Phil Rosenthal (Television Critic) ER fans bristle, but Wyle vows: Beard's coming off October 15, 1998 You devote yourself to your craft, honing your acting skills, immersing yourself into a role, worrying about your character's motivation. And people obsess over your beard. So enough, already! "ER" star Noah Wyle's Dr. John Carter soon will be clean-shaven again. It will happen within a couple of weeks on the NBC series. Is that soon enough for everyone? "I was in the Warner Bros. commissary two days before I shaved it and Tony Jonas, the president of Warner Bros. Television, looked at me and said, 'It's coming off tomorrow, right?' " Wyle recalled during a filming break this week at the Sedgwick L station. "I said, 'No, day after.' He said, 'OK, because we're getting calls.' I said, 'Yeah, Tony, yeah.' "Just the fact that the studio president is taking good time out of his busy, busy day to worry about it leads me to believe that it's far more important than I ever thought." But then, "ER" is the No. 1 rated show on television and brings $13 million per episode into the Warner coffers from NBC, meaning that every little detail of the 9 p.m. Thursday drama on WMAQ-Channel 5 matters a great deal--even a beard grown more out of summer laziness than any kind of fashion statement. Besides, it was a really scraggly beard. "I intended to shave it and then I came back to say hello to the writers, walked into the writers' room and they liked it," Wyle said. "It sort of fit with the character changes we were going to bring Carter back with. It was a superficial but nonetheless extremely visual way of saying this guy is a different guy than the one we left last year." Carter has turned his back on his family money, lost his girlfriend and is trying to define himself. Helping matters this season is that he now finally has a young charge, med student Lucy Knight (Kellie Martin from Life Goes On), to boss around. Wyle, too, has gone through changes. Like castmate Anthony Edwards, he renegotiated his contract over the summer for a three-year extension. "It was very easy for a long time to look at 'ER' as a launching pad to take me to other places and, somewhere along the way, I just decided that this was not a bad place to be," Wyle said. "Rather than look for the greener grass, I'll milk this teat as long as it's full and walk off this show at 31 years old and never have to take another job just for money. "It just made so much sense. ... It would have been irresponsible of me to turn my back. ... George Clooney and I have the same joke about how our careers will end: 'I'll take Noah Wyle to block.' " That, however, is a long way off. On this day, as Martin hobbled through a pickup shot despite a hairline fracture in one foot, Wyle sat off to the side, stroking his chin and talked about his next project--a TNT movie about the computer business in which he'll play Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. "Ironically, Jobs had a beard," he said. "But I'm shooting it so out of sequence that it's easier to lay [a fake] one in than use mine."