Denis Leary ready to rock

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Over its seven-season run, “Rescue Me” became one of FX’s signature shows. Can Denis Leary do it again for the network?

He’s ready to try. The ever-frank actor-comedian moves far away from the earlier series’ firefighter theme to play a literal rock star in the seriocomic “Sex&Drugs-&Rock&Roll,” premiering Thursday.

His alter ego Johnny Rock is a hard-living burnout of the music business, his group The Heathens having been disbanded 25 years ago over personal conflicts — very specifically, the discovery of Johnny’s intimate encounter with the wife of lead guitarist Flash (John Corbett).

The daughter (Elizabeth Gillies, “Victorious”) Johnny didn’t know he had is an aspiring singer who wants to reunite the band, but Johnny would have to take a backseat since she’d be fronting the band. New conflicts threaten to open old wounds, with the other regathered Heathens played by John Ales, Bobby Kelly and Elaine Hendrix. Adding authenticity, Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl appears in the first episode.

Also the writer and director and an executive producer of the new show, as well as a composer for it, Leary admits he’s “not really a singer. I can belt. I can scream, you know. So I knew I could handle what I had to handle, but the character of the daughter was going to have to really sing some songs with a lot of real emotion, rock ’n’ roll, kick-ass songs and some balance. And I wanted to have everything available, right? So that means I had to have a girl who could really sing and would be willing to sing live on set, because I wanted the vocals to be recorded live.”

Enter co-star Gillies, who has partnered tunefully with Ariana Grande several times and has a YouTube account on which she performs cover versions of known songs.

She’s not the only cast member with actual music experience, since “Sex and the City” and “Northern Exposure” alum Corbett also has it.

“I kind of have a country-rock band,” he says, “put a couple records out. We’ve gone around the country for 10 years now and play 500-, 600-seaters. Some people were trying to get me on that show ‘Nashville’ a couple years ago, and I just said, ‘No, thanks. I’m not interested in it.’ This just happens to be … I mean, we could be astronauts. It just happens to be in the rock-and-roll world, which is a world I love.”

While going for humor that’s true to the characters, Leary also has aimed to make “Sex&Drugs&-Rock&Roll” realistic about the ups and downs faced by those in the music world.

“I think there’s a couple of things in the show,” he reflects, “the funny parts especially, that will resonate in terms of making fun of what it’s like to be a working, struggling musician and come up with a bad song idea. Everybody thinks when you write a song, you think it’s the greatest (expletive) thing in the world, you know. You should usually wait a couple of days and play it for a few people. Sometimes, if your ego is big enough, you think the biggest piece of (expletive) is the greatest thing ever written. So I hope we pull that off.”