This is what happened when Nolan North ran into GENERAL HOSPITAL's Ingo Rademacher (Jax) at the ABC commissary:

North:"Hey! Cool it, you. I finally got someone to interview me."

Rademacher: "You're on PORT CHARLES, right? The title of the article should be, 'He works on the same lot as Ingo.'"

North: "Ingo Rademacher, ladies and gentlemen. And he's talking to me."

Rademacher: "I don't even know him."

North: "Let me tell you about Ingo. We were at a party the other night, he and I . . . I knew that would quiet him down."

North's lighthearted demeanor is quite a contrast to his alter ego, Dr. Chris Ramsey, who isn't exactly a barrel of laughs. Wearing the doc's designer suit and silk tie, with every hair in place, North looks the part of slick, self-serving Chris -- the man who sicced mobsters on Matt, paid Eve to break up Julie and Frank and slept with a supervisor's wife. But when the cameras stop rolling, the gregarious actor morphs into someone you might endearingly refer to as "a stitch."

Digest caught up with North on the set of PC on a Friday afternoon, and the guy just cracked up the cast and crew. In between scenes, North pretends to punch out Joseph Cali (ex-Bobby) as the hospital's elevator doors open, tries to convince Director Shelley Curtis that the black Lexus on the set is really his on loan, and jokingly chides the prop man for handing Cali a firearm. "You gave an Italian actor a gun?" he quips.

"With my personality, you either love me or hate me," North shrugs. "I got out of trouble as a kid by making my parents laugh. I'd use words like 'infraction,' which would crack them up." The jokes continued in college ("I won a contest and opened for George Carlin in front of 6,000 people."), and continue to this day. In fact, North recently became a member of The Groundlings, L.A.'s famous improvisational comedy group.

The humor subsides in North's dressing room. "The only one on the floor with a toilet," he proudly proclaims. Okay, the humor almost subsides. The posters in the actor's private sanctuary capture the essence of this complicated person. On one wall hangs a shot of the classic misunderstood one, James Dean. Adjacent to that is . . . . Beavis, of BEAVIS and BUTT-HEAD.

You'd think the outgoing North has always had acting in his blood, but in fact, only a shoulder injury while at the University of North Carolina kept him from pursuing a career in baseball. After attending graduate school at Emerson College, he got a taste of working in front of the camera when he was a reporter for a CNN affilliate in New Jersey. But what he really wanted to do was act. And his parents, who met while doing summer stock in New Hampshire, were hardly in a position to object . . . . right?

Wrong. All too aware of the pitfalls of an acting career, North's parents initially "freaked out" at their son's decision. "They weren't pleased," admits North. "But every two weeks, I'd get a letter from my mother saying, 'You hang in there and it will happen.'"

Seven months later, North was cast as PC's Chris, who is not, the actor insists, as seedy as fans believe he is: "Chris doesn't wear a black hat; he wears a chameleon hat. I don't think he has the Rex Stanton mentality where he'd murder someone to get what he wants. He must have a certain amount of ethics or he wouldn't be a doctor."

All that scheming has been keeping North so busy that he's had little time for a relationship. Currently content being single, the actor knows that what he wants down the line is to "find someone who's down-to-earth and doesn't care how much money I make or what I drive." For now, it's just as well that North is focusing on his career. Attributing his success to luck and sheer willpower, he remains adamant about what got him the job in the first place: "Hard work and preparation [laughs]. The eyebrows had nothing to do with it!"