Steve Eramo - The Morton Report tag:www.themortonreport.com,2011-10-04://1 2013-06-18T11:36:40Z Where Popular Culture Meets Swanky Living Melody 1.0.1 Taking the Lead: Interview with Inspector Lewis' Kevin Whately tag:www.themortonreport.com,2013://1.9316 2013-06-18T07:35:00Z 2013-06-18T11:36:40Z A chat with actor Kevin Whately, who is back on PBS' MASTERPIECE Mystery! and heading up the investigations of three all-new puzzling murder mysteries as Inspector Lewis. Steve Eramo http://scifiandtvtalk.typepad.com/scifiandtvtalk/ It was back in January 1987 that TV audiences were introduced to Detective Sergeant Robert “Robbie” Lewis, one half of the Oxford-based crime-fighting team in the long-running UK TV detective drama Inspector Morse. In his first case, "The Dead of Jericho," Lewis and his boss, the often irascible but always fair and dedicated Detective Inspector (later Chief Inspector) Morse, investigated the apparent suicide of a friend of Morse’s.

Despite being as different as chalk is from cheese, both detectives developed a quirky friendship of sorts over time and an intense loyalty for one another that lasted up to Morse’s tragic onscreen demise in the 2000 episode "The Remorseful Day," where his dying words were “Thank Lewis for me.”

With nearly three dozen cases under his belt, DS Lewis eventually struck out on his own almost 20 years later in the self-titled Morse spin-off Inspector Lewis. Newly-widowed and promoted to the rank of detective inspector, he carried on investigating complex murder cases in and around Oxford with the help of DS James Hathaway. What were some of the initial challenges that actor Kevin Whately, who plays Lewis, faced when stepping into the lead role on his own series?

“Fortunately, most of the crew on Lewis had worked on Morse, so from a productions standpoint it wasn’t that different,” says Whately. “I think the main thing for me was that in Morse I could be quite indulgent and laid back, but when you’re the central character in a story you have to drive that story. I was always very aware that that’s what John Thaw [Morse] did, particularly vocally. John had an absolutely fantastic cutting voice, which I’ve never had, and that always worried me. So for me with Lewis, it was largely an issue of energy as well as pace. 

“Something I found much more challenging was the fact that in Morse, my character had been quite down-to-Earth, happy-go-lucky, and easygoing. With Lewis, I think they [the producers] wanted him to be a bit more like Morse, more of a curmudgeon and a grumpy old guy. That was sometimes tricky for me to match with my memories of Lewis.”

In the Inspector Lewis pilot episode "Reputation," DI Lewis returns to Oxford after a lengthy absence and, much to his chagrin, his boss, DCS Jean Innocent (Rebecca Front), assigns him to investigate the murder of an Oxford mathematician student who was shot to death while taking part in a sleep study. Suspicion soon falls on one of the deceased’s fellow classmates, but when two more people are killed, Lewis must attempt to decipher a cryptic clue that his former boss, Morse, left in an old file.

“The pilot was rather odd in that you were very much aware that John Thaw wasn’t there, but the script had references to his character of Morse,” recalls Whately. “Again, because many of the crew had worked on Morse, there was a great deal of sentimental talk and reminiscing going on, and in a strange way that kind of worked against what we were trying to do, which was create something new and different.

“Also, because Lewis had come back from abroad, I spent part of the story wearing these lurid tropical shirts and suntan make-up,” says the actor with a chuckle. “So it felt slightly surreal to me, and yet I was playing the same character and bumping into other familiar characters like Dr. Hobson [Clare Holman], who had been around in Morse.”

Along with taking charge of a new murder inquiry, Lewis also had to deal with a new partner, DS James Hathaway (Laurence Fox) and all the responsibilities that that entailed.

“As John Thaw and I did on Morse, Laurence Fox and I never really talked about our characters’ relationship or tried to analyze it too much,” says Whatley. “Chemistry is something that either works or it doesn’t. You can’t force it. Laurence and I went out for a few drinks early on before we starting filming, and then continued to do so when production began.

“The two of us just tried to get on as pals, hoping some chemistry came out of that, and we were lucky that it did. There are some people who are best pals but whose chemistry doesn’t translate to film. Much of the Lewis and Hathaway relationship, though, came largely in the writing, so Laurence and I didn’t have to work too hard at it. Things have seemed to work for eight years, so we must have gotten it right.”

The Lewis pilot proved a hit with viewers, so much so that the ITV Network commissioned a three-episode first season for the following year. Even with all his time on the force, it was hardly smooth sailing for our hero, especially when it came to upper management. Meanwhile, behind the cameras, it was pretty much business as usual for Whately.

“My character was up against—as all TV detectives seem to be up against—a superintendent who wasn’t terribly sympathetic to him and, in fact, was trying to get rid of him. That was Lewis’ main struggle,” explains the actor. “Also, at the same time he was nurturing the Hathaway character, I was trying to get Laurence used to working the way we did, because as I said, it was very much a set with a lot of the same crew and production people from Morse.

“A big part of being a regular on a series like this is making actors who come into it feel comfortable, whether they’re leads and ongoing like Laurence, or someone who’s in for just two days and has to dish out a tremendous amount of very erudite dialogue without any rehearsal. It’s an important responsibility as a lead actor to make everyone feel relaxed and at home as possible, so I was doing quite a bit of that with Laurence as well as the guest artists.”

In addition to Whately’s character, another familiar face to make the leap from Morse to Inspector Lewis is the aforementioned police pathologist Dr. Laura Hobson. While some viewers may have hoped for a bit of romance to develop between the two, that does not appear to be in the cards for either of them.

“Goodness knows, Lewis is a lot older than Hobson, but Morse was much older and there was a slight sort of flirtation between them,” notes Whately. “She and Lewis are both kind of lonely characters and it’s rather astonishing that they never got together earlier if they were ever going to. To be honest, though, that’s something I’ve always sort of resisted because I think it can then become somewhat soapy. I prefer to focus on the mysteries and the dastardly characters as opposed to the home life of the lead character.”

In the States, Inspector Lewis returned to the PBS line-up June 16th as part of MASTERPIECE Mystery! In "Down Among the Fearful," the first of three new episodes, Inspector Lewis and DS Hathaway investigate the murder of a psychic who had been leading a secret double life.

“This episode is the one with all the chase scenes through the covered market,” says Whately. “We did three days of running around, and I’m not as young as I used to be. Luckily I survived all the interior market stuff, but then we went down to Merton and filmed me running towards Christ Church meadow. On the penultimate take, this girl is fatally injected with a drug and falls to the ground. Lewis has to chase after whoever did it, and as I did, I felt one of my hamstrings go.

“We ended up needing another shot of Lewis getting to the gate and realizing that he wasn’t going to catch the killer, but I couldn’t do it because of my hamstring. We had to wait a fortnight until we were in the middle of filming the following episode and back up in Oxford, by which time I thought the hamstring had healed, but inevitably it twanged again.

“So in-between all this I was doing lots of other scenes and trying to hide this pathetic limp. In the last episode we shot, there’s a scene where Lewis has to run along to one of the canal boats on fire. The director, Dan Reed, said to me, ‘Can you do it once more,’ and on the very last take as I get level with the camera, you can see my face contort as my hamstring goes yet again.”

In "The Ramblin’ Boy," Hathaway is off on sabbatical in Kosovo, so Lewis is assigned a temporary new partner, the young but bright DC Alex Gray (Babou Ceesay), and the two investigate the discovery of an elderly man’s body that has already been embalmed. This episode guest-stars former Doctor Who Peter Davison as Peter Faulkner.

“Peter Davison was at the Central School of Speech & Drama [at London University] a couple of years ahead of me, and I was sort of the Peter Davison of my year, if you see what I mean,” says Whately. “Here’s an actor who’s led so many series, and oftentimes when you’re leading your own series you don’t get to work with someone like that. It’s fascinating seeing how they work, and Peter tends to play sympathetic roles, as I do, so watching him create an evil character was fab as well. I really enjoyed shooting those scenes with him. Peter’s character is sort of a foe from the past, although he’s never appeared on the show before, and Lewis is desperate to nail him, whether he’s guilty or not,” jokes the actor.

Laurence Fox had the chance to work with his uncle, Edward Fox, when filming "Intelligent Design," the third and final new Inspector Lewis story to air this year on MASTERPIECE Mystery! In this episode, Hathaway ponders his future as a police officer, while he and Lewis search for a link between the hit-and-run death of an elderly university don and the murder of one of his students.

“We’ve had most of the Fox family in the series by now, and I keep saying that it’s a pension fund for them,” jokes Whately. “Again, it’s fascinating to watch them at work because they’re all different. Edward is very different from James [Laurence’s father], as he is from Laurence. They hadn’t seen an awful lot of each other for a while, so I think Laurence was quite nervous about having his Uncle Edward come on the show, but the two of them actually got on like a house on fire.

“We went out for meals in the evening in Oxford when Edward was up there, and I enjoyed watching them get to know one another all over again. The two of them clicked straight away. They have quite a few similar ideas about the business, and because he’s been a movie star for so long, it was great seeing how Edward puts a character together in his performance.”

Besides his work on Inspector Lewis, TV audiences on this side of the pond can see Whately’s guest-starring role in "Gently in the Cathedral," an episode of another popular British TV detective series Inspector George Gently, which stars Martin Shaw and is currently airing Stateside on PBS.

“Martin Shaw and I had met once before 30 years ago at an Actors Equity union meeting, and, again, it was fascinating to watch how he runs his show and how it’s made,” says the actor. “It’s done by the BBC and shot in the Northeast, so from that point of view it was quite sentimental to me. The episode I did ends in a huge sort of Wild West shootout in Durham Cathedral, and I hadn’t been there since I was a 13 year old and singing in the choir.

“So that was a joy, as was getting to play a baddie. I couldn’t resist doing it because my character is a baddie who you have to believe in for quite a long time. It wasn’t a huge part either, so there weren’t very many scenes to kind of establish him, and I enjoyed that acting challenge.”

Given the changes in how modern-day audiences watch TV, the chance of creating a hit show is harder than ever, and the same is true of playing a character for an extended period of time. Whately knows this all too well, and in the many years he has walked in Robbie Lewis’ shoes, the actor has never once taken any of those steps for granted.

“This character has dominated nearly half my life now,” he muses. “It’s a large chunk of my acting life and really consolidated my career. I learnt almost everything that I know from doing Morse. I’ve traveled the globe and have fans all over the world from Morse and Lewis. So I have many, many happy memories and feel incredibly fortunate to have the connection to both shows as well as the Lewis role.”

Please note, all Inspector Lewis photos copyright of ITV Studios for Masterpiece.

]]> Detective Work: Interview with Motive's Brendan Penny tag:www.themortonreport.com,2013://1.9315 2013-06-16T18:05:00Z 2013-06-16T22:04:33Z Actor Brendan Penny talks about hitting the streets of Vancouver, British Columbia and catching murderers along with other assorted bad guys as Detective Brian Lucas in the CTV police procedural drama Motive. Steve Eramo http://scifiandtvtalk.typepad.com/scifiandtvtalk/ There are some people who from childhood know what they want to be when they grow up, while others are what you might call “late bloomers” when it comes to deciding on a career path. Actor Brendan Penny freely admits to being one of the latter.

“I didn’t really have any specific aspirations when I was younger. I just enjoyed hanging out with my friends and stuff like that. In fact, I didn’t even take my first acting class until I was 23, and I was bad, really bad, like stinky-bad,” recalls Penny with a laugh. “When I was in high school and first started acting, I thought I might end up becoming the next big TV sitcom star, but it has actually turned out to be quite the opposite. I’ve done comedy and was even a lead in a sitcom [The Assistants], but most of my roles have been in heavy dramatic stuff.

“So I kind of fell into the profession, but as soon as I began to seriously pursue it I became quite passionate about it and then all my focus turned to acting."

Penny’s current gig definitely leans towards the more dramatic, but with the occasional bit of levity. He plays Detective Brian Lucas in the CTV police procedural drama Motive. It was not only the role but the story itself that immediately won him over.

“As an actor, you read plenty of scripts, but in this case I wanted to turn every page, which is a really good sign,” he says. “So the whole thing just grabbed me and I really liked the character. I’d never played anyone quite as innocent and, I guess, so eager to please, you might say. I thought it would be fun to ‘attack’ a character in such a way. Lucas was initially written as more comical, but changes were made as things went along, which is often the case. I still definitely find some comedic beats with the character and I love that.

“I auditioned for the role and had probably around four callbacks before I finally got the go-ahead to play Lucas.”

Unlike other modern-day TV police dramas, Motive gives the viewer a look at the victim as well as the murderer and shows how circumstances brought them together. It is then up to Detective Angie Flynn (Kristin Lehman) and her team, which Brian Lucas is a part of, to put the pieces together and catch the killer. In the show’s opener, "Creeping Tom," a popular karaoke-singing high school teacher (played by singer/songwriter/actor Joey McIntyre) is found murdered in his bedroom and the finger of guilt points to a serial killer. Being his character’s first time on the job, Penny was eager to start shooting.

“My first day of work on Motive was a night shoot, so my call time was around two in the morning, which was fine because I don’t think I’d have slept too well the night before anyway seeing that I was so excited about getting on-set,” says the actor. “The first scene I shot was a small one, and it was the scene in the kitchen. I had this pretty cute line that I really liked where Angie asked Brian if he can feel a woman’s pain, and my character’s response was quite amusing.

“I had worked before with Tyler Johnson, the actor who plays the killer in this episode, on another Canadian TV show called Flashpoint. He played my little brother and our two characters were kind of these troubled white supremacists, if you can imagine that being possible. It was really cool to work with Tyler again; he’s a very talented actor and a good friend. Joey McIntyre is a great guy, too, and easy to be around. So my first time on Motive was a thrilling and memorable experience for me.”

Like most police teams, all the officers working with Angie Flynn have a special skill or make a unique contribution to their investigative work, including Detective Lucas. His particular expertise is one that has taken Penny a bit of getting used to.

“To be honest, the biggest challenge for me with this role is one that has never been a problem for me before, and that is, Brian spouts off a great deal of technical dialogue,” he notes. “I’ve played a number of troubled characters in the past, so the dialogue always comes quite easily to me, but the technical stuff was difficult to wrap my head around in the beginning.

“Other than the techno-talk, I would describe Lucas as being this very straight and narrow guy. There’s good, there’s bad, and not much in-between. He doesn’t really judge people, but rather just lives his life in that way. I like to think of him being kind of like a Golden Retriever puppy, very eager to please and always there for you. Brian does a lot of research for Angie and Detective Oscar Vega [Louis Ferreira], and as the first season of Motive unfolds, you see him develop more and more as he gets out in the field and he gains a greater confidence with being a detective.

“That’s especially apparent when you compare, for instance, his first interrogation, which falls apart, to near the end of the season where he appears far more secure in his job. I really like doing the interrogation scenes, including that first one that went wrong. My character thinks he’s finally getting the respect that he deserves and that he's going to be in charge of this, but, ultimately Lucas just ends up being played. I had such a good time playing the up-and-down roller coaster ride of that little scene.”

