No more Mr. Nice Guy.

Usually when he appears in a drama, Adam Garcia is playing the resident hunk.

“I think I have a pleasant, generic face and people have always known me as ‘the nice guy,'” he tells TV Tonight.

“More often than not I’m cast as the nice boyfriend so it’s a great departure to be able to play someone who is a bit arrogant, in-your-face and not particularly well-mannered.”

Performing in theatre, film and television, Garcia’s CV includes Boot Men, Coyote Ugly, Kangaroo Jack, Doctor Who, Britannia High, Flight of the Conchords, Camp, Threesome, :30 Seconds and even Agatha Christie’s Marple.

“I was playing a moustachioed Cuban salsa instructor with incredibly tight pants! So not too serious.”

But in ABC’s thriller The Code, he takes a more dramatic detour as online Editor Perry Benson, boss of journalist Ned Banks (Dan Spielman).

“He’s arrogant, pushy and thinks he is smarter than everyone else. A sort of media Robin Hood who likes to piss people off,” he explains.

“He’s been in journalism a long time and probably had a whole lot of money from somewhere else. I suspect he clashed with a lot of the editors he used to work for in the normal outlets. So he decided to start his own one and tell a much more partisan or honest brand of journalism. Rather than one he thinks is concocted through collusion.”

As editor of an online political magazine, Perry has parallels with Wikileaks’ Julian Assange.

“There’s definitely an Assange way about him. And the whole story does spring from an Assange-like need for the public to know if their governments are incredibly un-transparent.

“Ep 2 and Ep 3 is when Perry is very deep into it and he has to decide if he can go on while his company is under threat. Possibly his life is under threat because of the button he chose to push.

“It’s whether he throws his friend under the bus or (doubts) whether his friend really has a story at all.”

Garcia won the role after performing in Camp, helmed by The Code‘s director Shawn Seet.

“Normally there are a couple of different directors but while he had a ton of work to do I remember him saying he was really excited to have the whole thing in his head,” he continues.

“The writing is what attracted me to it. I thought it was superb.”

While The Code airs on ABC, Garcia is also seen as Reality TV judge in his second term on Seven’s Dancing with the Stars. Although he isn’t as pushy as his Code character, Garcia says it isn’t short on its own brand of drama.

“They should put microphones in the dance studios to see how much they swear in the first week or two. They need 6 weeks of battering before they don’t swear without dancing,” he reveals.

“It should be fun. I’ll know what I’m doing now.”

The Code airs 8:30pm Sundays on ABC.