“I COULD only hope and pray that I could have a career like Mark Wahlberg,” said Kellan Lutz, the abdominally gifted young actor whose recent career highlights include the roles of ancillary vampire sibling and yet another Freddy Krueger victim.

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• Times Topic: Professional Models

 

ABS AND ADS Kellan Lutz, already a film (including “Twilight”) and television actor, during a Calvin Klein shoot.

 

Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images

KLEIN TIME At a Calvin Klein men’s collection show in Manhattan earlier this year, from left, Lee Pace, Jared Leto, Chace Crawford, Ryan Phillippe, Mr. Lutz and Mehcad Brooks, also an underwear model.

 

New Line Cinema and Warner Brothers Pictures..

CINEMATIC Mr. Lutz in “A Nightmare on Elm Street.” He has three films in production.

Who wouldn’t?

Though it has been seven years since he went from working as a shirtless greeter at an Abercrombie & Fitch store in Los Angeles to a cover model on one of its raunchy catalogs, and from a bit part on “The Bold and the Beautiful” to recurring eye candy in “90210” and “Twilight,” it will not come as much of a surprise that Mr. Lutz is still best known as the guy with a washboard stomach who is not on Team Jacob. That is not to imply that Mr. Lutz lacks for acting talent or broader ambition but rather to note just how far an actor can go by adhering to the simple example set forth by Mr. Wahlberg — the School of Marky Mark, if you will. The single lesson is success by six-pack.

After all, long before Mr. Wahlberg was to become an Academy Award-nominated actor for his role in “The Departed” and a producer of the HBO series “Entourage,” he was a terrible rapper, an obnoxious loudmouth and, quite possibly, the greatest underwear model the world has ever known. It is no wonder he is seen as a role model to Mr. Lutz, who is among the latest crop of actors and athletes to star in a campaign for Calvin Klein. In 1992, when Mr. Wahlberg’s ads first appeared, with a billboard in Times Square and commercials co-starring a topless Kate Moss, he went from a rap star with a strong MTV fan base to an international sensation with workout videos, a picture book and a catch phrase to match his meteoric, if somewhat embarrassing in retrospect, success: “Pow!”

“It’s a really cool thing,” Mr. Lutz, 25, said last week during a phone interview from the set of one of at least three films he has in production, including a romantic comedy withMandy Moore and a gladiator movie with Samuel L. Jackson. The campaign, he said, had been something he had wanted since he started modeling as a teenager, and so it was somewhat humbling to drive through Los Angeles in March and finally see his own torso reflected on a billboard on Sunset Boulevard.

The coy, racy posing and lopsided grin were meant to be evocative of Mr. Wahlberg’s original ad, photographed by Herb Ritts, which was a huge hit. It was also controversial because of Mr. Wahlberg’s remarks and stage antics that were interpreted as homophobic, leading to protests outside Mr. Klein’s offices. He was later shown in an image grabbing his crotch, and in commercials rapping about the underwear: “I gotta wear dese during my shows cause if I just wear regular briefs, they get stretched out.” Mr. Klein thought they were a riot.

Mr. Klein once said of his advertisements that he had never intended to be provocative. “It’s that we’re trying to be exciting,” he said. His underwear campaigns have been a topic of public fascination since 1982, when he first introduced an image of Tom Hintnaus, an Olympic athlete, photographed on the Greek island of Santorini with an obvious focus on the bulge in his white briefs. It stopped traffic in Times Square. The photograph, by Bruce Weber, was cited by American Photographer magazine as one of “10 Pictures That Changed America.” Mr. Hintnaus seemed almost frustrated by his fame, telling The Los Angeles Times, “I worked so hard to be the best pole vaulter in the world and I ended up being more well known for putting on a pair of briefs.”

Subsequent campaigns included the gold medalists Karch Kiraly and Steve Timmons, the models Michael Bergin and Joel West (whose spread-eagled stance in 1995 offended even Linda Wachner, then the head of Calvin Klein’s underwear licensee), Ed Flory and Albert Delegue and the actor Antonio Sabato Jr., some of whom were relative unknowns at the time. Nearly three decades later, even since Mr. Klein retired from the company and during a time when visible abdominal muscles are hardly a rarity in advertising, the job of Calvin Klein underwear model retains a surprisingly potent allure. Landing a Calvin campaign is the male modeling equivalent of appearing in a Victoria’s Secret fashion show.

“It is simple: whoever represents Calvin becomes a star,” said Sam Shahid, the art director who worked with Mr. Weber and Mr. Klein on many of the early campaigns. “What’s amazing is the longevity this has had.”

The work that goes into a single campaign image is considerable — Mr. Lutz worked with a trainer for weeks to bulk up his chicken legs, gave up candy and thought back to all he had learned from his earlier modeling days to capture a look, he said, that suggested he could just as well have been walking down a street, holding a smile and having a conversation with someone without thinking, “Gosh, I’m in my underwear.”

“You have to look like you enjoy what you’re selling,” Mr. Lutz said. “It doesn’t look that hard, but a lot of people don’t think about what goes into it.”

The effect, as intended, was almost immediate.

“I won’t lie about it,” he said. “I started getting text messages and calls from producers, and when I went into meetings for scripts, people were always commenting on the billboard and asking for pictures for their daughters.”

Looking at the history, it is sometimes striking to see the connections among the models. Most have gone on to acting careers, and two appeared in the same film. Two (Mr. Wahlberg and Djimon Hounsou) have since been nominated for Oscars. At least three have appeared in Janet Jackson videos. Almost all the rest have at least scored minor roles in films and on TV, particularly soap operas, like Mr. Sabato, who was on “Melrose Place” and “The Bold and the Beautiful.” Of the current cast of four, only Mr. Lutz can be said to have markedly improved name recognition (he is the only one who will be appearing at the Macy’s Herald Square store on Saturday to promote the briefs), though that could just as well be because two of the others are foreign athletes (Fernando Verdasco and Hidetoshi Nakata) and the fourth, Mehcad Brooks, of “True Blood,” does not actually portray a vampire on that show. And pity the unfortunate model from a 1991 campaign, photographed by Mr. Weber from the side with his face twisted away from the camera. He is listed in the company archives as “unknown male.”

And what of Mr. Hintnaus? In 1994, a headline appeared in The Houston Chronicle: “Model makes a splash at River Oaks event.” The model was Mr. Hintnaus, who took a big swan dive into a pool as the finale of the River Oaks International Tennis Tournament and Tootsies fashion show. It was not exactly a career highlight, but Mr. Hintnaus was a sport.

He had continued to compete, in the 1984 Olympics for Brazil and then in South Africa. He grossed about $100,000 over six years for the Calvin Klein image, he said, but the company eventually cropped his head off the image on its underwear boxes and stopped paying him. He tried acting in Hollywood, but eventually became a contractor. He is now 52, living in Honolulu, building docks for private homes and continuing to compete as a pole-vaulter.

“I’m still in shape,” he said. “Maybe they’ll bring me back for an old guy campaign.”