How would the actor describe Lucas’ relationships with the show’s other main characters?

“His background is nine years in financial crimes and, again, he’s very much a computer database researching type of guy,” says Penny. “So I think he has the utmost respect for Angie and Vega because their job is extremely difficult and they do it so well. He does have a different relationship, however, with all three of them, including Dr. Rogers, who is played by Lauren Holly. She’s quite sexy and Brian is bashful and therefore isn’t too comfortable being around someone who’s that flamboyant with their sex appeal. With Angie, he considers her to be the utmost professional and, like I said, he respects her and learns a lot from her. The same is true with Lucas and Vega, although that relationship is not as close as his and Angie’s relationship. Vega tends to poke fun at him a bit and isn’t as understanding insofar as Lucas’ ways, but there’s that strong respect and Brian aims to please where Vega is concerned.”

Prior to Motive, Penny booked small roles in a couple of TV shows as well as the 2006 feature film John Tucker Must Die. His big break came that same year when he was cast as series regular A.J. Varland in the Canadian TV drama Whistler. “I played a young rich kid who had everything and then ends up becoming a crystal meth addict,” explains Penny. “His life then starts to fall apart and the season finale ends with him committing suicide.

“I hold no job higher than that one. It was the greatest experience I’ve ever had and it taught me so much as far as working consistently almost every day on a set and being around all these incredibly talented actors. I grew so much and loved every minute of it.”

Besides Motive, Penny can also currently be seen in a new web series called The Runner. He plays Josh Rundell, a social activist vlogger who uses his parkour and skateboarding expertise to evade capture by the police while trying to prove he is innocent of murder.

“If you’re between the ages of 14 and 20 and really into parkour and skateboarding, you’re really going to like The Runner,” enthuses the actor. “I had fun shooting that and I got to do a number of the stunts. I’m always keen on pushing myself to the physical limit and doing as much of the physical stuff as possible, but if it’s something really dangerous, then I’m not allowed to do it.

“I just finished a movie with Trace Adkins called The Virginian and I’m new to riding horses, so there was a lot of the horseback riding that was beyond me at the time. However, thanks to plenty of hard work with the movie’s stunt coordinator, I actually ended up doing pretty well. That was definitely one of those jobs where I had a quick learning curve, but I had a blast.”

Please note, all Motive photos courtesy/copyright of Bell Media/CTV/ABC.

]]> An Ambitious Man: Interview with Longmire's Bailey Chase tag:www.themortonreport.com,2013://1.9291 2013-06-05T18:40:00Z 2013-06-07T18:36:20Z Actor Bailey Chase talks about chasing criminals and the job ambitions of his character Deputy Branch Connally in the hit A&E TV crime drama series Longmire. Steve Eramo http://scifiandtvtalk.typepad.com/scifiandtvtalk/ As Oklahoma City police detective Butch Ada in the popular TNT crime drama Saving Grace, Bailey Chase helped solve brutal homicide cases as part of the city’s Major Crimes unit. Given the actor’s good looks and talent, it is no surprise that he grabbed the viewers’ attention with his performance. When that series ended after three seasons, Chase booked a recurring role on another hit show, FX’s Damages. While working on that series, the opportunity came up for a more permanent gig playing Deputy Branch Connally in A&E’s Longmire.

“I had a really nice time being back in New York and working on Damages with some wonderful actresses in Rose Byrne and, of course, the amazing Glenn Close,” says Chase. “Then the pilot for Longmire came along, and originally I was up for the part of Walt Longmire. I loved the character and was excited about the prospect of having my own series, especially as its producers [Greer Shephard and Michael M. Robin] had a great track record with [another TNT series] The Closer.

“So I read for them when I was back in Los Angeles during one of my breaks from Damages and everything seemed to go really well, but when they called my agent, they said that they wanted me for the Branch role. If you watched the pilot, you saw that Branch wasn’t quite the man he is today, or that I like to think he is. So I had a side conversation with Greer Shephard, our show runner, who basically told me, ‘You’re perfect for this role. We want an equal adversary for Walt; that’s what will make this show interesting.  We’ll treat the pilot script a little bit with regard to your role.’

“They then gave me a huge gift with the writing over the course of season one. You see Branch’s evolution all the way through to the season finale where he has the fight with Walt. So that’s how I became involved in Longmire, and I just feel so blessed. Sometimes ego can get in the way and you’re like, no, I want my own show, but then you’re offered a supporting character that they [the producers/writers] really deliver on in the end. That’s what happened for me with Longmire, and I’m having a blast,” enthuses the actor.

Based on the mystery novels written by best-selling author Chris Johnson, Longmire is set in fictional Absaroka County, Wyoming, and tells the story of Walt Longmire (Robert Taylor), who returns to work as sheriff after the death of his wife. Helped by his daughter Cady (Cassidy Freeman), his new deputy, Victoria “Vic” Moretti (Katee Sackhoff,), and his best friend, Henry Standing Bear (Lou Diamond Phillips), Sheriff Longmire investigates a series of major crimes in his jurisdiction, while also preparing to run for reelection against a young deputy, Branch Connally (Chase), who wants his job. In the show’s pilot episode, the sheriff’s office investigates the murder of an Indian girl and a mobile brothel.

“Most of my scenes in the pilot were in the police station,” recalls Chase. “We were shooting in Las Vegas, New Mexico, and this episode is where I believe the seeds were planted just in terms of the confrontation that was on the horizon between my character and Walt and everything else that was going down at the time. What sticks out most in my mind as far as working on this episode is being in Las Vegas and really enjoying the rest of the cast. We all became fast friends, which was great because you don’t always get that. There’s something really special, I think, about being on-location that has made us much closer than if we were working, let’s say, in Los Angeles or New York.”

During Walt’s leave of absence from the force following his wife’s death, it was Deputy Connally who handled most of the sheriff’s duties, so it only makes sense that he would want to permanently take over the job. His father, the powerful and wealthy Barlow Connally (Gerald McRaney), would like nothing more than to see his son elected as sheriff. As much as he would like to be in charge, though, Branch has a great deal of respect for Walt. Not surprisingly, this sets up an internal conflict with the character that Chase relishes playing.

“It’s a very fine line insofar as the relationship between Walt and Branch,” he explains. “Initially, my character very much wanted to kind of mark his territory and be like, ‘Hey, I’m here, too,’ but at the same time still be professional. There are some private moments that he has with his dad and Walt’s daughter Cady, who Branch is in love with, over the course of season one where Branch shows a real affection as well as affinity for Walt and what a good cop he is. Naturally, his father shoots that right down.

“So it’s a real moral dilemma, and hopefully that’s something that resonates with the audience, where my character actually likes this guy, but the circumstances are such that the two of them need to go toe-to-toe and be adversaries. That’s just the cards they’ve been dealt. Again, Branch thinks Walt is a really good cop and ultimately good at what he does, even though Branch likes to poke fun at how old school he is.

“At the same time, my character is incredibly ambitious, and it doesn’t help that he has a past with his father, who would always make Branch feel bad and give him a difficult time about not being successful enough. Branch’s dad is constantly prodding him to go further, and where his motto is, ‘The ends justify the means,’ Branch actually has a pretty strict moral code that he tries to live by. Unfortunately, he has these ‘dark forces,’ if you will, pulling him in other directions. You see that with his father in the first season and you’ll see it more in season two where Jacob Nighthorse [A Martinez] becomes his primary campaign financer.”

The murder of an exotic dancer ("The Dark Road"), the connection between the deaths of a local Cheyenne boy and a member of the Mexican drug cartel ("The Cancer") and the killing of an escaped convict by a bear ("The Worst Kind of Hunter") are just a few of the cases Walt and his officers investigate in season one of Longmire. Chase is especially fond of the first season episode, "8 Seconds," which features a rodeo veterinarian suspected of having an affair.

“This episode was gratifying in a lot of ways,” says the actor. “First off, Chris Chulack, who directed our first two episodes, came back for this one. He’s actually coming back to shoot two more episodes this [second] season, and I always love working with him because he makes me an even better actor.

“I also felt like this was the first time Branch got to spread his wings. Our characters go out to a rodeo and ham it up, or at least Branch hams it up, in front of a crowd, and you really get to see him comfortable in the spotlight. It’s very much ‘game on’ for him. So "8 Seconds" is my favorite story from last year, although in the one that followed ["An Incredibly Beautiful Thing"] I got to play golf, and I’m a golf addict, so that was a lot of fun, too.”

In "Unquiet Mind," Longmire’s second season opener, a serial killer, Wayne Durell, (Dan Hildebrand) along with other prisoners escape the FBI just prior to transport and head into the mountains of Absaroka County. Among Durell’s victims was a young Native American boy who Walt promised to find. Ignoring a snowstorm, the sheriff sets out to track Durell on foot. Back in town, Vic butts heads with the FBI agent (Noam Jenkins) in charge, who appears indifferent to the dangers facing Walt, while Branch and Henry set off on horseback to find the sheriff. When it comes to shooting this episode and, in fact, season two, in general, Chase could not wait to step back in front of the camera.

“Coming back was great,” he notes. “For me, it was a really long wait, although most of us stayed busy during the hiatus. We loved filming season one, the ratings were great, and the fans are terrific. A normal turnaround for a TV series might be four months, and we were on hiatus for about eight, so the cast and crew were just excited and chomping at the bit to get back. Everyone showed up with their A-game, which in and of itself was really nice, and the first script, 201, was a very strong one as well. I guess patience is a virtue,” says the actor with a chuckle, “but, again, we couldn’t wait to get back.

“As far as Branch, I made a very conscious choice to change him up this season, and I hope that that’s coming through in my performance. I want the audience to see it and feel it. I basically decided that I’m all in, which is what Branch said to Vic towards the end of last season. At the end of the second to last episode, he tells her that he’s no quitter. He’s all in and is going to let the chips fall where they may. He’s not worried about Walt’s feelings or anyone else’s, and I know that might not be the most popular or likeable choice, but I feel like it’s what I have to do with this character. I’ve got my fingers crossed that at some point, that will resonate with the viewers and they’ll be able to take that journey with me.

“So it’s been fun. It’s definitely the boldest choice I’ve ever made in my career insofar as acting style and just delving deeper and deeper into my character as well as the story, but like I said, it feels really good and I’m having a wonderful time.”

Born in Chicago and raised in Florida, the actor was educated at boarding school where he also developed a passion for sports. Although Chase later attended Duke University on a football scholarship, he ultimately chose a very different type of career path. “I watched a lot of Clint Eastwood movies growing up, and I wanted to be like him,” admits Chase. “So when I stopped growing at six feet and 190 pounds I realized that the NFL wasn’t in my future. That’s when I started to think about my boyhood dream of acting. I moved out to Los Angeles after graduation and really never looked back. I got to spend a few years in New York as well as London [studying at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art], so it’s been an interesting time.”

Chase made his feature film debut in Adam Shankman’s Cosmo’s Tale, which screened at both Sundance and Cannes. The actor’s other film credits include Billboard Dad, The Stray, Crossing Over and the upcoming Summoned. His numerous small screen appearances include guest-starring, recurring or regular roles on such series as Charmed, JAG, Las Vegas, CSI: Crime Screen Investigation, Castle and White Collar. Among his most memorable roles are the aforementioned Butch Ada in Saving Grace and Graham Miller in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

“Well, Saving Grace was a dream job,” says the actor. “I had just come back from New York after doing a soap opera [As the World Turns] and my goal was to get on a primetime show, and who better to co-star with than Oscar winner Holly Hunter [Detective Grace Hanadarko]. We were getting a great deal of attention because of her involved and the show got picked up right away for 13 episodes. It really validated my decision to leave the security, if you will, of daytime TV and that steady paycheck of working every week, 50 weeks a year.

“So that was amazing and on top of that, working with Holly on a daily basis and seeing how hard she worked was incredible. She takes it to another level, and I grew up a lot as an actor. I started to push myself harder and harder and I thank her for making me better.

“As for Buffy, that was my first real acting job. That was when I threw away all the practical [job] applications I’d been filling out because I was tired of waiting tables, etc. I remember meeting [series creator/executive producer] Joss Whedon for the first time, and he’s such a terrific and genuine guy. He was there with me every step of the way. I had two lines in my first episode, and after it aired, Joss came up to me and said, ‘I got so many e-mails and posts from fans asking, “Who’s the new guy?”’ That was all very exciting and what got me in the game so to speak, and here we are after all these years.

“It’s funny, when I was on Buffy I thought I was a good actor, but I can look back now and think, ‘Actually, I wasn’t,’ and it’s the same with daytime TV. I felt like that was kind of boot camp for my acting career. I logged tons of hours in front of a camera, and there was a real change after I left daytime. I felt much more comfortable in front of the camera and I really enjoyed that time between, ‘Action!’ and, ‘Cut!’ It’s become my favorite time for me. Having recently turned 41 I feel like things have never been better for me, and I hope 10 years from now I can look back and feel the same way at 51.”

Please note, all Longmire photos copyright of A&E.

]]> On the Right Path: Interview with Rogue's Jarod Joseph tag:www.themortonreport.com,2013://1.9271 2013-05-21T14:40:00Z 2013-05-21T15:40:19Z Actor Jarod Joseph talks about getting "down and dirty" playing police Detective Nicholas Fleming in DirecTV's crime drama Rogue. Steve Eramo http://scifiandtvtalk.typepad.com/scifiandtvtalk/ It was just three years ago that actor Jarod Joseph made his professional debut in the big screen adventure Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief. While his role might not have been an especially big one, the actual experience is one that he vividly remembers to this day.

“I’d performed in acting class and appeared in a play or two, but this was my first time doing anything on a big budget scale,” says Joseph. “I mean, Uma Thurman [Medusa] was on set along with several other very familiar faces. I was just amazed at the energy on set, and when it came time to do my scene, I thought I was the biggest star in the world. I was like, ‘Yeah, this is my time. I’m here playing with the big boys.’

“Realistically, that sense of naiveté is something I’ll never get back, but it was a terrific reminder that this [acting] was what I was going to do with my life, and it felt great. Everybody searches for a job that they’re not going to hate, but to find a job that you don’t want to leave is, I think, the ideal situation.”

That feeling of enthusiasm about his profession has remained with the actor since his first day of work on the Percy Jackson set. Since then, Joseph has had the opportunity in a relatively short space of time to portray a host of different characters in several made-for-TV movies and TV series. Currently, he can be seen playing Oakland, California rookie police detective Nicholas Fleming in DirecTV’s Rogue. Like the aforementioned film, the actor’s first day of work on this series is equally memorable to him.

