“We had to gay it up,” Andreas explains of the notorious West Village sex emporium. “So we moved the female dildos, the clitoris things, to the back.” Then they slapped up some studly porn posters and got to work on those scenes, filming from midnight to 9am over three days and, Andreas says, initially shocking the straight production assistant with the array of sex toys. “But after a couple days in there we were all playing around with everything,” he says with a laugh.

Andreas, 35, has been pursuing a career in film ever since he was 20, when he left his hometown of Tibro, in Sweden, to study acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York. What followed were years of hard work and small rewards, including bit parts in films like Little Children (2006), in which he played a cop, and Woody Allen’s Celebrity (1998), in which he portrayed a stylist. “He was very much like his character,” he says of Allen, imitating the legend’s directing style by hunching over and crazily swirling his hands over his head. Andreas soon decided to teach himself filmmaking, through various books and seminars, and started writing his first screenplay at 25, thinking perhaps it could be a vehicle for his acting, and catapult him into greater roles. “You know, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon,” he says with an aw-shucks smile. “It seemed like the way to go.”

He shot his first short in 2001 (“I won’t show that to anyone!” he says) and then made the very low-budget ($30,000) Slutty Summer, another New York tale, this one of gay waiters and their various sexual exploits. It was the film that first launched the character of Luke, who was carried over into A Four Letter Word despite being roundly criticized by some viewers as being too much of a queer caricature. “My characters are based on real people, and there are people who are like that,” says Andreas. “Plus, we find out he has all these other sides to him. It’s so easy to dismiss people.”

Archer says he was proud that such an over-the-top character was the lead, and that he was given depth in the end. “He’s always a punch line, this kind of person,” Archer, 33, says, adding that the portrayal was not such a stretch for him. “I have a reputation as a party boy,” he admits. “Just last week I lost my coat at a club and was running around outside in my tight titty top at 4am!”

As Andreas moves forward, he says, he plans to continue pursuing an acting career while still making films; his latest, a “darker” gay drama called Between Love & Goodbye, is currently in post-production. “Gay films have a limited audience, and I do want to make mainstream films also,” he says. “It’s just that so far, the stories I’ve been interested in telling have been gay.”

A Four Letter Word opens Mar 28, 2008, at Clearview Chelsea Cinema.