Source: VMAN Magazine
Date: April 20, 2010

Matthew Bomer lands the lead in USA’s hit crime drama White Collar and puts all the bad boys away.

Matthew Bomer’s got guts. With his new USA Network series White Collar, the 32-year-old Texan enters the fraternity of actors able to pull off the slick cowboy criminal in a unique brand of coy cutesiness that only works because they’s manly men. Orson Welles did it in The Third Man; Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief; McQueen in The Thomas Crown Affair; and of course Clooney in the Ocean’s remake (his character cries while watching Oprah). These guys are rock-solid badasses, but romantic as the rain. Bomer’s White Collar character is a slick former confidence man who joins up with the FBI as a short of karmic sheriff now devoted to taking out his own kind. And the actor certainly finds inspiration in the right place.

“My role model is Paul Newman,” says Bomer. “For me, he embodied what it means to be successful at this. You can believe him as the romantic leading man, or he can be Cool Hand Luke – he can have the grit. I like characters who aren’t perfect, that’s what’s fun for me to play as an actor: the imperfections, the shadows.”