“I was so nervous,” he recalls with a laugh. “It was my first time as a series regular, and my first day on the job was actually a week-and-a-half after most of the cast and crew had already begun working together. There was an established dynamic and rapport that I wasn’t privy to, so I was a little worried about blending in with everyone and doing my thing. To be honest with you, it was a pretty scary day for me because I hadn’t had many discussions with the producers and writers about the direction of my character. So I just tried a bunch of different things and we ended up deciding on one specific direction to take Nick in. I then stuck to that path for the rest of the [season one] episodes.

“Nick Hamm [executive producer/show runner] is a brilliant dude. He and Matthew Parkhill [series creator/head writer/executive producer] knew exactly what they wanted with my character, but there was also room to grow as well as breathe within the role. On my first day, Nick took me aside and said, ‘If you’re thinking it, the camera is going to see it.’ That’s something I generally take with me to each job, but, again, it was a good reminder. From that point on, I created the Fleming character on a lot of understated acting and low-key performance, I guess you would call it, but that was because Nick was very precise with what we were doing and gave me excellent direction.”

In Rogue, Nicholas Fleming and his fellow detectives are working on a case involving a powerful and dangerous local businessman and crime boss, Jimmy Laszlo (Martin Csokas) and his ambitious business-minded son Alec (Joshua Sasse). One of the detectives, Grace Travis (Thandie Newton), had been working undercover in Jimmy’s organization until her cover was blown, but instead of ending up dead, she “brokered” a deal. Grace would help Jimmy expose the traitor in his organization, if he helped her find out who shot her young son in cold blood. No matter which side you are on in this show, good or bad, there is plenty of risk to go around.

“There’s a scene in one of the early episodes where Fleming rescues the Sophia Hernandez [Claudia Ferri] character from a fire,” notes Joseph. “We filmed that on, I believe, my second day of work, and like I said, I was still trying to blend in with everyone around me. When I showed up on-set there was a stunt double ready to do the fire scene. I’d introduced myself to the director and we had shot some of the face shots and other footage involving my character. I asked him, ‘Can I do this? Can I run into the fire?’

“The director sort of looked around and then checked with a few people. It was more or less my way of saying to them, ‘Hey, I want to get down and dirty with you guys.’ Well, I’m pleased to say that I did a good portion of the actual fire sequence, so that was my big thrust forward into the series. Throughout Rogue’s first season, my character gets a few more ‘bones’ thrown at him and earns a great deal more respect within his department. I guess that’s part of the natural course of things for the young guy to eventually learn more and get the go-ahead to do more. It was pretty much like that for me as an actor, too. In my first episode I had a little bit to do, and then a bit more in the second one, etc. That worked perfectly with my character and his overall progression.”

Despite all the onscreen turmoil between and amongst the Rogue characters, things behind-the-scenes were nothing but congenial. “I made lifelong friends on this show, and we all became like a family,” says Joseph. “Because of the various storylines, you didn’t the chance to work with everyone, but whenever you crossed paths on-set, there was always time to chat and find out how everything was going. It was such a terrific ensemble and I call them all good friends."

Prior to signing up for duty as Detective Nicholas Fleming on Rogue, Joseph had the chance to add some additional credits to his resume with recurring or guest-star roles in Fringe, Arrow, Once Upon a Time and, most recently, Motive.

“Fringe was a pretty interesting situation,” he says. “I auditioned for that show seven or eight times and had been short-listed or had callbacks for a number of them. I thought I’d keep trying out for Fringe for as long as it was on the air, but then I went in for this one audition which essentially called for me to walk into a room, put down a box, deliver a line, and walk out. That turned into multiple episodes and I became a recurring character based on that one little scene. That’s kind of what happened on another show I worked on, Once Upon a Time, and it’s gone that way a few other times for me. I’m very fortunate in that regard.

“Working on Arrow was very interesting and it’s probably the most vulnerable I’ve ever felt onscreen or filming. There were a lot of emotions involved and at the end of shooting I was actually emotionally fatigued. I had never given that much on-camera. It was actually a huge challenge for me to be that revealing in front of 100 people on-set. It’s subjective as to whether or not my performance works, but I was very proud of it, and the fact that it was somewhat of a breakthrough acting-wise for me.

“As I previously mentioned, Once Upon a Time and my character of Billy was a one-scene, one-episode role that turned into more,” continues the actor. “They’re pretty tight-lipped on that show about what’s next, so with every new script I discovered more and more about what was going on with Billy and who he was. I particularly enjoyed the episode [Child of the Moon] that I did with a good friend of mine, Anthony Hemingway. We had worked together on Fringe, and he was in town and directed this Once Upon a Time episode.

“This was actually my character’s swansong episode. I had a nice scene with Megan Ory, who plays Ruby, and it was the first reveal of who my character was in the fantasy world. It turned out that Billy was, in fact, Gus [a mouse in the Enchanted Forest and presumably one of Cinderella’s only friends]. So it was great to be cemented forever in Disney history and to be working with my friend again.

“Last but not least, Motive. Man, oh, man, I was so excited to see this episode air. I played a paraplegic, which was challenging in and of itself, and those are the types of challenges that I live for as an actor. I’m very lucky to be as young as I am and getting to play as many quirky or unconventional roles that I have so far. That usually doesn’t come this early on.

“My character is the paraplegic brother of a slain boxer, and my work in this episode is the most I’ve done in a single episode of a TV show. I did a ton of research for this part because I didn’t want to disrespect it in any way or turn it into a caricature. I wanted to do the role justice. It was a demanding undertaking, but one that I think was a great example and, hopefully, a preview of what’s to come in the future for me as far as putting in a lot of work on a single character.”

As someone who is serious about his craft, Joseph appreciates knowing he is sticking to the right path when it comes to acting. “I’ve been really fortunate not only to work regularly, but also get constant verbal affirmation from my peers,” he says. “That’s something precious to me, because it’s not something that people have to do, but rather chose to do. Especially with the last group of projects I’ve done, people have taken that moment to say, ‘Hey, you’re doing good work.’ It’s that affirmation that helps make you feel like you truly belong and gives you the confidence to move forward. It’s also a nice reminder that I’m in the right place and might just be here to stay.”

]]> Family Man: Interview with Rogue's Kavan Smith tag:www.themortonreport.com,2013://1.9251 2013-05-06T19:10:00Z 2013-05-06T20:07:49Z Actor Kavan Smith talks about stepping from the somewhat lighter sci-fi world of TV's Eureka into the much darker and violent surroundings of DirecTv's Rogue and playing husband, father and teacher Tom Travis. Steve Eramo http://scifiandtvtalk.typepad.com/scifiandtvtalk/ When TV audiences last saw Kavan Smith, he was playing the dependable and lovable humanoid robot Deputy Andy 2.0 in the sci-fi series Eureka. Currently, the Edmonton, Alberta-born actor is portraying the very much flesh-and-blood Tom Travis in DirecTV’s much darker and grittier drama Rogue. A teacher and the father of a teenage daughter, Tom is married to Grace, an undercover police detective whose job has turned their home life upside-down as well as threatened all of their lives. The role immediately attracted Smith, and while booking it was a rather long process, it was worth the wait for him.

“I remember reading for them [the show’s producers] about a month and a half before they actually offered me the job,” he notes. “The audition scene itself was from the third episode and it was a fight scene between Tom and Grace [Thandie Newton]. It was more or less a three-page monologue for my character and really heavy stuff. I have kids of my own, so it was very easy to sort of emphasize with what was going on with the character.

“I kind of got into that audition in a way that doesn’t always happen in film and television. I genuinely liked the role along with the scene and thought I did a pretty good job in the audition, but then I didn’t hear anything for, as I said, about a month and a half. Finally I got a phone call telling me that Thandie was in town [Vancouver] and wanted to read with me the following morning. I explained that I hadn’t worked much on the part since the audition, but that I’d do my best.

“I met with Thandie the next day and I guess I was the only one she asked to read with. We worked on the material a little bit and right away we connected. The two of us did some fun stuff and when I walked out of the room I thought if I was the only one who she wanted to meet and then based on how things went in the room, I had a good shot at getting the role. It was, I believe, a couple of days later that I received the good news, and I happily worked my butt off for the next five months,” says the actor with laugh.

In Rogue, Grace Travis is working undercover on a case involving a powerful crime boss, Jimmy Laszlo (Martin Csokas), and his family who are dealing in drugs. When a business “transaction” goes wrong, it points to a traitor in the organization. With her cover  possibly compromised, Grace is pulled off the case, which coincides with her and Tom’s young son being gunned down in the street. Could the two incidents somehow be linked? Stepping into such a violent and emotionally volatile world proved quite a challenge for the show’s cast and crew.

“This was a tough one right from the start because those involved have high expectations for Rogue,” explains Smith. “They really want it to be cinematic and have an edge to it, so there was a great deal of hype going into the first couple of days of shooting, which included my first day on the job. We did a lot of rehearsing and I felt fairly comfortable starting out, but, again so much was expected. With the first couple of episodes of any TV series, you’re trying to explain where all the characters are coming from, how they mix together, etc. Even though Thandie and I connected right away, I think there are always some growing pains for actors. That is pretty standard across the board; actors need a few episodes to get their teeth into the work, start to feel at ease on set as well as with the crew.

“So the first couple of days it was somewhat nerve-wracking but also exciting, and we shot some good scenes. Thandie and I wound up filming a sex scene on my second or third day of work, which was a tad awkward. I don’t particularly like doing those types of scenes. I mean, I’m an old man now,” jokes the actor, “so it’s not necessarily sexy, but Thandie was totally professional about it. It was very risqué and they wanted it right in your face and a little on the shocking side. It didn’t necessarily read that way to me on the page, but we made the best of it and the scene turned out just great. After those first few days and certainly after finishing the first episode, everyone eased more and more into their roles. Again, you almost always feel a bit anxious starting out, but you work through it and move on.”

Although Tom and Grace were cut from the same proverbial cloth, their respective career choices have helped shape them into the people who viewers are introduced to in Rogue.

“The back story that we worked out between Thandie, myself and the show’s writers is that Tom and Grace were both sort of young rock ‘n’ roll kids, kind of hell-raisers and probably into drugs a little bit,” says Smith. “However, when their children came along, he cleaned up. Tom was cool with it and ready to move on to the next level, but Grace was still a bit of a wild child and not necessarily ready for that.

“So Tom got out of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle and began working as a teacher. When things go sideways in the household, he’s the glue that holds everybody together. He tries to keep the family from falling apart at the seams, but he’s only human, too. Tom doesn’t necessarily do the best job, but he does the best he can, and I really feel the challenge for me as far as playing Tom was to not have him just be white bread, but to make him, again, human. I didn’t want him to be the okie-dokey dad who’s just trying to hold it all together, because Tom does have some teeth, he has some bite.

“My character knows Grace is undercover and that something is up, but he has no idea to what extent things have gone sideways. I think what really appealed to me about playing Tom is the switching of roles. Instead of the husband being the hero who is going out, finding the bad guys and saving the day, this guy stays home, takes care of everyone and everything there and tries to be the supportive one. Having been raised by my father, Tom’s situation kind of spoke to me, and I found the character to be heroic in a non-action type of way.”

Against orders, Grace returns to working for the Laszlo family in the hope of discovering information about why her son was murdered. Unknown to the detective, Jimmy is suspicious of her, but rather than kill Grace, he agrees to help her find her son’s killer in exchange for helping him flush out the traitor in his midst. As much as Grace longs to walk away and just be a wife and mother to her husband and daughter, she cannot resist Jimmy’s offer. As her quest consumes more and more of her time, it begins to adversely affect life at home.

“As things begin to unravel and become more dangerous, Tom is forced to come to the realization that he has to think outside the box and do certain things without Grace in order to protect their daughter,” says Smith. “Even so, he also knows that no matter what Grace gets into and no matter how bad things get, he cannot deny that he will do whatever he can in the end to protect her, too.

“There is a definite end to season one of Rogue as opposed to some other shows that leave things too wide open,” continues the actor. “At the same time, it still leaves a number of avenues open for where Tom could go as well as where Tom and his daughter Evie [Sarah Jeffrey] could go and where that could be with Grace. I know the show’s producers have made their pitch to the network about a second season and what they want to do. Apparently it’s really quite extreme, amazing and interesting, but they haven’t told me any details yet.

“So I don’t know exactly what they have planned for Tom, but the way the season ends is sort of carte blanche for something really new for him. From my point of view, I would like to see Tom become a little more involved with other facets of the show. All the stuff I shot was familial and with Thandie and Sarah. I did work with Martin Csokas, but I didn’t have a chance to do scenes featuring the other gangsters/crooks or some of the other cops. I’d love to explore that world a bit more with Tom. It would be a lot of fun and as I mentioned, the writers left certain things wide open, so we’ll see.”

Having plenty of acting experiencing under his belt prior to starting work on Rogue, Smith had the opportunity to further exercise his creative muscles when playing Tom. “My aforementioned audition scene ended up being very different from what it was like on the page when we went to shoot it,” he recalls. “It became a very visceral and very real fight between me and Thandie. Our characters have it out in the backyard of their house and get into a big screaming match. I recently saw the episode that this scene is in for the first time, and I didn’t know how it was going to look or how it was going to be cut together.

“When we shot the scene, they basically said, ‘Okay, we’re going to light it this way, we’ll have a couple of cameras roving around, and you guys just do your thing.’ I loved being part of that. It was so spontaneous, almost like being onstage. Thandie and I didn’t practice at all. We just kind of went at it. In one of the takes, she hauled off and punched me in the face, and in another take I launched her about 10 feet across the yard. When I got home that night I was on such a high. I remember the following day when we went into work and the hair and make-up people, who are always terrific sounding boards for actors, said to me and Thandie, ‘That wasn’t so much a scene yesterday, but more of just a full-on fight between you guys.’ That was cool to hear.

“There’s another great scene where Tom talks with his daughter about what they can do to hold themselves together,” continues Smith. “Sarah Jeffrey has a wonderful moment in that, and definitely earned herself a new scene for her demo reel. There’s another wonderful scene, it’s either at the end of episode eight or episode nine, where Tom is being interrogated by the police. I feel so lucky to have been given the chance to play this character. This is the type of thing I did onstage and when I first got into the business. It was usually the heavy stuff or big, broad comedy like Eureka. There’s a big difference between playing a super-keen robot and playing Tom Travis in this sort of tragic drama. I really enjoy doing the comedy stuff, and it was a joy to then go to the other end of the spectrum with Rogue.”

As the actor and the rest of the Rogue cast and crew wait to hear about a season two pick-up, he is keeping busy on some other projects. “I’m narrating a couple of documentary series again for the Discovery Channel, and other than that, I’m playing Mr. Mom at home, which is my best role ever,” says Smith.

“I’m also writing a TV show of my own. I’ve written a bible of ten episodes along with the first four or five scripts. I was a huge reader as a kid and have always enjoyed writing. I’ve taken several stabs at writing novels and, much to my chagrin, realized I’m not nearly as smart as I thought I was and they all failed tragically. However, I’ve started to do a bit more writing recently as far as writing about what I know, and I know screenwriting a little bit better as well as storytelling. I’ve spent a great deal of time working on this particular project and I want to do all I can to push ahead with it. I know it’s a several-year process, so I’m just kind of buckling myself in and we’ll see what happens.”

