New York ? Cheyenne Jackson eagerly thumbs through a copy of Star magazine until he finds the page containing a small picture of himself with Priscilla Presley.

“I was reading this in bed last night when I saw it,” he says with a sheepish grin, either for modesty’s sake or in mock embarrassment that he had acknowledged reading Star.

The photo suggests that Jackson — the swaggering, hunky star of “All Shook Up,” Broadway’s new Elvis Presley-inspired musical — has officially arrived. During lunch at the appropriately named Cheyenne Diner, he admits the worst of it — he has groupies.

“A lot of them are older ladies, like 40s or 50s, that come in droves,” he says. “Sometimes, there will be 200 or 300 waiting. … I even had a lady try to take off my shirt.”

This is not hard to imagine. Jackson is quintessential beefcake, with black hair spiked like perfect quills, striking blue eyes, a chiseled face and about a day’s worth of stubble to make him look just a little bit rugged. When he smiles, he reveals startlingly perfect — and almost-too-white — teeth. His black shirt is unbuttoned enough to show a sprinkling of chest hair and a pumped-up body obviously dedicated to the gym, plenty of sleep and a healthy diet.

OK, so he’s nibbling on a lunch of chicken strips and French fries.

But the 29-year-old has also shown himself as a more than capable singer and actor in “All Shook Up,” a musical based loosely on Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” that features only songs once recorded by Presley. Critics and fans alike believe that Jackson even embodies a tiny bit of the King; he received the utmost of compliments from Priscilla Presley herself after she saw the show last month.

“She said, ‘I love that you don’t take yourself too seriously, and you have a warmth that leaps off the stage and grabs you. Elvis would be proud,”‘ Jackson recalls. “I could get a million bad reviews and that was all I had to here.”

It’s enough attention for anyone to handle, especially someone who was an understudy until only 10 days before rehearsals began, when the actor who was to portray the male lead pulled out due to a contract dispute. Jackson read for the part of Chad — the womanizing roustabout who infects a small conservative town with a serious case of boogie fever — and got the job the next morning.

Cheyenne Jackson portrays a character inspired by Elvis Presley in the new Broadway musical All

It was a huge leap for Jackson, who had moved to New York several years earlier and been cast in ensembles and understudy roles.

“I was shocked,” he says. “The first thing I did — I was outside on the sidewalk — I sat down and called my mom. … I just said, ‘Mom, the agent called and said the part was mine.’ And then she cried and I cried.”

Director Christopher Ashley acknowledges that casting an unknown in a lead role for a Broadway musical was a “leap of faith,” but he says Jackson took to the role instantly.

But then again, luck has been on Jackson’s side since he first started acting. He readily acknowledges that he was not an extremely ambitious youth growing up in Newport, Wash., a town of 1,400 on the Idaho border that Jackson says just got its first McDonald’s restaurant. He didn’t do his first professional show until age 18, then got a gig doing summer theater in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, where he was making $280 a week. “I thought I was so rich!” he says with a laugh.

Actor Cheyenne Jackson, center, portrays a character inspired by Elvis Presley in a scene from the Broadway musical All

Rather than chase the acting bug to New York, though, he decided to move to Seattle and take a job selling advertising space for a magazine. Then, two things happened to change his life: a death in his family and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“It kind of just shook me to my core,” he says. “I said, ‘You know what, now is the time to make something happen.”‘

Jackson had one contact in New York — actor Marc Kudisch, for whom he was once an understudy in a Seattle play. Kudisch set Jackson up with an agent, who signed him on the spot. Within a few weeks, Jackson was cast in his first Broadway show after going to only one audition. He was just shy of his 27th birthday.