RANDY HARRISON doesn’t look a thing like Andy Warhol. Walking into a restaurant opposite Grand Central Terminal on a Monday morning, taking time for an interview before catching the 10:07 to New Haven, he’s dressed in jeans and a gray sweater and still looks a lot like Justin, the young and initially wide-eyed character he played for five seasons on Showtime’s “Queer as Folk.”

But Mr. Harrison is 32 now, and he’s playing Warhol in his late 30s in the Yale Repertory Theater’s latest production, “Pop!” (reviewed in The New York Times on Wednesday by Charles Isherwood). The musical begins on the day in 1968 when Warhol was shot and critically wounded by Valerie Solanas, an aspiring playwright whose script he had rejected.

In “Pop!,” the audience may already know who fired the gun, but Warhol doesn’t. He spends the rest of the show trying to figure it out.

To Warhol, Mr. Harrison said, “it’s a murder mystery.” Could the culprit be Viva, Candy Darling, Ondine, Edie Sedgwick or another of his closest, wackiest associates?

Although he hadn’t even been born when the shooting took place and was only 10 years old when Warhol died of complications after gall bladder surgery, Mr. Harrison is a serious admirer.

“He was such an elusive, brilliant character,” he said. “He’s an enigma.”

Warhol “was so driven to make art,” Mr. Harrison said, that everything else about him seems to fade away.

Having the time to develop a character fully is one of the reasons Mr. Harrison loves stage work. But unlike many actors who claim that the stage is their first love, he practices what he preaches, despite having a face that is made for the movie camera. Other than his stint on “Queer as Folk,” Mr. Harrison’s screen résumé, over nine years, consists of one made-for-television young people’s film and an 11-minute short.

During that same period, though, he took on an impressive range of serious stage roles, including the young Tom Wingfield in “The Glass Menagerie” at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis; Lysander, Flute and Cobweb in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival; and a number at the Berkshire Theater Festival, including Lucky in “Waiting for Godot” and Oswald in Ibsen’s “Ghosts.”

Mr. Harrison made his Broadway debut in 2004, filling in as the Munchkin character Boq in “Wicked.” After “Pop!” ends its Yale Rep run, he hopes to work again in New York. He lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with his cats, Ella and Aggie.

Mr. Harrison also feels at home working in New England. Although he spent his adolescence living in suburban Atlanta, he was born in New Hampshire and spent his first 11 years there. For another week, he’ll be living in a temporary apartment in New Haven, winding down his association with Warhol and his world.

Mr. Harrison is particularly enamored of the idea of the Factory, where Warhol and his followers were always making new, challenging art. (And using drugs. And taking off their clothes. He doesn’t mention those aspects of the experience.) But to help him shape the character, he also considered aspects of Warhol’s earlier life, like his growing up in Pennsylvania as the son of Czechoslovakian immigrants and his placing importance on both family and church. (“He’s very, very Catholic,” Mr. Harrison said.) He was also ill as a child with St. Vitus’ dance, a movement disorder.

How does it shape a person, Mr. Harrison wondered, to spend so much time in your formative years “when all you can do is look”?

It explains a lot.


Sara Krulwich/The New York Times.

KING OF ‘POP!’ Randy Harrison as Andy Warhol, with Leslie Kritzer, left, as Valerie Solanas, and Emily Swallow as Viva, during a rehearsal of “Pop!”