Please note, all photos of Kavan Smith are by and copyright of Trevor Brady.

]]> Chief of Staff: Interview with Mr. Selfridge's Tom Goodman-Hill tag:www.themortonreport.com,2013://1.9235 2013-04-25T23:00:00Z 2013-04-26T00:02:12Z Stage and screen actor Tom Goodman-Hill talks about taking up a management position and playing Mr. Roger Grove in the popular British TV drama series Mr. Selfridge. Steve Eramo http://scifiandtvtalk.typepad.com/scifiandtvtalk/ Any good businessperson will tell you that one of the keys to success is making sure to surround yourself with the most loyal, trusted and hardest working team of people possible. Such is the case in the British drama Mr. Selfridge, currently airing Sunday nights in the States on PBS’s MASTERPIECE Classic. When American entrepreneur Harry Gordon Selfridge crosses the pond and comes to London in the early 1900s to build what becomes the world-renowned department store Selfridges, he wants only the cream of the crop working for him.

Among those who Selfridge seeks out to fill these coveted positions is Roger Grove, who he appoints as his chief of staff. While the character is a fictional one, it has its roots in the real world, as actor Tom Goodman-Hill, who plays Mr. Grove, reveals.

“The source material for the Grove character in Mr. Selfridge is based loosely on a man called Percy Best, who in real life was the store director,” explains Goodman-Hill. “However, In order to continue the show’s storyline, it was impossible to call Grove by the same name because we didn’t know enough about Percy Best’s private life to properly dramatize it. So [series creator/head writer/executive producer] Andrew Davies gave him a new name and was able to then fictionalize the character.

“My character was part of this concept relating to the mechanics of the store’s staff and how the employees all interact with one another. That idea was one of central management, something Harry Selfridge brought with him when he opened the store. Grove would be someone who staff members could approach with their grievances and complain to if they had any problems with their working conditions.

“That was a whole new idea in how the British store was managed. Up to that point, everyone was answerable to their immediate boss, or to a buyer or head buyer, but Harry Selfridge set things up so that if you had an issue, you could take it right to the top. Grove was that ear for anyone with a problem, if you know what I mean. So you had this kind of hard-line disciplinarian who was also able to be a shoulder to cry on and sympathetic to the staff. As an actor, that was the main thing for me to remember and try to embody when playing the character.”

No stranger to the actor’s prior work, it was casting director Kate Rhodes James who initially brought him in to read for the role of Grove. “Mr. Selfridge was a project I’d heard about mainly because I was very familiar with the work of Andrew Davies and had always wanted to be in something he’d written, so it was terrific just to go in for the audition,” he says. “At that time, they were being quite secretive about the script and only had a few scenes to show me, so I only knew a limited amount about Mr. Grove himself.

“Honestly, I thought I hadn’t gotten the role, but then three or four weeks later I found out I’d been cast as Mr. Grove. It was a total shock to me. When I got the call, I was actually in Selfridges with my girlfriend. We were about to go on holiday and she was buying a couple of last-minute things before we left the next day. They [the producers] wanted me to do a script read-through the following week, but I explained that I was about to leave on holiday. I figured if I was going to work for the next six months, I should at least take my holiday first.

“When I returned home, I left the airport and headed straight to rehearsals. That’s where I first met Jeremy Piven [Harry Selfridge], who was equally jet lagged, having just flown in from the States. Before long, filming began, and the thing that first comes to mind about that is the scale and beauty of the [Selfridges] set. On the UK mainland you certainly don’t get TV sets that fabulous, and it was a huge surprise where we were shooting because it’s this huge carpet warehouse that had been converted into a studio.

“So it was a shock, albeit a very pleasant one, walking onto that stunning set and seeing everyone in costume after spending a week of rehearsing around a table in a small office. It was just phenomenal. Also, because the set was such an exact replica of the real Selfridges back in the day, you really didn’t have to do too much as an actor in the way of imagining things around you. It was all pretty much there, which is a great thing to experience.”

In the premiere of Mr. Selfridge, Harry Selfridge arrives in London with a grand business plan to open a department store unlike anything European shoppers have ever seen, especially women. He was originally partnered with a British businessman, but the gentleman then pulled out of the deal when plans became much too flamboyant for his liking. Undeterred, Harry forged on alone, and while the store was being built, he recruited his senior staff, all of whom, including Mr. Grove, had to adjust to doing business Harry’s way.

“They’re like chalk and cheese, really, Harry and Grove,” notes Goodman-Hill. “They couldn’t be more different because Grove comes from a whole set of different working practices, and all of a sudden this showman comes in and changes things up. The main sort of touchstone for Jeremy Piven with his character is that Harry Selfridge worshiped P.T. Barnum. The idea of bringing showmanship into shopping was a big deal for Jeremy as well as Selfridge, and that could not be further removed from the working practices that Grove was accustomed to.

“The kind of disciplinary style that Grove is used to within a working environment is something that Selfridge himself worked very hard to kick against. The idea of we’re all in it together was something very new to the working practices, and yet there’s this thing about Grove in that he’s kind of a Selfridge want-to-be as well. He looks at Harry and can’t help but admire the way that he runs the store as well as how he takes everyone’s concerns on board and then feeds those concerns back into the staff. If anything happens within the store that affects everyone, Selfridge wants to make sure everyone knows about it so the same problems don’t keep happening. This is all new to Grove, so he’s hugely admiring of the way that Selfridge does things, but at the same time he’s constantly fighting his own personal inclinations.

“Although Grove is emotionally rather soft-centered, he has to, again, be quite a hard-lined disciplinarian. As an actor, it’s been quite exciting to explore that, and really enjoyable when Grove and Harry are onscreen together, because you can see how free Selfridge is personally and emotionally, and how buttoned-up my character is.”

As chief of staff, Mr. Grove is responsible for helping enforce all the rules set down by his boss. In the show’s second episode, he accompanies Harry Selfridge down to the store floor to confront an employee about theft. Like those around him, Mr. Grove must also adhere to store policies, which is easier said than done.

“I’ve already talked about Grove being a disciplinarian and a man who’s carrying a great emotional weight. Well, that’s complicated by the fact that he’s in a relationship with Miss Mardle [Amanda Abbington],” says Goodman-Hill. “That, of course, sets him up as a prize hypocrite because of the scene in the first episode involving the lecture about Selfridge’s employees not having inter-staff relationships, whilst he’s in the throes of a full-blown affair with Miss Mardle.

“Needless to say he has to tread extremely carefully, and it would be easy to paint him as a stock villain or, again, your classic hypocrite. However, there’s the matter of Grove having an invalid wife at home. So this relationship is something that has been very important to both him and Miss Mardle as a means of having an emotional outlet, and you kind of have to justify everything that Grove does in relation to and balancing it with his personal life.

“As the series goes on, Grove’s and Miss Mardle’s relationship really develops, and you begin to see what a slow burn that relationship is, how much history there is between them, the level of emotional support they give one another, and how crucial that is to their existence. It’s been quite something allowing that to grow as its own storyline and treat it in such a way that it’s not too much of a potboiler of an affair, but rather something with a genuine emotional ring to it. There are a few surprises with regard to things between Grove and Miss Mardle, so viewers should keep an eye on them,” he teases.

When Goodman-Hill is asked if he has a favorite scene from Mr. Selfridge’s first season, he wastes no time in answering. “It would be so very easy to choose any scene with Amanda Abbington as they’re all an absolute joy to play,” enthuses the actor, “but there’s a scene in episode three that I especially love. It was this really big and truly sumptuous day on set because we had [real-life ballerina] Natalia Kreman coming in to play legendary Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova. In this scene, Anna visits Selfridge’s and the customers as well as staff are kind of swooning as she walks around the store.

“Amanda and I had this tiny but glorious moment standing near a display case where Miss Mardle is desperate to see Roger. They’ve both been so busy at work and haven’t seen one another for a few days, and she just wants to know that their Tuesday night get-together is going to happen. They’re quietly and furiously whispering to each other about how they want to see one another. It was the first time within the store environment that they had that type of incredibly secretive, intimate opportunity to talk with each other.

“It was a great scene to do because we suddenly realized what a big deal it is for these two characters and how difficult it is for them to conduct any type of relationship in a place where they’re not allowed to express their feelings for the other. Tiny though it is, that scene is incredibly intense and a good sort of benchmark for the relationship between Grove and Miss Mardle for the rest of the series.”

An experienced stage, TV, radio and feature film actor, Goodman-Hill originally trained as a primary school teacher in his native England. After graduating from the University of Warwick with a Bachelor of Arts in drama and English with a teaching qualification, he spent a year working in the educational field before opting for a career change.

“There were two people, in particular, who taught me at Warwick and who also made me decide that I wanted to become an actor, which is massively paradoxical,” recalls Goodman-Hill with a chuckle. “Andrew Davies was a visiting teacher and already well on his way to becoming a successful TV writer and producer when I was training to be a teacher, so it was fantastic having him  speak to us about drama and education. All I could think was, ‘Wow, I want to be in one of your projects.’

“The other person was Ken Robinson. He works in the States now and is an amazing tutor and was an extraordinary figure to me. Ken was also the man who I thought would be the one to say to me, ‘You have to be a teacher.’ Truthfully, I was a terrible administrator but a great teacher in the classroom. When Ken found out how many plays I was doing whilst at university, he said to me, ‘You know, you’re a really good teacher, but you really should be an actor.’ It was strange that that happened during my time at Warwick, but it helped me form my decision to go into acting rather than teach.”

The actor spent much of his early time in the profession honing his craft onstage. Among Goodman-Hill’s theatre credits is the London production of Spamalot, for which he received a Laurence Olivier Award nomination for Best Performance in a Supporting Role in a Musical. On the big screen, he has appeared in such movies as Charlotte Gray and The League of Extraordinary Gentleman. His TV credits include a number of made-for-TV movies and miniseries as well as regular, recurring or guest star roles in such shows as Heartbeat, Spooks, Hustle, Inspector George Gently, Case Histories, Call the Midwife, Ideal and Spy. Audiences in North America have likely seen his performances in Doctor Who, Foyle’s War and Doc Martin.

“I grew up watching Doctor Who, so working on that show was never going to be anything but incredible,” says the actor. “I finished training at drama school at the same time as David Tennant [the Tenth Doctor]; he went to the Royal Scottish Academy and I went to the Bristol Royal Vic, so we’ve known each other ever since we left school. When a friend is cast as The Doctor, it’s wonderful to be then asked to guest star in an episode of his.

“The one I worked on ["The Unicorn and the Wasp"] was directed by Graeme Harper, who was one of the great directors of the original Doctor Who, so it was a thrill for me having him behind the camera.

“With Foyle’s War, I hadn’t watched much of that series before I went to do it, although I really enjoy [series creator/executive producer] Anthony Horowitz’s work. However, the main reason I was excited about this job was because of Michael Kitchen [Christopher Foyle]. I grew up watching him perform with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and I vividly remember him in Henry IV and Richard II playing Bolybrook, while his Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet was just an extraordinary moment onstage. Talk about an amazing screen actor; Michael Kitchen is a man who does it all with his eyes. So it was a real treat to guest star on Foyle’s War.

“As far as Doc Martin, by the time I came to do that series I had already worked three or four times before with Martin Clunes [Dr. Martin Ellingham]. We did Tartuffe at the National Theatre; he was Tartuffe and I played Dorine. We also did a TV adaptation of Fungus the Bogeyman, where Martin played the good guy and I was the villain, which was a lot of fun. So by the time we did Doc Martin it was very easy because Martin Clunes always makes me laugh. It was a joy shooting that episode and spending time on the coast and in a sunny little fishing village having lots of laughs and a great time working again with Martin.”

No matter what medium he is performing in, the most important thing to Goodman-Hill is the written word. “It always comes down to the writing for me,” he says. “I’m very lucky to have been able to work with some fantastic writers and amazing scripts, and the reward always comes with feeling like you’re interpreting those writers as best as you possibly can. So whether it’s in film, TV or the theatre or on the radio, I always look to the writing first.

“There’s a radio show in the UK called Desert Island Discs where guests come on and choose the eight records that they would take to a desert island with them. Sir Derek Jacobi did the show once, and the first thing that the presenter, Sue Lawley, said to him was, ‘Derek, you’ve had a wonderful career…,’ and Derek said, ‘Can I just stop you there. I haven’t had a career; I’ve had a series of jobs.’

“That’s something I’ve held in the back of my head. It’s such a wonderful thing to hear because you have to be very grateful for each job that comes along. You have to be even more grateful if you’re lucky enough to work on a good script every time that next job comes along. I feel like I’ve had that kind of luck where, again, I’ve been able to work with incredible writers and enjoy playing characters that jump off the page at me.”

Please note, all Mr. Selfridge photos copyright of ITV.

]]> A Perfect Day: Interview with 42's Jud Tylor tag:www.themortonreport.com,2013://1.9230 2013-04-18T21:00:00Z 2013-04-18T21:58:57Z Actress Jud Tylor talks about stepping back into the 1940s to play screen legend Laraine Day in the feature film 42. Steve Eramo http://scifiandtvtalk.typepad.com/scifiandtvtalk/ When she was 27 years old, the late feature film/television actress and former MGM contract star Laraine Day wed her second husband, American infielder and baseball manager Leo Durocher. The two were married from 1947 to 1960, during which time she became known to fans as “The First Lady of Baseball.” While Durocher was manager of The New York Yankees, Day wrote her first book, Day with the Giants, published in 1952. She also hosted a 15-minute television interview program of the same name that aired before New York Giants home games.

Given their association with as well as contributions to America’s favorite pastime, it is no surprise that Day and Durocher are part of 42, the newly released biographical feature film about the legendary baseball player Jackie Robinson. When its producers were looking for someone to play Day, they chose the beautiful and talented Jud Tylor. While casting can sometimes be a long and arduous process, this one turned out to be quite painless for the actress.

“I went in for my initial audition, which casting liked, and that was followed by a callback,” recalls Tylor. “That’s when I had the opportunity to read the entire script for 42, which I fell absolutely in love with. It’s such a phenomenal and inspiring story of one human being’s triumph against all odds.

“During the callback I read for [the movie’s writer/director] Brian Helgeland, who wrote two of my favorite films, Man on Fire and Mystic River, so to be in the room with him and be given a chance to read for him was such an honor in and of itself. At that point I felt very much invested in the project because, again, I loved the story as well as Brian’s interpretation of Laraine Day. I went back just one more time to read and then received a phone call telling me that I had booked the role.”

