NEW YORK (TNA) – Vincent D’Onofrio says he’s drawn to acting roles that “scare” him. But there was one time when his gig in “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” got a little too frightening for his tastes.

Let’s set up the scene: D’Onofrio – who plays brilliant, quirky, and deeply troubled Detective Robert Goren – was filming on the streets of Manhattan.

Plummeting skyscrapers all in a day's work for 'Law & Order: Criminal Intent' star Vincent D'Onofrio.

“That’s when a big four-by-four piece of sheet metal came flying down, caught by the wind off a skyscraper that they were doing construction on, and it hit the ground from 40 stories up,” he recalls. “It stabbed into the cement.”

“It nearly decapitated you,” costar Kathryn Erbe adds.

“Yes, and [also nearly struck] some of the crew,” D’Onofrio continues. “It could have brutally killed several people. It was very scary.”

And it was hardly what the cast and crew had in mind while striving to give the long-running crime drama its authentic New York flavor.

The “Law & Order” spinoff, focusing on detectives from NYPD’s Major Case Squad, occasionally hits production snags while filming on location, but usually it’s nothing as dramatic as plummeting skyscraper debris. Most of the time, it’s just a complaint here and there from residents inconvenienced by the presence of a large TV film crew.

“We’re sort of beloved by the people of New York,” Erbe says, “unless we’re blocking their access to their apartment.”

“Or taking their parking space,” D’Onofrio adds.

Otherwise, Erbe continues, “We get support every day on the street from the people who live here.”

It’s not uncommon, for example, for New Yorkers to offer the use of their apartments for filming. Many stick around to watch as the show gets made. Some, Erbe says, even turn the occasion into an intimate wine-and-cheese party.

“If we’re shooting, say, in the living room,” Erbe explains, “we will set up what we call a video village elsewhere in the apartment, which is where there are monitors where the producers and directors and script supervisors watch what we’re shooting. And the people, sometimes they’ll be sitting at the monitors, headphones on, watching and listening to us doing the scene, and they’ll be pouring wine for their friends that they’ve asked to join them.”

It now appears that “Criminal Intent” – in its seventh season, once on the brink of cancellation but now airing on a new network, USA – might continue to take a slice out of New York for many years to come.

As long as the city, with its projectile sheet metal, doesn’t take a slice out of D’Onofrio first.

'Criminal Intent' star Kathryn Erbe dreams of doing one episode just for laughs.

The show airs Thursday night and, as in previous seasons, D’Onofrio and Erbe (who plays Detective Alex Eames) will star in half of the installments. The other half will showcase Chris Noth and Alicia Witt (who is filling in during Julianne Nicholson’s maternity leave).

“Criminal Intent” fans will be happy to find that the move to USA has had no impact on the show’s quality. If anything, it’s stronger than ever because it continues to play to its strength: the relationship between Goren and Eames.

Technically speaking, that defies the “Law & Order” philosophy of emphasizing plot instead of character development. But so be it.

“What has always struck me from the very beginning is that people who talk to me on the street are not talking about the crimes and the fact that we solved them,” Erbe says. “They’re talking about Goren and Eames and how they love the way they interact. The fans are really compelled by more than the ‘Law & Order’ formula or the fact that it’s a crime show. The interesting cases add to it, but it’s really the characters that they have become attached to.”

In fact, D’Onofrio’s Bobby Goren is actually a nice fit for USA Network, which already was home to offbeat crime-solvers. But unlike Tony’s Shalhoub’s obsessive-compulsive detective Adrian Monk, of “Monk,” and James Roday’s fake psychic Shawn Spencer, of “Psych,” Goren’s foibles aren’t played for laughs. D’Onofrio’s performance is a portrait of a truly tormented man.

Credit for Goren’s Sherlock Holmes observational and deductive skills, as well as his troubled personal life, D’Onofrio says, goes entirely to the show’s writers. But the character’s eccentric mannerisms – from the way he peers probingly into another person’s eyes to the quirky maneuver that the fans now refer to as the “Goren Lean” – were D’Onofrio’s invention.

“As an actor, I was really in a mode of seeing how much I could get away with and how strange I could make him,” D’Onofrio explains. “All the physical stuff was from my own head.”

Goren’s weird screen presence, however, has given many fans the misguided idea that D’Onofrio is himself dark and bizarre. The truth is that, off camera, he is a warm, funny and relatively anguish-free person.

“You know, this acting thing is not as romantic as people make it,” he says. “The minute the director says, ‘Cut,’ I turn back into myself.”

Besides, D’Onofrio notes, why would anyone want to be like Bobby Goren 24/7?

“I have enough trouble in my personal life,” he jokes.

In case you don’t believe him, Erbe will back him up.

She reveals that she and D’Onofrio are constantly cutting up on the set.

“I really would love to do a spoof episode sometime, or a much more comedic episode,” she says, “because we really have a good time.”

As D’Onofrio puts it, “Things always happen on the set that some people find funny and others don’t. And Kate and I are usually the ones laughing, while everybody else just wants us to stop so we can continue the work.”

It should come as no surprise that the two actors are so close.

Cast members routinely come and go in the revolving-door world of “Law & Order.” Noth, for example, was paired with three different partners during his five-year run on the original “Law & Order.” Witt is his third partner in three seasons of “Criminal Intent.”

But D’Onofrio and Erbe bonded in the early years during a grueling production schedule that literally pushed them to the brink. In November 2004, D’Onofrio collapsed on the set from exhaustion, after which the second detective team was brought in.

So today, as far as D’Onofrio is concerned, there is no Goren without Eames.

“I don’t think either of us could do it without each other,” he says.

They say they’re grateful that Noth was brought in.

“We realized we couldn’t have a life and do the job the way we were trying to do it,” Erbe says. “But we’ve got this new lease on life with the schedule of alternate episodes.”

At the same time, D’Onofrio notes, there’s a bit of a rivalry between the two detective teams now.

“We trash talk a lot,” he says.

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