And they’re fun girls!”

But no, he laughs, blushing, “I’ve never been a boy toy!” Underwear model? “I’d love for Calvin Klein to show up, but I never really went looking.”

In fact, he’s that rare breed: an actor who, after graduating from the North Carolina School of the Arts, seemed to have skipped waiting tables and went straight to the stage, with a few stumbles.

“My first job ever, I got fired from,” he says. It was a summer festival for new playwrights, and Magnussen — “new and nervous” and by his own measure “never a good reader” — ad-libbed all his lines. Which, apparently, isn’t what they want at a festival of new plays.

He rebounded quickly, though, landing a role in a Broadway revival of “The Ritz” that required little more of him than looking studly in a towel. One soap opera and several films later, he auditioned — five times — for Spike.

Compared with his audition for “Twelve” — when he leaned over and licked the casting director’s face — his Spike tryouts were rather tame. “There was a piano in the room, and I started playing it,” he recalls. “And I don’t play piano.”

But he does play well with others.

“What’s really nice,” Weaver says, “is he’s such a gorgeous young man, but he’s never full of himself. He’s a very centered, kind, responsible sweetheart, and we all adore him.”

Adds Pierce, gravely: “I’ve learned a lot from him . . . Then again, it’s been so long since I waggled my butt, I may not be the best person to ask.”