42 follows the life story of Jackie Robinson (Chadwick Boseman), who, under the guidance of Brooklyn Dodgers executive Branch Rickey (Harrison Ford), signed with the team and became the first African-American to break baseball’s color line. The film features other familiar names in the sports and entertainment industries including sportscaster Red Barber (John C. McGinley), ten-time All Star player Pee Wee Reese (Lucas Black), outfielder/manager Ben Chapman (Alan Tudyk), Leo Durocher (Christopher Meloni) and, of course, Laraine Day (Tylor). What were some of the challenges for Tylor as far as stepping into the shoes of such a well-known actress?

“Whenever you’re part of a non-fictional piece and helping tell a real-life story as opposed to creating a fictional character in a fictional piece, there’s a sense of accountability,” she says. “You have a responsibility to the person who you’re portraying to bring them alive in the most honest and truthful way.

“I think that was probably my biggest challenge playing Laraine Day. She was a bit of a dichotomy because on the one hand she was this glamorous movie star who became involved in this very scandalous public affair. [C David Heymann’s 2009 book Bobby and Jackie: A Love Story claimed that the actress had at one time been a lover of John F. Kennedy. Her children later sued Haymann on slander charges.] On the other hand, Day was a devout Mormon who was very active in the church as well as being an environmentalist.

“Having the right hair, make-up and wardrobe were also definite assets in helping me step back into the era we were depicting. In this case, I think the 1940s were quite different from our modern day society in that there was an innocence that was lost in later years along with a sense of idealism as well as upholding of specific values and a much clearer specification of male/female roles. I tried to incorporate all those qualities into my portrayal of Laraine.”

From day one of her stepping onto set, right through to the end of production and everywhere in-between, Tylor’s experiences filming 42 are memorable to her for a variety of reasons.

“On my first day at work I met Harrison Ford, who to me is a legend,” says the actress. “I grew up with the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films, and I just think that he’s a hero and a classic old-time movie star. I’m delighted to tell you that Harrison Ford is exactly as I expected him to be. He’s charming and still sexy at 70 years old as well as incredibly supportive and kind to his fellow actors. He’s a lovely man and meeting Harrison Ford is probably what stands out most in my mind about starting out on this film. Working with him was amazing. The same is true of Brian Helgeland as well as Chris Meloni and everyone else involved.

“The funniest thing that happened while I was shooting 42 actually has to do with my dog. We filmed in Atlanta, Georgia, and because I was traveling I decided to take my dog Ranger with me. On my first day of work I left him in my trailer, and while I was on set I heard that there was a dog loose at craft services. It never dawned on me that it was Ranger, but when I got back to my trailer, the door was open and he was gone.

“I walked over to craft services and found him begging one of the crew members for a jelly doughnut. I assumed that I’d left my trailer door open or had not properly locked it, so I put him back inside and made sure the door was secure. Well, the next time I heard that a dog was loose over at craft services, I knew who the culprit was. That’s when I discovered that Ranger can open doors with handles. One day I should set up a video camera and see exactly how he does it, but I guess he stands up on his hind legs and put his weight on the door handle until he opens the door. So that’s my silly 42 set story.”

When Tylor was a little girl, the Canadian-born actress would build makeshift sets and perform one-man (or girl) plays for her parents. As she got older, her creative passion grew with her. While still at school, she did some modeling, but initially planned on taking a very different type of career path.

“I had decided to become a veterinarian when one of my friends who was working a great deal as an actress, introduced me to an agent,” notes the actress. “In my mind this was a way for me to make some extra income while going to school, so I read a monologue for him, and within two weeks I was auditioned for the role of one of the wives in the Rodney Dangerfield movie My 5 Wives. I managed to get the job, and from there I more or less put school on the back burner and just continued to book more work.

“So I feel like acting kind of chose me, not that it wasn’t something that I always had an interest in anyway, but that was the path that my life took. Of course, at first I really didn’t know what I was doing. I had no idea what continuity was or even a mark, so it was a learning experience for me and probably more than a little bit exasperating for some of the crew members. It was exciting for me, though. I loved the movie Back to School with Rodney Dangerfield, so stepping onto a film set for the first time with someone I admired was an incredible experience. He was a lovely man and I had to pinch myself that this was happening for real.”

Freshman Orientation, What Love Is and Charlie Wilson’s War are among the actress’s other feature film credits. On TV, Tylor has appeared in a number of made-for-TV movies and guest starred on such series as Viper, Seven Days, Smallville, Just Cause, Dawson’s Creek, CSI: Miami and Mad Men. She also played a recurring role on That ‘70s Show and was a series regular on Edgemont and, most recently, HBO’s Good God.

“Good God is somewhat of a hybrid of Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Office,” says Tylor. “The series stars Ken Finkleman, who also wrote and directed it, and is very intelligent, very politically correct and very funny. I play a character named Tory, who’s a bit of an anomaly. My character is an escort, but she also has this childlike innocence and goofy charm. Tory is also really sweet, a little naïve and a lot crazy,” jokes the actress. “I was actually nominated for a Canadian Screen Award for my performance as Tory. I didn’t win the award but I was flown to Toronto for the awards show and just to be nominated was a huge thrill for me.”

You can follow Jud Tylor on Twitter @judtylor

]]> Musical Interlude: Interview with Actor/Singer John Corbett tag:www.themortonreport.com,2013://1.9217 2013-04-11T22:40:00Z 2013-04-11T23:40:18Z Actor John Corbett talks about embracing his passion for music and turning it into another creative outlet in his long, varied and successful career. Steve Eramo http://scifiandtvtalk.typepad.com/scifiandtvtalk/ Television audiences are likely to remember John Corbett as convicted felon/disk jockey/ordained minister Chris Stevens on the quirky and popular TV series Northern Exposure, or perhaps for his role as Carrie Bradshaw’s boyfriend Aidan Shaw in Sex in the City (as well as that show’s feature film outing Sex in the City 2), while moviegoers enjoyed his performance opposite Nia Vardalos in the hit 2002 feature film movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

What some people might not know, however, is that Corbett is an accomplished country music singer. In February, he released his second album, Leaving Nothin’ Behind, and just recently, Corbett finished an 18-city tour, all the logistics of which he painstakingly coordinated with a TV project he was working on at the same time. This second album was, in fact, the direct result of a prior musical venture.

“I made my first record in 2006 [the self-titled John Corbett], which was just a fluke,” notes Corbett. “It was the result of a trip to Nashville to be a presenter at an award show that I’d been asked to be a part of. My buddy, Tara Novack, who I sat around playing guitar with since 1986, had never been to Nashville, so I said, ‘Let’s go. I hear it’s a great town.’

“So we took this amazing trip that lasted for three days and met people interested in the same things as we were. In the old Hollywood circle that I’d been jumping around in forever, you meet some musicians here and there, but most people are concentrating on acting. In Nashville, however, there is everything we like to do, which is write songs, play music, have a couple of beers, go listen to music, etc. and we just gravitated towards that.

“At the end of the three days, we decided that we were going to come back to Nashville and make a record. It would just be something we’d make probably 100 copies of and give to our friends and family to say, ‘Look what we did.’ It was around Thanksgiving 2006, I believe, and we flew into Nashville on a Thursday in order to meet some people at the publishing houses there. We wanted to see if they had a couple of songs from their songwriters that we could add to the eight songs we’d written to round out our album, which we were going to record the following Monday.

“By the end of Friday we had, I think, no less than 40 songs from about six publishing houses that we thought were great. All of our songs ended up in the trash; they were just silly little rhymes compared to the stories that these Nashville songwriting pros had written. That night, I was sitting in the car with a pen and a piece of paper, and my guitar player was in the back seat. We had narrowed things down to 12 songs that we were going to put on the record. I now had to learn how to sing these 12 songs by Monday, because I didn’t want the guys who were coming in to play on this record to think, ‘Oh, here’s this guy from Hollywood who doesn’t know what he’s doing.’

“By the time we were finished with that record, we thought, ‘This is as good as anything playing on the radio today.’ So we decided to put a band together. I had a couple of bucks saved up from working, so I hired a radio promotion team along with a publicist and we just went at this thing full-force. Funnily enough, at that point in my life I’d never really sung in public before. Even though I’ve been doing it since I was a kid, it was usually just around friends and family.

“Cut now to last year. A friend of mine called me up from Nashville and said, ‘Hey, I heard you’re making a new record here in town.’ I asked her, ‘Where did you hear that? It’s not happening, but if I did, I’ve love to make a record with [singer/songwriter/musician] Jon Randall Stewart and sing all his songs. I’d met Jon during my second trip to Nashville, and he had just produced Dierks Bentley’s Up on the Ridge bluegrass album. Well, my friend told Jon, and two days later he called me up and said, ‘Hey, man, I hear you want to make a record. Why don’t you come back here and we’ll do it.’

“So that’s how that happened — it was sheer luck. We started work on the second album over a year ago—in fact, this past Christmas it was a year—and it just takes so much time out of your life. You feel like this record is the thing that’s going to be on your tombstone and it’s got to be right. It takes a lot of energy out of you and you think of nothing else.”

Corbett’s love of music is obvious in the way he speaks about it. Where does that passion originally come from?

“It’s funny, my mom and dad split up when I was two and I didn’t get to know my dad at all,” he says. “Even though his family didn’t live too far away from us—they lived in Ohio and I lived in West Virginia with my mom—we didn’t have ties. I didn’t get to know my dad until I left home at the age of 18 and showed up on his doorstep. He was a welder and I wanted to try to get a welding job in California because I didn’t go to college.

“When I got to know my dad, I found out that he came from a big musical family. We have pictures of the five brothers and sisters along with their parents, and from around the age of seven or eight, the children all had trumpets, French horns, tubas, pianos and drums. The last photos were probably taken around 1979 or 1980, and the kids were all grown up by then, but they’re still sitting there with their instruments. My dad played sax and the piano as part of a band when he was in the army, and, In fact, I still have his childhood saxophones as well as flute and accordion.

“Maybe I inherited some of his musical DNA, because from the time I was four or five years old, if something had strings on it or I could bang on it with a stick, I would play with it. I learned to play piano when I was nine or ten. A friend of mine had one, so I used to go over there and practice the chords. I’ve just always enjoyed making sounds that are pleasant to the ear.”

Corbett’s very first musical performance in front of a live audience (and on TV) was during an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. “If I have my dates right, it was 1993 or 1994 and a day or two before Christmas,” he recalls. “I was living in Seattle, Washington and working on Northern Exposure. It was really one of my first times being on a talk show, and I called The Tonight Show people up a couple of days before and asked, ‘Hey, can I come on and sing a rockin’ Christmas song with my band?’

“Back then I didn’t even have a band; there was just me and my friend and guitar player Tara, who still plays guitar in my band. They said, ‘Well, send us a record or something.’ I explained that I didn’t really have anything like that, so they said that they’d get back to me. That night I got a call back and they told me, ‘Look, we never do anything like this unless we know what we’re getting into. We’d love to have you sing on the show, but we have to do it under these conditions — you and your band show up and we’ll do a full rehearsal. If we don’t like what’s happening, and we have to be totally honest with you, you’re just going to be a guest and we’ll scratch that part of the show.’ I said, ‘Fair enough.’

“Tara called my buddy James Intveld, who’s an amazing guitar player and American artist and asked if he’d like to come play the bass. James then called his buddy Richie Weiss, who plays the drums, and the three of them got together and began rehearsing. I subsequently flew down from Seattle and we rehearsed in The Tonight Show parking lot on the day we were hoping to perform on the show. We did kind of a rockin’ Stevie Ray Vaughn version of the Elvis Presley blue-grass-ish song “Santa Claus is Back in Town” with everyone watching — including, I think, Jay Leno — and two minutes later they said, ‘Okay, let’s do this. It’s going to be great.’

“So they let us sing on The Tonight Show. I had never sung in public before, and it was great, man,” enthuses Corbett. “I was supposed to be the first guest introduced, and I asked them, ‘Could I please sing before I come out, because if I come out and talk with Jay, I’m going to be nervous enough, and then I’m going to have to get up there and sing. I’ll be a wreck.’ Fortunately, they were amenable to my little master plan and let me do exactly that.” That’s what I remember most about that whole experience, the fact that it was totally off-the-cuff and I’m still kind of amazed that they let me do it.”

Switching gears into Corbett’s acting career, like music, this was another part of his professional life that he initially had no inclination or desire to ever pursue. “I never thought I’d be talking to you or anybody else about any part of my life, not when I was younger or when I knocked on my dad’s door when I was 18,” admits the actor.

“I worked in a steel mill factory for six years. My dad was a heavy laborer his entire life and I thought that’s what I was going to do, which I was happy to do. In 1980, I had a job that paid me almost $20 an hour, and it was a union job, too. Here we are 33 years later, and I’m not sure I could go out and get a job paying me $20 an hour today. It was a great living and hard work, but at 18 years old I had a new car, you know? I never thought I’d ever sit in a living room and see myself on TV talking to Sarah Jessica Parker [Carrie Bradshaw in Sex in the City] and giving her a kiss. It’s just a bizarre thing that I still sometimes can’t wrap my mind around, the fact that I got lucky enough to be picked to do some of the things I’ve gotten to do ever since I decided to give it [acting] a try and see if I could make any headway in the profession.”

Having moved out to Los Angeles in 1986, the actor worked in the theatre over the next two years before booking his first professional TV job in an episode of a new TV series called The Wonder Years. “This was for a big guest star role, and Dan Lauria, who played the dad on the show, was reading with all the actors coming in to try out,” says Corbett. “He looked at my resume and knew some of the plays that I’d been involved in. I did my audition, Dan and I hit it off, and he said, ‘Well, come on, let’s do this.’

“I played sort of a rebellious college hippie, and at the time I had almost shoulder-length hair, so I looked the part. Dan really pulled for me to get this job, even though I had nothing on my resume, and I ended up getting a tremendous amount of attention out of it. That resulted in a lot more interviews and meetings for additional [acting] work.

“Two years later I got my other substantial break, which turned out to be a Jack in the Box commercial,” he continues. “I was the only actor in it, and I was talking about this delicious tasting cheeseburger in a sourdough roll that I was eating. In between bites, I’d look at the camera and just go on and on about how fantastic this cheeseburger was. Someone at CBS Universal saw it and brought me in for a meeting, where they told me, ‘If you can do what you did in that commercial for 30 seconds, we want to see what else you can do.’

“A couple of weeks after that I was on a plane up to Seattle to shoot eight episodes of Northern Exposure, which I think was the original series order.  Barry Corbin, who played Maurice on the show, was on the same flight, and I just sat there thinking ‘Wow, I get to be on a show with my hero from [the movies] Urban Cowboy and War Games.’

“When you’re young like that, you go to the set every day even when you’re not working just to watch and learn. I just remember seeing Rob Morrow, Janine Turner, Barry Corbin, John Cullum, everyone, working very hard. That was such a magical time. It was also a major life-changer for me after the show began to air. To have so many people come up to me and say, ‘Hey, you’re Chris in the Morning,’ was a really big deal for a guy like me. You’re only famous once and you never forget it.”

