LOS ANGELES (AP) — In a recent episode of the medical drama “House”, when a tall, imposing man showed up at the clinic with a problem in an embarrassing place, Dr. Gregory House displayed his customary lack of sympathy.The big man, Detective Michael Tritter, didn’t like that.

Consequently, for the next few weeks, the brilliant but crotchety medic will be facing a really tough nemesis. The annoyed cop, having observed House popping pills, investigates just how addicted the doc is to pain killers, and whether he’s obtaining them legally.

After House was “pretty mean”, all Tritter really wanted was an apology. “But he doesn’t get one and ... his alarm goes off,” says David Morse, who plays Tritter. “He’s met too many drug addicts in his life. He starts pulling the thread, and that leads to a big problem not just with Dr. House, but in the hospital.”

In other words, expect an arrest.

At six feet, four inches, Morse is a couple of inches taller and not so slender as Hugh Laurie, who plays Gregory House on the hit Fox series airing on Tuesdays at 10 p.m. Bermuda time.

“We wanted someone with the strength and presence to really stand up to House ... David’s presence is felt when he’s not even speaking,” says executive producer Katie Jacobs, praising Morse’s powerful reticence. “In the moments when he’s silent, his face is so expressive, and he can do so much with just his stature.”

Reticence is not quite as effective during interviews, but Morse does his polite best to be chatty as he talks outside a midtown cafe.

Morse doesn’t live in Hollywood. He moved his family to Pennsylvania after the Northridge earthquake in 1994. He and his wife, actress Susan Wheeler Duff, have a daughter and twin sons, now high-school age.

From 2002 to 2004, he was able to stay close to home, starring in the CBS drama “Hack”, filmed and set in Philadelphia. He played the title character, Mike Olshansky, a disgraced cop turned taxi driver trying to right wrongs during his search for redemption.

These days, like many family guys, Morse tries to find work that doesn’t take him away from home for too long.

Recently, he played a very tough cop in the action movie “16 Blocks”. Upcoming, he’ll be seen in the independent drama “Hounddog” as the father of a young rape victim, portrayed by Dakota Fanning. He just completed working on “Disturbia”, a murder mystery in the “Rear Window” genre in which he plays “one of the significant neighbours”.

Morse, 53, was on vacation with his family in Maine when he was asked to play Tritter. He admits he hadn’t watched “House”, but the instant response from family and friends was so positive he felt he had no choice but to accept.

“They just went nuts,” he says, “and couldn’t believe I was being asked to do that show and said I’d got to do it, because he (Laurie) was amazing, and the show was amazing.”

Morse’s only hesitation was that he didn’t want Tritter to be just a bad guy, because as an actor, he’s always wary of stereotyping.

“I’ve played a number of bad guys recently and I really didn’t want to play some bad guy to Hugh’s hero,” he says. But the producers quickly assured him that “they don’t even think of House as a hero ... and they didn’t want a bad guy.” What they were after was someone “as focused and as smart as House, so it’s a real force he comes up against.”

Morse starred from 1982-88 as Dr. Jack (Boomer) Morrison in NBC’s “St. Elsewhere”. In those days, medical series weren’t as explicit and gory as they are today.

“We didn’t have all that inside-the-body stuff, done by computers. It would have been incredibly expensive to do then. There was some surgery, but it was a big deal to occasionally have a shot when you saw a needle going in,” the actor says.

After playing “the nice, innocent, earnest, sensitive guy” on “St. Elsewhere”, Morse, of course, got offered similar roles.

“I just basically made the decision, I didn’t care if there was any money in the role or not. I had to find roles that were different from what I had been doing.” The 1990 crime movie “Desperate Hours”, accomplished that, but probably led to him being known as good at playing bad guys.

Actually, Morse says he prefers playing characters that “bridge two worlds” — such as the crime solving cabbie in “Hack” or the prison guard in 1999’s “The Green Mile” — “decent characters with darker more dangerous qualities.”