He'll mention his role as a man dying of AIDS in Playing By Heart or the nice guy boyfriend in the Jennifer Aniston vehicle Picture Perfect, and people will still bring up Sugar. "I really try not to do the same role twice, but it seems futile. People just seem to remember, 'Hey, you're that asshole from Jerry Maguire.' All right, I was."

It's an image Mohr might have a tougher time shaking this fall, when his new show, Action, premieres in the Fox Thursday night lineup. Mohr plays Peter Dragon, a slimy Hollywood producer whose only endearing relationship is with a prostitute he meets at a premiere party. The show is an especially mean-spirited satire of the movie industry, the flipside of Maguire's feel good sentimentality. Mohr himself can't avoid making the comparison. "It's kind of like the Larry Sanders Show with Bob Sugar from Jerry Maguire," he says.

Then again, Mohr has always been fighting for a chance to show what he can do. His first big gig was as a cast member of Saturday Night Live, a two year tenure that he calls "disappointing." Though he occasionally broke the surface with his dead-on impressions of Christopher Walken and Sean Penn, he was mostly a support player. His lack of reoccurring characters might have benefited his movie work in the long run, saving him from getting trapped in "Canteen Boy" hell, but it still smarts. "It all worked out, but in retrospect, I still kind of wish I would have had the opportunity to show off, I guess, and flex my muscles on camera a bit more."

Mohr still wants to stretch. He has mounted a campaign to let the producers of a film based on the life of jazz great Chet Baker know he's interested in the role, trying to bring it up in every interview. Ask him what attracts him to the role, and he'll rattle off Baker's bio - the drug use, the transformation from pinup star to ragged, empty shell, the fact that Baker lost all of his teeth and spent a year learning how to play trumpet without them. "You see pictures of Chet when he was in his twenties and you see pictures of him in his thirties -- it's a horrific change, what the drugs just did to his face and his body. Just the lines in his face and the greasy hair. I mean, this guy was a pin-up idol. He was a gorgeous man."

Mohr may not get the chance to play Baker, but he certainly has enough on his plate to keep him busy. When Cherry Falls comes out this fall, it will be the third film released this year with Mohr in a major role, including 200 Cigarettes and Go. That's one less than last year, when he made the rounds in Small Soldiers, Mafia!, and Playing By Heart, and provided the role of the parrot in Paulie. Just to keep things interesting, Mohr spends about a month out of the year with his first love, performing stand-up in comedy clubs across the country.