Besides the aforementioned Sex and the City 2 and My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Corbett’s other big screen credits include Dinner Rush, Raising Helen, Street Kings, The Burning Plain and Baby on Board. On TV, he has appeared in several made-for-TV movies and, along with Northern Exposure, had a recurring role on Parenthood and was a series regular on United States of Tara. The actor also played the lead in Lucky as well as the short-lived sci-fi series The Visitor.

“The Visitor was an incredible experience,” says Corbett. “I loved working with [series creators/executive producers] Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich. I don’t see Roland that much any more, but I still see Dean every now and then, and we always do that Hollywood thing of, hey, man, we’ve got to do another project together. He and Roland are two very special guys, and although I wasn’t a producer on their show — I was simply an actor for hire — they went out of their way to make me feel as if I were a participant in the creative aspect of The Visitor on just about every level.”

Corbett recently guest starred in Red, a two-part episode of NCIS: Los Angeles and what is called a “backdoor pilot” for the NCIS franchise’s next spin-off, NCIS: Red.

“I play Roy, a former cop and agent who was shot in the line of duty and is now an analyst,” explains the actor. “Hopefully this will lead to him eventually becoming an agent again and being more hands-on with the cases. For the time being, though, the other guys do the legwork while he gives them his two cents about their findings. The Red Team’s function is to travel all over the U.S. solving naval-related crimes. They have a mobile unit that goes to the Mexican border, and ultimately in the outline of the show, they’ll be able to travel the world to places like Pakistan and Afghanistan.

“It’s a terrific premise for a series and I really love my cast, which includes Scott Grimes and Kim Raver, who plays my character’s kind of nemesis/partner. They have a past and, therefore, some conflict, which makes for good TV. I had a ball getting to hang out with LL Cool J, Chris O’Donnell and the whole team over there at NCIS: Los Angeles. They were incredibly welcoming and incredibly nice to us while we were shooting on their set.”

Please note: first four photos of John Corbett are by and copyright of Bo Derek. For more information about his music, check out his website.

]]> An Ever-Enduring Spirit: Interview with Mr. Selfridge's Aisling Loftus tag:www.themortonreport.com,2013://1.9210 2013-04-05T21:30:00Z 2013-04-05T22:32:38Z Step through the doors of the world-famous London department store Selfridges (circa 1910) with actress Aisling Loftus, who talks about playing Agnes Towler in the popular ITV series Mr. Selfridge. Steve Eramo http://scifiandtvtalk.typepad.com/scifiandtvtalk/ It was a day just like any other in the early 1900s, when the pretty and soft-spoken Agnes Towler arrived at the stuffy London department store where she worked as a salesgirl. As she tended to her counter, an American, Mr. Harry Gordon Selfridge, turned up and asked to see a pair of gloves. It was an innocent and simple enough request, but Agnes had no idea that it would end up getting her fired and changing her life forever.

As one proverbial door closed, another opened for her as well as for actress Aisling Loftus, who was thrilled to find out that she had booked the role of Agnes in the popular British TV drama series Mr. Selfridge.

“The audition process for the character was actually a fairly short one,” recalls Loftus. “The casting director, Kate Rhodes James, who had cast me in a previous project, sent me just a few scenes from Mr. Selfridge because they weren’t initially releasing that much about it. All we had to go on was that it was going to be a big production by ITV here in the UK and Andrew Davies was the head writer [and one of the show’s executive producers]. That immediately signaled good things, and I’m a big fan of Andrew Davies, which made it even more enticing.

“So I went in to read for the Agnes role and met with producer Chrissy Skins as well as the casting director and the director [Jon Jones] of the first two episodes. We spoke a little bit about the character, including my take on her, and I read the few scenes I’d been given. Honestly, I thought I had completely messed things up and I was really upset about it afterwards because this was something I felt very strongly about and a role I’d love to play. A couple of weeks later, though, I received a phone call offering me the part. Here I was, having pretty much assumed when I left the audition room that that was the last thing I would hear about it. I guess, though, I fitted what they wanted in Agnes, so it was a delightful surprise for me.”

Currently airing Sunday nights as part of Masterpiece Classic on PBS, Mr. Selfridge tells the story of the gregarious, somewhat larger-than-life and visionary entrepreneur Harry Selfridge (Jeremy Piven). After transforming Chicago’s Marshall Fields into a modern department store, Harry comes to London intent not only to build the world’s biggest and best department store, but also revolutionize the way that customers, especially women, shop. Having booked the part of Agnes, what sticks out most in Loftus’ mind about her first day on set.

“The fact that is was very cold,” she says with a laugh. “We shot all the scenes that took place in Agnes’s flat, the set for which is in the dingiest corner of the studio. Although it was absolutely freezing, I had this nervous energy and was totally oblivious to the cold, to the point that I didn’t even realize that my feet had gone numb until I was taking off my shoes at the end of the day.

“It was all such an adrenaline rush on that first day of meeting the rest of the cast and seeing how beautiful the sets and costumes were. It was just an awful lot bigger than I think I originally imagined it was going to be, and we all couldn’t wait to start telling this story.”

Harry Selfridge’s exuberance and unconventional ideas of what the shopping experience should be is what led to Agnes to being fired. When she found out that he was planning to open his own store, Agnes went to his London home to inquire about a job. Harry immediately saw the potential in her and hired Agnes as part of his sale staff at Selfridges. That was the start of a big transformation for Agnes, and Loftus was looking forward to tagging along for the ride.

“I’m a huge fan of [the American TV series] Mad Men, and I especially adore Peggy Olson [Elizabeth Moss], and someone has since described in a news piece about Mr. Selfridge that Agnes is, perhaps, Peggy Olson’s great grandma,” notes the actress. “I thought that was the best thing I’d ever heard, and I suppose the reason I’m making the comparison is that initially Peggy is quite trodden upon and meek. She doesn’t know what she wants, or at least doesn’t know the right way to go about getting it. Peggy gets thrown into this world that she’s not equipped to deal with and consequently makes some bad judgments.

“Her bad judgments are probably very different in the 1950s from those that Agnes can make in 1910, but I love that Agnes begins her story in much the same way as Peggy. My character doesn’t have a very clear sense of herself or at least what she could be, and where Peggy obviously ends up, and where I feel to some extent Agnes ends up by the end of the [first] season is similar. She develops a real sense of her identity as well as a real sense of ambition and a dignity in that ambition.

“Within the context of 1910 London, a working class girl like Agnes needed to survive,” continues Loftus. “She needed to make money and do it in a respectable fashion, but she couldn’t expect much more out of life. Back then, the ordinary person's sense of ambition wasn’t like it is today, where there’s more of a ‘me’ culture. It’s like you deserve to get to the top of your tree, and you deserve the best and you owe it to yourself, whereas in Agnes’s time it was more a matter of you needed to survive.

“So I liked that Agnes was under Mr. Selfridge’s guidance and kind of influence. Because of that, she starts to carve out a bit of a different path for herself than she could have ever expected to follow otherwise. Again, Agnes starts off with quite low expectations of herself, her life and, I think, of men, actually. However, as the episodes go on, her world becomes a much bigger place, and the world at large becomes a much bigger place, too. No longer is she going to just sit back and take the pain and be beaten down. Instead, Agnes can now take from her experiences and learn and grow from them.

“At the start of the series, the closest men in Agnes’ life are her father, Reg Towler [Nick Moran], who’s very abusive, psychologically as well as physically, and her brother George [Callum Callaghan], for whom she’s very much a maternal figure. There aren’t a lot of male figures in her life that are anything more than I suppose in some ways parasitic, in terms of her dad, or in her brother’s case, dependent on Agnes. However, Harry Selfridge and Henri Leclair [Gregory Fitoussi] treat her as a valuable asset in terms of who she is, rather than just a woman who can be manipulated or abused to some extent.”

Although she was hired to work at Selfridges as a salesgirl in the accessories department, Agnes’s business sense along with her attentive and caring way with the customers and her imaginative spirit soon set her apart from her fellow workers. She is recruited by Henri Leclair, head of the store’s creative department, to help him develop a perfume for the ordinary woman. Agnes also provides the finishing touch for one of Henri’s store window displays. Meanwhile, Agnes catches the eye of Victor Colleano (Trystan Gravelle), a waiter in the store’s posh restaurant. All these positive relationships have a significant impact on the growth of Agnes as a character.

“Victor is very much someone who Agnes probably would have come across at some point in her life,” says Loftus. “I realize it might sound negative and it’s not meant to, but he is a very realistic prospect in terms of someone with whom she could have a happy life and children and that whole domestic set-up. Victor is from the same world as Agnes, and he has the same take on the world that she does. I suppose they’re kindred spirits in the sense that they both have ambition above what life has kind of led them to believe that they can achieve.

“So Victor and Agnes both have ambition but they’re also from the same stock and very much working class people, whereas Harry Selfridge and Henri Leclair are exotic ‘creatures’ that Agnes would never have met were it not for getting a job at Selridges. She would never have come across a bohemian spirit like Henri, or someone as vivacious and tenacious as Harry because he’s very much one of a kind. He’s sort of like a panther that has come to London and someone who no one has really seen before, at least not up close.

“Agnes is initially in awe of both of them, but as she gets to know Henri she starts to fall for him in less of an infatuation type of way and more of really deeply falling for him. As for Harry, her respect for him just grows and grows, and he’s very much a figure in her eyes to aspire to. He’s also quite paternal towards Agnes throughout the season. Harry sees how talented she could be and decides to take the risk and invest in that to try to get her to be all she can be.

“One of my favorite scenes from Mr. Selfridge is the first episode and between Agnes and Mr. Selfridge. My character is in a very desperate situation, but really tries to conduct herself as a lady when she goes to see Mr. Selfridge after learning that he’s setting up this big store and needs not just lots of new employees, but a certain kind of employee.

“At this point in the story Agnes is in a really bad way. She’s unemployed, and to be unemployed at that time in history and in London was a very bad thing. Despite this, she makes every effort to show herself in the best light to Mr. Selfridge. Harry sees Agnes masking her desperation and has the kindness as well as intelligence to realize that underneath this desperate situation is someone who is valuable and could be valuable to his business plan. I really like the dynamic of that scene as far as these two people sussing one another out, and I thoroughly enjoyed acting opposite Jeremy Piven in it,” enthuses the actress.

A familiar face to television audiences on both sides of the pond, Loftus has appeared in a number of made-for-TV movies as well as miniseries and guest starred on such series as Casualty, Doctors, The Bill, Case Histories, Public Enemies, Good Cop and Little Crackers. The actress was just nine years old when she made her small screen professional debut as Abby Moffat in "Electricity," an episode of the long-running Sunday night British series Peak Practice.

“I played a little girl whose mum had left her and her little sister to take care of themselves, and my character’s sister became very ill,” she says. “Back then, it just felt like I was playing make-believe in earnest and with grown-ups. I was pretending to be this little girl and everyone around me was willing to and wanted to believe in that as much as possible.

“I suppose my first acting job, in terms of when I truly began to feel that this was definitely what I wanted to do for a living, was a short film called Jade. I played the title character and the film won the Silver Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival. All of a sudden I was being approached by different London agents. I subsequently signed with an agent and began auditioning and started working.

“When we were shooting Jade I never thought, ‘Right, this is going to be a game-changer for me career-wise.’ I was just totally committed to the work. In the film, my character finds out she’s pregnant and goes into survival mode. In her mind, the father could be one of two people — either her teenage boyfriend or a 40-year-old man who is also her employer. She decides that it needs to be the older man, and she seeks his comfort, but he ends up rejecting her. I’ve simplified the story, but it’s a very visual short and quite beautiful, too. I still feel very proud of the film.”

Having enjoyed acting from a young age, there was no other profession that Loftus ever wanted to pursue. Despite the unpredictability of the industry, she was still determined to take that creative leap. “I think from where I’m from anyway, if you said you wanted to be an actor, some people would wonder if you were ‘delusional’ and advise against it. They’d say to you, ‘Why not have a rethink. Perhaps you could go to university and then teach drama instead.’ Their concern would not be misplaced, considering that many actors aren’t able to support themselves on just the money they make from acting.

“I can’t remember the exact specifics, but there are a huge percentage of actors that are out of work, so it’s understandable that some people would be a little bit skeptical. I could never forgive myself, though, if I didn’t at least try, and try I have. Luckily I’ve worked pretty consistently, and not just consistently, but on projects I’ve been proud to do and proud of, like Mr. Selfridge. I feel so lucky to be apart of that cast and show."

Please note, all Mr. Selfridge photos copyright of ITV Studios.

]]> The Human Equation: Interview with Bomb Girls' Meg Tilly tag:www.themortonreport.com,2013://1.9203 2013-04-02T16:10:00Z 2013-04-02T17:11:08Z The lovely, talented and engaging actress/writer Meg Tilly talks about her life and career, including her current role as Lorna Corbett in the Canadian-made wartime TV drama series Bomb Girls. Steve Eramo http://scifiandtvtalk.typepad.com/scifiandtvtalk/ During World War II every able-bodied person helped in the fight against the enemy. While the men served on the front lines, the women did whatever necessary back home to support the troops. The popular Canadian-made TV drama Bomb Girls follows the stories of four women working in a Canadian munitions factory while the conflict continues to unfold overseas.

Multi-talented stage and screen performer Meg Tilly plays Lorna Corbett, Blue Shift floor matron at the Victory Munitions bomb factory. Having taken an extended break from her profession in order to raise a family, the actress decided not too long ago to venture back into the industry. She had no idea, though, that her efforts would result in a lead role in a brand new TV project.

“I didn’t know if I would be successful at my attempt to return to acting, but I decided to give it a try because I wanted to do plays,” says Tilly. “When my children were young I always thought, ‘Oh, I’d love to do some theatre,’ but theatre doesn’t pay much of anything. It would have cost me more to move my children to a town that had a play going on and pay someone to help take care of them than I’d actually earn doing the play. When my children grew up, however, I figured maybe I could try, but I seriously didn’t expect or even plan on being asked to audition for a TV show or get such a great role right off the bat.

“I had a new Canadian agent, Rich Kaplan, who asked me if I’d meet with the people from Bomb Girls. He told me they were lovely, so I said, ‘Sure, of course.’ I met with Adrienne Mitchell, who’s one of the co-creators of the show and who also directed the first two episodes of the first and second seasons. She was so insightful about the Lorna character and brought so many layers to it in just the 20- or 30-minute period I spent with her. By the end of our meeting, I was all fired up about the part. A director who can really help you become a better actress is such a joy to work with, so I thought, ‘If they want me to do this, I’ll do it.’

“I’ve really loved getting to know Lorna, and [head writer] Michael MacLennan and his team of writers have done remarkable things with all the characters on the show. So I’m incredibly grateful to be a part of something like this.”

