Smeared with fake blood. Alec Baldwin shakes hands, saying, "Hi, I'm playing Medea," and if his gag is slightly manic, it's small wonder: The blood is for his role as a crazed ex-con in Miami Blues, his ninth movie in only three years. As he tensely smokes ("I really smoke very little") in his Miami dressing room. Alec admits to being a workaholic, then talks of quitting films altogether to live alone on Long Island. Though he's just thirty-one, and ruggedly handsome, you note a certain fatigue in his ice-blue eyes, an edge to his self-deprecating humor.

"This business can crumple you like a beer can," Alec asserts, his voice grainy, satirical. "It'll suck you dry. Workdays, I've got nothing left over for anybody work is all I do. After shooting, I'm a total vegetable, all I want is input: TV, food, sleep."

He has made it clear that he'd like to have something "left over" for soap actress Holly Gagnier, whom he's been seeing "off and on" for four years, "but I've found that no matter how much I want to be with Holly, my work takes me away from her—it conspires against a normal relationship. We try for a few months, then I say, 'I can't do this anymore.' All the traveling I have to do, all the separations . . . but I'm the one who chooses to work all the time."

This from a man who thought no one would ever pay him to act. A native of Massapequa, Long Island, Alec played high-school sports and got good grades. "Acting was only a vague dream fed by Marion Brando movies," he says. Enrolled in prelaw at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C., he took one acting class, which led him to transfer to New York University's drama department and to study with Method guru Lee Strasberg. At his first audition, he was hired to play embezzler Billy Aldrich in day time TV's The Doctors, and when an agent persuaded him to try Hollywood, he was instantly cast as the demented preacher, Joshua Rush, in Knots Landing. After a season and a half, the movies called: In She's Having a Baby, Alec was a philandering best friend; in Beetlejuice, a dizzy, dead husband; in Married to the Mob, a horny hit man; in Talk Radio, a greedy producer; in Working Girl, a cheating boyfriend; and in the just-released Great Balls of Fire, he portrays the young Jimmy Swaggart.

"I would now like to play something with a little humanity in it." Alec's laugh is sudden, infectious. "I'm constantly offered Mafioso types, psychotic convenience-store robbers, or the best friend who screws the lead's wife, and I've done those." (One major upcoming role may change all that. Alec will star in the screen version of Tom Clancy's best-selling espionage thriller The Hunt for Red October, due out in December. In it, he'll play Jack Ryan, a CIA agent.)

Why has he been cast as he has? Of course, he's an excellent character actor and, admittedly, a bit eccentric off-camera. In New York, for instance, he spurns glitzy health-club workouts to box in a grimy gym just off Times Square. You'd suppose that a fledgling star would reside in Hollywood or Manhattan, ready to take lunch with directors, but Alec's Long Island roots are important to him—"I grew up surrounded by Mafia culture, and people actually wanted you to think they were 'connected' "—and now he has bought a home in Ama-gansett, on the Island's east end, where he intends to live year-round, entirely spurning the glittery arts-and-show-biz summer set.

"Out there, it's like I'm in Fort Apache. I used to have to be where the action is; now, I just naturally retreat from crowds." Alec does stay in touch with Knots Landing friends Lisa Hartman and Joan Van Ark, "but I cannot live in Hollywood, where, as Joan Didion wrote, the code is 'I'll pretend you are what you think you are if you pretend I'm what I think I am.' " In Tinsel Town, Alec did get offered lots of TV after Knots Landing, "but I did not want to become one more former NewYork actor driving a Jaguar and making thirty grand a week for a series. I moved back east so that I wouldn't get tempted."

In 1987, Alec found time, between pictures, to make his Broadway debut in Joe Orton's Loot, for which he won the prestigious Theatre World Award, and he wants to do another play. He also likes the idea of marriage and fatherhood and believes buying his Amagansett house and working on its remodeling will help put permanency in his personal life. "In a relationship, long-distance phone calls, gifts, flowers, don't count. People want you there every day. Oh, you may find someone who can subsist happily on a diet of crumbs and water, in terms of the time you give them—but then they object, and you become incensed. 'Why won't you feast on crumbs anymore, what's changed?' "

Without question, Alec's speaking of his Holly Gagnier involvement, though he doesn't name her. When you ask him what he looks for in a lady, he answers slowly, seriously: "When you're young, you make a list often things you want in a partner, and you look for someone who gives you those ten—the quantity is important. Get a bit older, you find someone who gives you seven of the ten, and you go with that person. When you're still older, you get down to three things you must have, and you go with the person who gives you less but gives you those three things in spades."

For Alec, that person's "being there" is one of the things; the other two are private, and you don't press him. But you do wonder, for anyone so work-obsessed, what happens if his present promise doesn't pan out? What if, suddenly, the movie roles stop coming, and Broadway doesn't beckon again?

"Going back to TV wouldn't bother me," Alec replies, doubtfully. "It's a job. People come up to me now and say,'You've got the world by the tail. Everything's going to happen for you.' They never just say, 'You're going to have a nice career, do good work.' " Again, Alec's laugh is infectious. "It's 'You're going to be an icon!' But if you even begin to think that way, you lose your mind. What about all the actors who were zooming along on a high-speed elevator to the fortieth floor, and then, on thirty-nine, the elevator started down again?"

Of course, a descent would give Alec the breather that romance requires. But earlier, he said, "I'm as ambitious as Napoleon," and when you think of Alec Baldwin, that's what you remember.