England to 'Arcadia,' and Back

"I'm not God," quipped Andrew Ableson, who instead played a snooty fashion editor on CBS' "Joan of Arcadia". If the show is renewed, though, he hopes to return, and, since the show often has the Deity speak through various random guest stars to Amber Tamblyn's lead, "Who knows?" Ableson said. "Anyone could turn into God at any moment."

The consumptively handsome Englishman (who clearly inherited some of his father's looks) has been on the West Coast for 9 years, and though most of his work on stage and screen has been in his native tongue, so to speak, he often auditions with a neutral American accent, as he did for the "Joan" part. It wasn't until he was hired and was chatting with producers in his everyday accent -- which he places as "very contemporary, sort of middle-class London" -- that they upgraded the part to English.

The accent gets him a lot of voiceover work (he's the resident baddie, Valmont, on Jackie Chan's animated show), and it landed him a lark of a role on "The Bold and the Beautiful" as Rafael of London, a jet-setting stylist who did a makeover on longtime lead Susan Flannery (which "B&B" diehards knew was in fact the long-overdue shedding of a blonde wig for Flannery's naturally short silver hair).

Closer to Ableson's heart is a partnership with a fellow expatriate, TV director Sarah Pia Anderson, to develop playwright Mark Ravenhill's "Some Explicit Polaroids" into a feature film -- the first adaptation allowed by the bad-boy Brit scribe. It probably helped cinch the deal that Ableson starred in definitive West Coast productions of Ravenhill's "Shopping & F***ing". "Anyone could turn into God," indeed.