Bomb Girls originally started out as six-part miniseries, but when it was renewed for its current second season, it was given a full 12-episode order. The season one opener, "Jumping Tracks," introduces the show’s four main characters including Gladys Witham (Jodi Balfour) and Kate Andrews (Charlotte Hegele), both of whom have just begun working the Blue Shift at Victory Munitions. The factory’s best worker, Betty McRae (Ali Liebert) is asked to take Kate under her wing, while the Blue Shift’s tough but caring floor matron Lorna Corbett (Meg Tilly) butts heads with Marco Moretti (Antonio Cupo), an Italian-born worker at the factory. Having been away from acting for a while, it took Tilly a little bit of time to re-acclimate herself to the process and get comfortable in Lorna’s shoes.

“Before filming began on Bomb Girls, we had a read-through of the first script,” says the actress. “We have a huge cast, and a number of people already knew each other from having worked together on other projects. I had been away from acting for 17 years being a mom, so I felt kind of shy, especially having to say my lines out loud for the first time in a long time.

“You work on the script as well as your character, but you don’t know if it’s going to sound right or ‘feel right’ in your belly. So the read-through is always the most heart-pounding. Some people get nervous on the first day of shooting, but for me, it’s that first time you sit down with all the other actors and get a sense of the faces and the personalities along with the flow of things.

“As far as Lorna, when I read the first script, I didn’t really get her,” continues Tilly. “She does some things that make you think, ‘Wow, That’s not very nice.’ However, when I began working with Adrienne Mitchell, I saw the various layers to Lorna emerge and discovered the beauty of this character that Michael MacLennan had created.

“What I love about Lorna is that she’s human and a mix of things. She’s not black and white. Sometimes she behaves quite honorably and heroically, and other times she behaves badly. It’s just that humanness in her that we all have. Lorna is learning and growing and falling down and picking herself up, and along the way she’s finding out who she is.

“That’s kind of an ongoing process that all of us as humans do in real life. You try to be the best person you can be and try to work in the truest way you can, but there are times when you’re blindsided by a less-than charitable action, thought or realization that you’re being different. You thought you were behaving honorably and well, but in hindsight that really wasn’t the case. That happens with Lorna as well, and again, I think that’s what I love about her. It’s what I love about all the characters in the show, the fact that they’re all human and there’s no one who’s the good guy or the bad guy.”

A nit-picker when it comes to how Blue Shift does its job at Victory Munitions, Lorna is also the first person who will stick up for the rights of the women working under her and with her. On the home front, she is married to Bob (Peter Outerbridge) a World War I veteran who was left a cripple and suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The couple have three children, a daughter who works as a nurse’s aide, and twin sons, both of whom are fighting in the war.

Bob’s medical issues have put a strain on his and Lorna’s marriage, especially with regard to intimacy. Much to her surprise, Lorna finds herself attracted to Marco, which results in an affair as well as pregnancy that ends, sadly, in a miscarriage when Bob learns of her affair.

“There are going to be big changes for US viewers in season two of Bomb Girls,” reveals Tilly. “There were shifts with these characters in season one, but I don’t think Lorna ever expected to fall for Marco. After all, she was prejudiced against him in the beginning and rather rabid-doggish about the whole thing. We never know what’s going to happen until we get the next new script, but my concern during the first season — and this actually kept me awake at night — was that my character had made a mistake with Marco and in judging him. She discovered, though, that she was wrong and felt bad about it.

“The nice thing about Lorna is that, yes, she does not-so-nice things sometimes, but once she realizes or discovers that she was wrong, she tries to make amends and correct things. Lorna is a compassionate person as well, and when she tried to made amends with Marco, she became attracted to and enamored of him. Again, at the start of the series you never would have thought that could happen, but it did and those feelings grew. Lorna couldn’t help but be drawn towards Marco. It had been many, many years of no intimacy with her husband, and Bob was so trapped in his own pain that all he could do was flail out and try to control as well as criticize her. Lorna’s boys were away, so she wasn’t getting hugs from them, either.

“Lorna used to work on the line in the bomb factory, but was then promoted to floor matron. That position earns her more money, which she needs because she supports her whole family. However, it’s also a position that’s isolating and makes her an outsider with the other girls. So instead of being one of them, having chats as they do and working shoulder to shoulder on the line, now my character is the one who has to say, ‘Speed it up.’ She kind of has to be the person who cracks the whip a little bit.

“So Lorna had a very lonely life and she just kept trying to put one foot in front of the other and shore up. Suddenly it appears that Marco is noticing her, and to be seen by him when she couldn’t even ‘see’ herself, was so heady. It made her feel things she hadn’t felt in a while. At the same time, I, Meg, was worried for Lorna because I didn’t know if Marco was playing her. Was he a ladies’ man and someone who was going to hurt her irrevocably? At the end of season one, Lorna made the decision that that was it. She had ‘fallen,’ but wasn’t going to continue down that road and was going to stay with her husband.

“As I mentioned earlier, Lorna’s and Bob’s relationship and Lorna’s and Marco’s relationship changes a lot this season. As events take place with the war overseas as well as back home, everyone changes, as life naturally changes in challenging times, it just does. And because of what happened in season one, I think in season two Lorna starts off seeing the world very differently.”

Tilly speaks with great enthusiasm about some of her favorite scenes she has shared with her Bomb Girls costars. “There’s a scene I did with Jodi Balfour — I think it may have been halfway through this season — where she just knocked it out of the park,” says the actress. “It was so beautiful and she was so connected to the material. There was another scene I did with her where our characters are in the shower room. We eventually changed how Lorna was interacting with Gladys and it became more about the other girls when we actually went to shoot it. Again, though, in rehearsing of scene, there was that same connection and I just feel so proud of how Jodi is blossoming into this amazing actress and woman.

“There’s a young man named Brett Dier who joined our cast for a few shows this season [playing one of Lorna’s and Bob’s sons, Eugene “Gene” Corbett], and I was floored by the complexity as well as detail and focus that he brought to his character. Once again, I felt so honored to be on the other side of the camera and working with a fellow actor like Brett. I tend to remember scenes where someone else has done amazing work. It makes my heart sing because they’re so easy to be with. I’ve noticed all the characters along with the actors doing such beautiful work, and I guess those are the moments that stick in my heart.

“Rosie O’Donnell came on the show this season to guest star in episode nine ["The Enemy Within"]. That was such a thrill because a lot of us know Rosie as a talk show host as well as an advocate for causes that she believes are important, including helping children and veterans, but I’m telling you, there’s one hell of an actress in there, too. When she played Dottie and I looked into her eyes, Rosie was gone. She was portraying this character and speaking those lines, but there were so many other layers going on of what Dottie was thinking and what Dottie was behind those eyes. It was another of those moments where I thought, ‘Wow.’

“I did a scene where I was standing in a doorway of the factory and Charlotte Hegele, who plays Kate, walks in, gives her name, signs in and just breezes by me. She was just so Kate, do you know what I mean? There’s another scene I did with Michael Seater [Ivan Buchinsky] where we were basically background action. He’s looking at this other guy and his jaw is slightly slack; I could ‘see’ his thoughts just by reading his face. It was so funny and so right that it snapped me out of the scene for a minute and made me want to laugh because it was so wonderfully rendered. It’s just a little thing that no one else will see, but those are the moments I live for and that make doing this show such a joy.”

Born on Valentine’s Day, 1960 to Patricia Ann Tilly and Harry Chan, Tilly dreamt since childhood of one day becoming a ballet dancer, and she began working early on towards eventually making that dream a reality.

“When I was 10 years old, I traveled with my family across the United States to immigrate to Canada, and in the summer we worked in the fields picking strawberries,” she recalls. “It was hard, brutal work, the sun was hot, you were on your hands and knees, and you weren’t allowed to eat any of the strawberries. I was always hungry, and the smell of these ripe, fresh, succulent strawberries kept wafting over you in waves. It was like the promise of a party in your mouth if you gave in, but I had to be honorable, even though I wanted so badly to eat even just one.

“Most of the money we earned went towards family expenses, but we were each allowed to keep a tiny portion of it. So I saved and saved and picked flats and flats of strawberries until I finally had enough to buy two tickets to the ballet. I went with my mom and we sat way in the back and watched the ballet. I’ll never forget it. When I was 14, we moved to the big city of Victoria [British Columbia], and it had ballet classes there. My grandmother said she would pay for the classes, and I got a job working in a restaurant on Fridays and Saturdays from six until two or three in the morning, and used my tips to buy my ballet clothes.

“I started studying ballet and worked extremely hard at it. I was terrible to begin with, but I stuck with it, and two years later I finally began winning scholarships. After graduating from high school, I bought a ticket on the Greyhound Bus and went to New York to become a ballet dancer. I arrived at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, which back in the late '70s was a very scary place. I didn’t know anyone and had no idea where I was going to study. I eventually found my way to Madame Gabriela Davash’s Ballet School and I was extremely fortunate because she offered me a full scholarship.

“While I was studying there, I got a job dancing in the movie Fame. When that finished filming, I studied on another full scholarship with Melissa Hayden. Unfortunately, I was dropped during a dance class and fractured my back. I couldn’t walk for a while, and that was when I began to think about acting. If I hadn’t danced in Fame, I’d have never gotten my SAG [Screen Actors Guild] card or even considered becoming an actress, because that was something my sister Jennifer [Tilly] did. Once I was able to walk again, I went out to Los Angeles where Jennifer showed me the ropes and helped me get started in acting.

Bomb14.jpg

“So it was a wild and rocky ride, but it turned out okay. Sometimes you work so hard towards a goal and it seems to be going your way, but then something happens and it seems like a tragedy and that your life is over. It was, for me, though, one of the luckiest things that could have happened, because a ballet dancer has such a short [professional] life. You give everything to it, including your youth and body, and if you manage to work until your early 30s, that’s a long career. Here I am, 53, and I’m still able to act. I was able to have children in my 20s, which for me wouldn’t have been a possibility as a dancer. I was also able to save some money and have a bit of financial security. I was just so blessed, but I didn’t see it at the time, you know? It was pretty devastating, and then I picked myself up and thought, ‘Okay, what’s next?’”

The Big Chill, Agnes of God, Valmont and Leaving Normal are among the actress’s feature film credits. On TV, she has guest starred on such series as Hill Street Blues, Avonlea, Winnetka Road (multiple episodes) and Caprica as well as a handful of made-for-TV movies. Tilly is also a published author, having written five books, her most recent being A Taste of Heaven, which came out this past February.

“My writing started off as a need to acknowledge the truth of my life,” says the actress. “I began writing when I was 30; I had done The Big Chill, Agnes of God and Valmont, but I was selling a fairytale to the world that just wasn’t true about my happy, happy life and happy, happy childhood. To be able to find the words and then write them down about the truth of my childhood was a terrifying as well as incredibly freeing thing to do, but I didn’t know I was a writer. It’s only now after having had five books published that I’m able to see that.

“I love being given this opportunity to act again. It’s such a gift at my stage of life. I also love that I can write books from the heart and that I’m lucky enough to be able to find publishers who want to publish me. My big passion, though, is my family, my kids, my husband, my sister, and just kind of living life. I’m so very, very lucky and grateful for that.”

For more information about Meg Tilly, including her books, check out official website. Please note, all Bomb Girls photos copyright of The REELZ Channel.

]]> A Monk's Tale: Interview with Vikings' George Blagden tag:www.themortonreport.com,2013://1.9193 2013-03-27T21:45:00Z 2013-03-27T22:45:20Z Actor George Blagden talks about stepping back in time to play the young monk Athelstan in the HISTORY Channel's Vikings. Steve Eramo http://scifiandtvtalk.typepad.com/scifiandtvtalk/ Around the age of nine or ten, George Blagden saw a stage production of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. When the show ended and the curtain came down, he thought, “I really want to be one of those people up there onstage,” recalls the actor. “Back then, my only frame of reference was the theatre, so I began doing school plays. When I turned 18, I auditioned for drama school and got into the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. That was the start of it all for me. I’ve always wanted to be an actor and I feel extremely lucky to be able to say that that’s what I do for a living.”

In 2012, the actor made his big screen debut playing Soldier #1 in Wrath of the Titans, followed by a much more substantial performance as Grantaire in the award-winning Les Miserables. Currently, he can be seen in the regular role of Athelstan in the HISTORY Channel’s first scripted drama series Vikings. Blagden plays a monk who, against his will, winds up living amongst a group of people whose ways are undeniably alien to him. While his character is taken aback by this sudden upheaval in his life, the actor wanted to jump right into it, fictionally speaking, of course.

“I was in London and got a call from my agent telling me about a role for this new television series called Vikings,” says Blagden. “He said, ‘I don’t really know much about it, except that it’s for the HISTORY Channel and something quite original for them.’ All I needed to hear, though, was the title; it is really clever what HISTORY has done as far as calling their show Vikings. It’s one of those household names that as soon as you hear it, everyone knows what you’re talking about.

“So I immediately said to my agent, ‘Yes, I’d love to audition.’ I subsequently met with Frank Moiselle, who was the casting director in London, and when I got to the audition, it was, I kid you not, in a chapel, which was in the basement of this very nice London hotel. I usually arrive at auditions and they’re in a studio, a boardroom, or a cupboard,” jokes the actor. “In this case, however, I walked in, opened the door and there was this underground chapel. I thought, ‘No way. I’m auditioning here for the part of a monk. This is perfect.’

“I did a taping with Frank Moiselle, and about a week and a half later I got a phone call telling me that HISTORY and MGM Studios would like to hire me for the role of Athelstan. I think it was one of those really fortunate things where people had seen my tape and they were looking for a particular someone to play this part. Sometimes the character just walks through the door, do you know what I mean, and I was quite lucky that [series creator/writer/executive producer] Michael Hirst decided to write a character that was what everyone envisioned as being very close to me. So it was a very painless as well as easy audition process and I was over the moon with how things turned out.”

Young Viking farmer Ragnar Lothbrok (Travis Fimmel) is the focus of Vikings. With dreams of exploring (and plundering) civilizations across the seas, he joins with a clever craftsman named Floki (Gustaf Skarsgard), and together they build a faster longship suited for such a journey. Using a new type of navigational device, Ragnar leads a group of volunteers, including his brother Rollo (Clive Standen), and sets sail in the show’s second episode, "Wrath of the Norsemen."

Their first raid is an Anglo-Saxon island monastery off the coast of England. Ragnar and his men kill most of the monks and take the rest with them back home as slaves, including Athelstan (George Blagden), who is almost killed by Rollo before Ragnar intervenes. When they return to Kattegat in the next episode, "Dispossessed," the local Viking chieftain, Earl Haraldson (Gabriel Byrne), claims all the spoils for himself, much to Ragnar’s chagrin. Ragnar is allowed to pick one item as his, and he takes Athelstan to be his slave. The new member of the Lothbrok household has a memorable welcoming, as did Blagden when first starting work on the show.

“Our first couple of weeks in Ireland [where Vikings was shot] was spent doing various pre-production things, including a cast read-through of the script. It’s also when I got my god-awful monk’s haircut,” says the actor with a chuckle. “As far as my actual first day on set when the cameras began rolling, it was to film a scene for episode three. It was this particular scene that had a lot of people talking, and it’s where Athelstan is propositioned by Ragnar and his wife Lagertha [Katheryn Winnick] to climb into bed with them.

