"Welcome to the O.C., bitch!" No, we're not dissin' you, gentle readers. That's just the line Chris Carmack made infamous on Fox's teen soap, The O.C., where he played semi-reformed bad boy Luke Ward. While the popular 23-year-old actor has moved on, Luke-aholics aren't yet ready to let him leave his signature role behind. Sometimes, they really freak him out...

Carmack's based in Southern California, where TV viewers live right in the midst of show business. Surely they're sophisticated enough to tell him and his soap character apart? "You give them too much credit," Carmack grumbles to TV Guide Online. "I can't even tell you the amount of people I've met who think my name is Luke and that I do live in Orange County. So don't put it past anyone. If somebody calls me Luke and expects me to engage in conversation with them... Oh, those poor souls are mistaken."

Ouch! Well tonight, Carmack does another sexy badass turn in The Last Ride (8 pm/ET on USA Network). "This is quite a different character than Luke," he points out. "He's not a hotheaded, jealous boyfriend type. Granted, he's got his immaturities, but he's more of a soft-spoken, quiet rebel type."

And whereas The O.C. called for the occasional choreographed fistfight with Benjamin McKenzie — not exactly scary — Last Ride required some seriously perilous stunts. The film's producers were loath to let their star risk his pretty-boy hide, but he fought to keep a stand-in from doing too much of the fun stuff.

"There's always danger, no matter what the stunt is," he says. "The director saying 'If something goes wrong, you'll get hurt' is different from 'You're probably gonna get hurt, one way or another.' I'm not [about] to do a stunt where you drive off a loading dock in a car. You could hurt your spine doing it and break your back. These are the kind of stunts that I don't want to be part of!

"But there's another stunt where a car is speeding at three of us. The stunt driver brakes and skids out in front of us," Carmack notes. "They didn't want me to do the stunt, so they had a stunt double stand in — and my stunt double is a foot shorter than me. He was standing next to two actors that I had other scenes with, and in those, I was visibly taller than them! The incontinuity of it would just not be good. So I finally had to convince people to let me do it."

Speaking of iffy ventures, any chance Carmack will do Fox's upcoming O.C. spinoff series? "Would I do the spinoff? I don't know who's involved or what it's called or what it's about," he laughs. "I imagine if I haven't heard anything of the spinoff, they're probably not planning on having Luke in it."