Playing the Bad Good Guy : Michael Douglas enjoys his roles as ambivalent heroes.

NEW YORK — Remember the sequence from Adrian Lyne’s “Fatal Attraction” in which Michael Douglas’ character, left alone in his Manhattan apartment while his wife and son visit relatives, decides to spend a day with the woman he’d picked up the night before? They laugh, they talk, they eat, they make love, he tries to leave, she slits her wrists? In the morning, he comes home, and musses the sheets in his own bed, so that when his wife gets there later, she’ll think he’s been a good boy?

During the first preview screening of the film, Douglas and the filmmakers got a big surprise near the end of that sequence. “I remember when I jumped into the bed to ruffle the sheets, there was this laughter, and I was shocked,” Douglas recalls, a decade later. “I thought, ‘My God, they’ve already forgiven this guy!’ Whether it says something about me or the amount of adultery going on in the country, I’m not sure.”

Maybe it was a little of both. By the time “Fatal Attraction” was released in 1987, Douglas’ persona of a likably arrogant, ambivalent modern-day figure had been established through an incidental series of roles. He’d been the good cop in the popular TV series “Streets of San Francisco,” and the bad cop, a judicial vigilante in “Star Chamber.” He’d been a coldly calculating Broadway director in “A Chorus Line,” and a gruffly romantic hero in “Romancing the Stone.”

So, when Douglas’ Dan Gallagher ruffled the sheets in “Fatal Attraction,” audiences trusted him in a way they might not have if he were played by, say, Richard Gere. And we’ve been trusting him, or at least looking for the kernel of decency behind his characters’ moral lapses, ever since. Even in those instances, such as “Wall Street,” “The War of the Roses” and “Falling Down,” when it never quite emerges.

“I’m attracted to the ambivalence of people,” says Douglas, over danish and fruit juice in his suite at the Regency Hotel in Manhattan. “I don’t see people as saints or sinners. I see them somewhere in the middle. . . . In the context of a really good dramatic story, I guess I’ve had enough support to do roles that allow you to paint yourself in one direction, and hopefully have people discover something redeeming about you in the end.”

Which brings us to Douglas’ 24th screen character, the coolly dispassionate financial baron Nicholas Van Orton in David Fincher’s stylish thriller “The Game,” which opened Friday. Van Orton is “Wall Street’s” Gordon Gekko with a background. As a boy, he’d seen his depressed father celebrate his 48th birthday by leaping off the roof of the family manse, and he’s kept an icy distance from people ever since.

Now, with his own 48th birthday at hand, his security is threatened by grave self-doubts, feelings heightened by a terrifying game perpetrated on him by his estranged and unstable young brother, Conrad (Sean Penn). As a birthday gift, Conrad has enrolled Nicholas in Consumer Recreation Services, a company that provides life-experience thrills aimed at kick-starting the most frozen heart.

Van Orton is vaguely interested in the challenge, but once the game begins, he seems to be running for his life, and wondering what kind of game has people trying to kill you and strip you of both your fortune and your dignity.

“It’s tough playing a victim,” Douglas says. “Victims are so reactive. You can’t really initiate action, just react to it. And Van Orton is such a hard case, you think, ‘Oh, man, how are you going to pull this one off?’ It’s exciting playing this kind of dark ambivalent character.”

Douglas thinks his attraction to such characters may be inherited. His father, Kirk Douglas, did some of his best work playing morally ambivalent types, two of them--the boxer in “Champion,” the movie producer in “The Bad and the Beautiful”--leading to Oscar nominations. The younger Douglas received his lone nomination, and award, for playing his least redeemable character, Gordon Gekko.

“We seem to have an inherent interest in these people,” Douglas says, raking his fingers through his long hair. “Somebody nice tends to be bland. But where there’s dark, there’s conflict.”

Playing unappealing people is something few major stars attempt on anything like a regular basis. It’s a risk to test your own appeal against an audience’s inclination to associate you with the failings of your character. Maybe Douglas did inherit the urge from his father. As it’s pointed out to him, geneticists think they’ve linked risk-taking behavior to a gene that adventurers have clinging to their 11th chromosome.

“I’m so happy to hear it’s a gene, thank you,” he says, laughing. “My whole life, as a kid living in Connecticut, I used to be into high diving. We had a bridge about 75 feet high that we dove from. I raced Formula F cars for a while, I raced dragsters and motorcycles. . . . Something is secreted when you’re overcoming fear, and for me, the greatest rewards have been getting over stage fright. My first response to a script is a total anxiety attack. ‘How am I going to do this?’ It’s nice to tie it to a gene and not some dysfunctional family thing.”

Douglas, who will turn 53 in two weeks, says he would like to be acting in more than a movie a year, but he’s lucky to see even that many good scripts.

“Material-wise, the studios are in the worst shape I’ve ever seen. I thought last year was a little blip on the radar, in terms of the awards [to the independent films], but it’s not. There’s a real shortage of material. With costs going up, the ability to make an individual statement is getting harder and harder.”

Nevertheless, the optimist in Douglas (“I’m a lot more positive than some of the characters I play”) is planning to cut back on his involvement in his production company to concentrate on acting. Down the road, he says, he’ll try his hand at directing. In the meantime, he’s preparing for a starring role in Andy Davis’ “A Perfect Murder,” an adaptation of the Alfred Hitchcock thriller “Dial M for Murder.”