There are worse ways to spend Saturday afternoon than sitting in a park in Brentwood chatting with David James Elliott.
     Because he's in nearly every scene of his popular action-drama "JAG" on CBS, the hunky star couldn't fit an interview into his schedule until the weekend.
     "We work 14 to 16 hours a day on average," Elliott explains, sitting down on a bench under the only tree in the park. "The later the week goes, the worse it gets. You can work 18-hour days. It wipes out the weekends because you are tired. If you work until 7 a.m. [on Saturday], you sleep all day. It's brutal and relentless."
     Elliott, 37, had planned at one time to squeeze in a feature film gig during his summer, break, but he decided instead that he needed to spend quality time with his wife and 5-year old daughter.
     "We went away for a weekend and our daughter kept saying all weekend, 'I love you, Mommy.' My wife said, 'Why don't you tell Daddy that you love him?' She said, 'I don't know item very well.' I said, "You know, I think I better not work for a while.'"
     In "JAG," created by Donald P. Bellisario of "Magnum, P.I." and "Quantum Leap" fame, Elliott cuts a striking figure as Lt. Cmdr. Harmon Rabb Jr., a Navy lawyer in the Judge Advocate General corps. Catherine Bell plays his by-the-book partner, Maj. Sarah MacKenzie.
     The series has been one of television's Cinderella stories. Cancelled in 1996 after is first season on NBC, it was picked up by CBS, where it performed nicely on Friday evenings and then took off in the 8 p.m. Tuesday berth last season. It finished No. 36 among all series, with an average 12.9 million people tuning in each week.
     "You know when we were on NBC, the show didn't do bad," says Elliott, peering over his sunglasses. "We had a core audience, but it wasn't an NBC show at that time in their planning. When I came into this project and read it and auditioned, I thought it had great potential to really be a hit. I thought it was interesting and diverse. It's never just an action show or just a drama."
     The Toronto-born Elliott was a rock 'n' roller who tured to acting after reading "King Lear" in a class about the history of theater during his last year in high school.
     "I had never done any theater in high school, which actually worked to my benefit," he explains. "I didn't develop any bad habits. We read 'King Lear' out loud and I played Lear. The teacher said, 'You should be an actor.'"
     At that point, he says, he was becoming increasingly frustrated with music. "You can never rely on musicians," he says, laughing. "I quit high school at one point to make a go of it with this band and we kept breaking up. So I went back to school."
     Through his older brother he teamed that Ryerson Polytechnic Institute had the best acting school in Canada. "I said, 'I'll audition for that. If I don't get in, I'll find something else to do.'"
     Elliott had never even seen a play when he auditioned. He cribbed for the event by reading a book on how to audition. "They said I was a natural," he says modestly. "They thought they could take this raw talent with no bad habits. They cut kids every semester. Out of 32, there were seven of us left [at year's end]."
     He was still at school when he decided to attend an open audition for the well-regarded Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario. He was accepted but only stayed two seasons.
     "You can get stuck there," says Elliott. "lt's suppose to be a repertory theater. The idea being you start playing small notes and eventually you play Lear and Romeo and Hamlet. That's great in theory, but it never really happens."
     After appearing on the Canadian series "Street Legal" for four seasons, Elliott came to Hollywood in 1990, appearing notably as Carl the moving guy on "Seinfeld" and as Courtney Thorne-Smith's jock boyfriend who had a sex and alcohol addiction on "Melrose Place."
     But the actor Las gone through some tough times in Tinseltown. "I remember we got married and couldn't get work for a long time and we got pregnant. I was in debt. Thank God, I got 'The Untouchables' right in the nick of time. It all fell into place. All the debts got paid. I got to help my wife [with the baby]. It gave us some money."
     Elliott is a firm believer that everything happens for a reason. Last year he was cast as the evil American captain in "The Mask of Zorro," then fates intervened: CBS picked up more episodes of "JAG," making it impossible for him to do the film.
     "I was cast and working on the fencing and I couldn't do it," he says. It was a breakout role in an A-list feature. But there's an angel looking out for me. I got that role, so that means I can score in the feature world."
     Elliott pauses. "You know, when I look back, some of the best things that could have happened to me are the failures," he says. "I believe that nothing happens in God's world by mistake."
     Take "Melrose Place," for example. He says that when the Fox series was initially being cast, he was the prime candidate to play Jake.
     "But I fell flat on my face," he recalls. "I'd gotten a letter from my best pal telling me he didn't want to be my friend any more. Then someone crashed into my car on the was car on the way to the audition and totaled it. I was shaking [in the audition] and I fell apart. The casting people said, 'What the hell happened? It was yours going in and you blew it.'"
     "I'm so glad I didn't get that," Elliott says. "It probably would have been a dead end. I had always wanted to work with Bellisario. Something told me I was going to work with him."