TAYLOR KITSCH is showing off an advance copy of the January issue of Men’s Health magazine. On the cover, he’s posing shirtless, his chiseled frame and laser stare in prime form. He likes what he sees.

“I feel like I cut and pasted myself onto the cover,” said Mr. Kitsch, the confident but not cocky model turned actor, on a recent Saturday evening at the Driskill Hotel. “When I was 21, 22, I went up and introduced myself,” he said, “and told them I would be on the cover.” The magazine’s focus on fitness spoke to him, and now, at 25, he is their youngest-ever cover boy.

Mr. Kitsch plays Tim Riggins on “Friday Night Lights,” a smartly photographed and musically buoyant television drama about the religion of football in small-town Texas (it’s based on the film and book by the same name). The show, which is filmed here, has become a critic’s darling and was just extended through May.

“Riggs,” as he is known on the show, is the embattled bad boy girls yearn to fix. When he’s not seducing his best friend’s girlfriend or drinking away loneliness, he’s striving for inner peace. A similar tug of war exists for Mr. Kitsch: heartthrob versus thespian.

“People think, ‘Oh, he’s young, in Austin; he must eat grapes in his bed with, like, 16 cheerleaders around,’ ” he said while nursing a vodka and soda in the hotel’s stately lounge with his brother Brody, who was visiting from their hometown, Kelowna, British Columbia. “Man, it’s not like that.”

Not that he would turn that down, but he has a career to consider. He likes to write down his goals to help visualize his future. “When I was 21,” he said in a north-of-the-border accent that can be as thick as Canadian bacon, “I wrote down that I would work with Sean Penn within the next 10 years.”

Mr. Kitsch has six years left to achieve that; meanwhile, “Friday Night Lights” has elevated his game from previous movie roles in “The Covenant,” “Snakes on a Plane,” and “John Tucker Must Die.” Before that, Mr. Kitsch was stuck in a jobless rut after a Diesel ad campaign. He was living in a walk-in closet at a fellow model’s apartment in New York (other past residences included the subway and a Pontiac Firefly hatchback).

“Incredible,” he said. “Bad, though. I’m going to the gym, eating right, and I’m into nutrition, and I’m fit. And I’d come out of my room and there’d be these kids — just skinny rails — slamming coke on the coffee table, and they’re like, ‘Oh, I got a Hugo Boss campaign yesterday.’ ” he said, his voice becoming mock blasé, “And I’m like, ‘This isn’t right.’ ”

These days, he doesn’t lack for attention. Doting females materialize once Mr. Kitsch — having discarded his wool coat and scarf for a  jean jacket — arrives at the Broken Spoke, a honky-tonk where Stetsons and rhinestones aren’t required, but encouraged. There, an older woman sparks pleasant conversation in the drink line while a younger one tells her friends that she’s irked after Mr. Kitsch politely squashes her entreaty to join the merry-go-round of dancing couples.

But it’s not only women. While he’s playing a game of shuffleboard, beer-soaked men shout Riggs’s trademark phrase, “Texas forever!” on their way out the door.

And the only time Mr. Kitsch seems mildly uncomfortable is when he is photographed with his arm around the shoulder of a female fan, and afterward, the photographer, also a woman, blabs about how easily he could have moved his hand a few inches south and “she wouldn’t have cared.”