Will Everyone Still Love Raymond?

For a guy who lived in his parents' basement until he was almost 30, Ray Romano is surprisingly ambitious. It's raining pretty hard, but Romano really wants to do well at the AT&T; Pebble Beach National Pro-Am in two days, so he's going to finish all nine holes. Slowly. The closest he comes to saying something printable about his golf game in the two-hour, self-hatred-fueled, 21-over-par tour of Burbank's Lakeside Golf Club is while blowing an easy putt "Everybody sucks." If you, like much of America, enjoy seeing Romano beleaguered by his parents, wife and kids on his TV show, you should see him on the golf course.

Romano is Jackie Gleason with updated wife-management techniques, having replaced threats of violence with pathetic groveling. While Romano's superego is sensitive 21st century husband, his id is pure '50s. He just wants to eat, golf, watch sports, have sex and keep his wife from getting mad at him. Romano, 46, is even more uber-guy than his Ray Barone character on CBS's Everybody Loves Raymond . He likes to gamble so much that he placed a Super Bowl bet on how long Beyonce's rendition of the national anthem would take (thanks to some overhead planes and a really long brave, he made the over). His sharp take on contemporary manhood has created the No. 2-ranked sitcom for the past four years, according to Nielsen Media Research. And yet Raymond gets cited by sitcom writers as a favorite alongside the much edgier Simpsons and Curb Your Enthusiasm because of its structure and character definition. For all that, Romano acts like a man who is more comfortable with failure. After he takes 10 shots on a par four, he becomes probably the first celebrity to actually write down the 10. "Jack Nicholson," says celebrity golf pro Steve DiMarco, "would have taken a four on that one."

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The problem and comedic blessing of being self-deprecating, honest and ambitious is that you're always in a panic. Right now, the panic is that he has ruined his movie career before it even starts this weekend with his first film, Welcome to Mooseport . People, he's sure, are out to David Caruso him before he even gets going. "You think everybody loves me? Go on the Internet," he says over clubhouse mini-burgers dipped in a mixture of Tabasco and ketchup. "This is why we have the Internet. To keep your head straight. I know where to go to find people trashing me. My wife has a website about me."

Romano is even afraid of ruining the unruinable. He and creator Phil Rosenthal will decide whether to shoot a ninth season of Everybody Loves Raymond , depending on whether he and his writers can, in the next few weeks, come up with six solid, fresh story ideas. He should, if Seinfeld is any indication, be entering the relaxing children's book writing part of his career. And while he is indeed writing Raymie, Dickie and the Bean: Why I Love and Hate My Brothers with his two brothers, he is hoping to launch a career as a leading man in films.

This is not always an easy task for sitcom stars. This spring's upcoming independent ensemble comedy Eulogy , in which Romano plays a sleazy son arguing over his father's inheritance opposite Zooey Deschanel and Hank Azaria, got less than stellar reviews at Sundance. But this week's romantic comedy Welcome to Mooseport is where he really fears he's going to be judged. "What if it just does abysmally? Is that a word? What if it's like my golf game today? What if people not only don't go what if they protest?" he worries. "It's a good movie, but it's not knock-down funny. It wound up being more of a sweet movie. I already told the cast [of Raymond], 'I'm inviting you to the premiere, but I'm politely asking you not to come.' I don't need the pressure of going to work the next day and them making fun of me."

The reviewers, he's sure, are going to take him apart. "I'm the highest-paid a_______ on TV. That builds contempt. I'd hate me," says Romano, who makes $40 million a year in salary alone from the show. He took a lot of time choosing his first movie role (not counting the voice of the mammoth in the animated Ice Age ). His main concern was finding a character close enough to his sitcom persona that he could nail it and please his TV audience but still different enough to be interesting. In Mooseport , a formulaic romantic comedy (he's going to be right about the critics), he plays a plumber in Maine who runs for mayor against the former U.S. President (Gene Hackman), who is stealing his girlfriend (Maura Tierney). "People will say it's not much of a stretch, but I think he's different. He doesn't have any gray in his hair," he says. "To buy me as a romantic lead, we needed special effects."

Mooseport's director, Donald Petrie ( Miss Congeniality , Grumpy Old Men ), says Romano often redid scenes to knock the Ray Barone out of his performance. "Where he was at his most awkward was if a scene required him to be emotional or tender or kiss," says Petrie. Romano, in fact, names kissing as the area he most hopes to improve upon. "I wanted to kiss another woman. Morally. Without stepping out of the boundaries of the marriage I'm committed to. So when I got into the TV show, I found a legal loophole." If the screen career goes well, he says, he will give dramatic roles a shot. "Kissing a woman dramatically is better than comedically. I think you get tongue when it's dramatic."