“That’s the very first scene we shot for the show. So just imagine, it was my first day of putting on my new costume, this big brown robe, or as I called it, this big brown sack, walking onto the set, and I’m presented with a half-naked Travis Fimmel and Katheryn Winnick. I was screaming inside; I was so terrified. It’s not every day as an actor that you have a half-naked man and woman opposite you, especially on the first day of work. Believe me when I tell you that there was no acting required on my part. It was all just pure, terrified George. Talk about a great icebreaker.”

Initially, Ragnar’s wife and children consider Athelstan to be more of a curiosity than anything else, but the Viking sees something far greater in this pious young man. Acting-wise, Blagden was thrilled to take on such a challenging role.

“During our first week in Ireland and in my first conversations with Michael Hirst, one of the first questions he asked me was, ‘Where did you go to school?’” notes Blagden. “I told him that from the ages of seven to 18, I went to boarding school in England. Michael said to me, ‘That’s perfect. I’d like you to bring as much of yourself to this role as possible, because that’s essentially how Athelstan has grown up, in this isolated community on an island out at sea.’

“I had just come from shooting Les Miserables in London where I played a character that was really not me at all. He was a drunken womanizer and far removed from who I am. As an actor, it’s sometimes easier to play roles that are far away from who you are as a real person, because you then get to sort of analyze them from a distance and are able to have fun playing them. However, it’s not easy when a director or a writer asks you, in this case, me, to bring as much of George as possible to the role.

“Suddenly, you start to recognize certain things about yourself and think, ‘I don’t really like that about me; I’ll just change it and make my character seem cooler.’ Then, of course, you have the director or writer saying, ‘But that’s not what you do if you went to boarding school.’ I know it sounds sort of adverse or conversely true, but it’s far more difficult to bring a lot of who you are to a role as opposed to slipping on the costume as it were of another character.

“When it comes to Athelstan’s development, that’s the most exciting thing about this role,” continues the actor. “It’s such a gift when a writer gives you a character that goes on such a big journey. You can only have fun with something like that. I’m not going to spoil anything for the audience, but Michael and I really wanted Athelstan to be a character who at the end of the season will hopefully have viewers looking back at his first episode or two and thinking, ‘Is that the same guy? I can’t believe how much he’s changed.’”

In "Dispossessed," Ragnar tricks Athelstan into revealing specific information that allows him and his men, accompanied by Lagertha, a skilled shieldmaiden, to launch a second blood-soaked raid, this time on England’s kingdom of Northumbria. While Ragnar and his wife are away, Athelstan is left in charge of their farm as well as children. That might sound to some like a rather big leap of trust, but as season one of Vikings continues to unfold, Ragnar’s and Athelstan’s relationship takes a number of surprising twists and turns.

“The Ragnar/Athelstan relationship is a very, very complex one of master and slave, and, again, without spoiling too much, when you get to episodes four, five and six, that relationship shifts,” says Blagden. “Whilst maintaining the title of master/slave, there are certain barriers that are broken, and certain ways of interacting with each other become easier and friendlier shall we say than what you saw in episode two where Ragnar puts a rope around Athelstan’s neck and drags him from his burning monastery.

“In my opinion, their relationship is one of the more interesting ones on the show. Of course, I am biased,” he jokes, “but it’s neat to watch as the two of them realize and discover that Ragnar is equally as interested in my character as Athelstan is in him, and they can actually help each other out. They’re both thinking, ‘Hmm, perhaps this person is going to be quite an important figure in my life.’ I think that’s the thought process of the two of them, which as an actor is very exciting to play.”

While the Vikings may have been lacking in some of the “social graces” when dealing with outsiders, Blagden and the rest of the Vikings’ cast and crew could not have gotten along any better.

“The five months filming in Ireland was like a summer camp with the coolest of people, some of whom were all just like big boys, really, with swords and riding around on horses,” says the actor. “I think anyone you talked to about the series would agree with me in saying that it just wouldn’t be what it is without Mr. Fimmel in the hero role as Ragnar. He really does make the show, and his professionalism on set was just unbelievable.

“Don’t get me wrong, Travis was quite the joker, and there have been stories that some people have been telling about how he’s a big prankster and how much he enjoys practical jokes. However, it’s wonderful when you have the lead of a show that can find the perfect balance between being really professional and getting the job done — and doing a bloody good job at it while doing it — but who also doesn’t take himself too seriously. It was such a joy and a gift to work with Travis, and I sincerely hope I get to go back to Ireland and do it again.”

When asked if he has a favorite episode or scene from the first season of Vikings, the actor is reluctant to reveal any specifics as to not, again, spoil things for viewers. He is, though, able to divulge one or two more memorable moments.

“I can say that what I think is the most interesting episode from a developmental standpoint is probably episode eight,” he reveals. “Now I feel like I’ve given away some sort of secret that I shouldn’t have. I won’t tell you what happens, but as we get towards the end of the season, some really interesting things start to happen with my character, and his mental conflict just gets worse and worse.

“As far as specific scenes, oh, boy, I’m going to sound like such a geek now,” he says laughing, “but when I was 15 or 16, or maybe even a bit younger, that was when the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie came out. I sat there watching the film and at one point, Orlando Bloom and Johnny Depp climb into this big pirate ship docked at a pier. All I could think was, ‘My God, imagine one day if I as an actor, get to climb onto a ship and sail off into the ocean.’

“I remember last July when we were in Ireland working on Vikings and filming the scene where we put the Viking ship into the water for the first time. It had been built in Eastern Europe and then shipped from there to Ireland, so we had no idea whether or not it would actually stay afloat. There’s a scene in the second episode, or it may even be in episode one, where Floki is putting the boat into the water for the first time and he’s terrified it’s going to sink. That was real, because we really didn’t know if it was going to work or not.

“The first time I had the chance to get into the boat was in a scene where we’re actually getting off the boat and onto a pier. I’ll never forget thinking, ‘Hang on a minute. I’m on a Viking boat, and there’s a pier, and a Viking town, and the ocean - this is incredible.’ It was like a boyhood dream of being in a television series about Vikings. I hope that doesn’t sound arrogant or, oh, look at me, look what I’ve done, because I don’t mean it to be. I just remember dreaming about stuff like that when I was young. So for it to now come true, it’s just kind of the giddy little boy inside me going, ‘Oh, wow, I’m in a TV series about Vikings.’ I know I’ve used the word lucky already, but I really do mean it when I say I’m a very lucky guy.”

Born December 28th, 1989, Blagden was educated at Oundle School located in the ancient market town of Oundle in Northamptonshire. Having already been bitten by the acting bug when he was younger, his interest in the craft continued to be fostered as part of his ongoing education. While at school, he had the opportunity to participate in a master (acting) class taught by the legendary Sir Ian McKellen.

“The head of our drama department organized for Sir Ian to come and give a talk to the English and Drama departments about Shakespeare’s sonnets, and more importantly how they weren’t written as poems, but rather to be spoken,” says the actor. “They were actually written to be used by men to help them find the love of their life. They were apparently meant to recite one of these sonnets to a woman and the two of them would then go off and live happily ever after.

“Sir Ian asked for four members of the school’s acting community to be chosen, and for them to prepare two or three sonnets each. He would then get them up onstage with him and work with them one-on-one on these sonnets. I was selected to be one of the four students, and we were all blown away by it. I was 17 at the time, and it’s one of those experiences that you really don’t know how to properly process until three or four years later when you say to yourself, ‘Of course, that’s what that means.’”

While at Oundle School, the actor also had the chance to take part in the UK’s National Youth Theatre. “The National Youth Theatre isn’t really a specific class you take, but rather something you can audition for when you’re 15 or 16,” explains Blagden. “If you’re accepted, you get to go on an intensive fortnight acting class type of thing during the summer. Once you’ve done that, you then become a member, which means you can take part in National Youth Theatre shows throughout the UK. I never really got to do the latter, though, because I was at boarding school, and after I graduated, I went to drama school in London. So my experience with The National Youth Theatre was just that two-week summer course, which was still a fantastic time.”

Prior to Vikings, Blagden booked a role in the big screen adaptation of the aforementioned stage play Les Miserables, which afforded him the chance to combine acting with another of his passions, “I’ve always been a singer, and I mean not professionally, but in the shower,” jokes the actor. “I’ve always loved singing, though, and I’ve found that I can sometimes be much more expressive through song than just normal dialogue. I think that was the thing that really drew me to this project, and when they started getting all the people on board as far as the lead roles and the real Hollywood heavyweights, it was just another dream come true for me and such a rewarding project to be a part of," enthuses Blagden.

Please note, all Vikings photos copyright of A&E Network/HISTORY Channel.

]]> Lucky Guy: Interview with The Neighbors' Tim Jo tag:www.themortonreport.com,2013://1.9176 2013-03-22T13:00:00Z 2013-03-22T02:02:11Z With his feet planted firmly on terra firma, the engaging and affable actor Tim Jo talks about playing his not-of-this-world alter ego Reggie Jackson on the ABC comedy The Neighbors. Steve Eramo http://scifiandtvtalk.typepad.com/scifiandtvtalk/ When you move into a new home, you are never sure what the neighbors are going to be like, right? In the ABC TV comedy titled, what else, The Neighbors, this very ordinary concept is taken where no human has ever gone before. The Weaver family move into a gated townhouse community called Hidden Hills, which they soon discover, much to their disbelief, is populated entirely by extraterrestrials from the planet Zabvron.

These aliens, disguised as humans, have been stuck on Earth for ten years waiting for instructions to return home. A quirky bunch, they identify themselves by names of human sports celebrities, love to patrol the community in golf carts, and “digest” reading material through their eyes and mind for nourishment. The Weavers make friends with the family living next door to them, the Bird-Kersees, including a male teenage Zabvronian named Reggie Jackson. Not surprisingly, playing an alien disguised as a human and named after a baseball legend initially proved quite a creative handful for actor Tim Jo.

“In The Neighbors pilot I only had one small scene, but in auditioning for a series regular role, [series creator/executive producer] Dan Fogelman along with the network execs had to see a bit more of what the actors could bring to the table,” says Jo. “So Dan wrote us each a much bigger scene to audition with, and mine had Reggie standing up to his father [Larry Bird, played by Simon Templeman], who my character says doesn’t understand what it’s like not growing up back on their home world. Reggie is like, ‘Do you know how frustrating it is to be on a strange planet, living in this strange body and having unnecessary hair growing in unnecessary places?’

“It was just this whole spiel about him appealing to his father, and I suppose there could have been a lot of different ways to approach that scene, but for me there was only one way, because as a minority I felt so connected to what I was reading. The thing is, Reggie didn’t have to be an alien to have had this type of argument with this father. I think it’s something that anybody shares when they feel out of place. So I took the scene very seriously and performed it as honestly and straight from the heart as possible. I thought it deserved that as opposed to trying to put a comedic spin to it.

“I think that’s the moment when I decided to approach playing Reggie with every truth that I had in me, Tim, rather than some character I was trying to create, do you know what I mean? I feel that’s when Reggie was ‘born.’ I’d heard people say that when you’re an actor, you have to bring part of yourself to your performance. That didn’t really click with me until I started playing Reggie. So when I had doubts about my work on The Neighbors pilot and thinking, ‘I only had one scene; did I even do it the right way,’ or even throughout the season when I had doubts here and there, I always had to remind myself, ‘Just reach inside yourself and pull out whatever you get first, because that’s what Reggie is.’

“In hindsight, the most joyful thing about this is the fact that I’ve experienced a lot of emotional ups and downs in my life just because of the pressure of the industry and everything that goes along with working as an actor. However, when I reached into myself to pull something out for Reggie, I pulled out the most wide-eyed, innocent, loving, curious little creature ever. I’m so happy that was the case, and not some angry, jaded teenager. Again, looking back, I was like, jeez, this is the acting job that I really need to get, because it’s become more than a step in my career. It was like, wow, I was given the right direction in my life. It’s kept me so sane to be playing a character that may at times be frustrated, but is happy in his heart.”

In The Neighbors opening episode, "Meet the Neighbors," Debbie and Marty Weaver (Jami Gertz and Lenny Venito) along with their three children, Max (Max Charles), Abby (Isabella Cramp) and Amber (Clara Mamet), relocate to Hidden Hills. While adjusting to their new surroundings, they become friends with Larry Bird, his wife Jackie Joyner-Kersee (Toks Olagundoye) and their children, Reggie Jackson and Dick Butkus (Ian Patrick). The Weavers soon learn that their neighbors’ names are not the only thing “unusual” about them. Acting-wise, this was one neighborhood that Jo was hoping to move into.

“It was another pilot season, and prior to booking The Neighbors, I had been going from audition to audition and, like any actor, looking for work,” he says. “That summer, I had seen [the 2011 feature film] Crazy, Stupid, Love, and it was my favorite film back then because when it was over, I walked out of the theatre feeling so good. I really enjoyed Steve Carell [who starred in the movie], I thought the comedy was great, and the film was written by Dan Fogelman. From that point on, Dan’s name was sort of branded into my head, so I couldn’t believe it when I got an audition for a TV show he wrote about aliens. Here were my favorite things in the world, or in the galaxy — sci-fi and Don Fogelman’s comedy.

“I was really looking forward to putting my spin on the Reggie character, but I had gone through a pilot season where I wasn’t getting cast because I was either too young or too old of an actor. So I decided to grow a mustache, and my very first audition for The Neighbors was with [casting director] Susan Vash. I did my thing and it went really well, but when it was all over, I started making up excuses about the mustache — I can shave it off; I’m not that old, etc. Susan said, ‘I didn’t even notice the mustache.’ She followed that up with a very funny comment that made us friends forever and this audition one of my more memorable ones.

“I was lucky enough to get the job, and when we began shooting the pilot, I felt like I was a benchwarmer being thrust into the big leagues,” continues the actor. “Having done small gigs here and there, I was suddenly being thrown into an ensemble for an ABC show. There was a great deal of fear and some doubt. I think everyone felt that to some degree, and that bonded us all very quickly and intensely. There was also a lot of love on set as well as trust.

“As you can imagine, there are no egos on this show, especially because Jami Gertz is one of the most gracious, compassionate, kindest, patient people in the world. It’s unbelievable how someone who has been working in this industry for such a long time and with such a high profile can be so friendly and concerned about everyone around her. People will come up to me and tell me that they’re fans of Jami Gertz, and I’ll go out of my way to tell them, ‘Well, if you love Jami Gertz from her work, just wait until you meet her in person, because there’s no one else like her.’”

While they may be another of TV’s dysfunctional families, the Weavers do have their good qualities and are working to bring more of those positive elements to the surface. At the same time, they are helping the Bird-Kersees learn more about what it means to be human. Such cross-species interaction not only leads to some of The Neighbors’ more comedic moments, but also some of its more touching “human” ones.

“Reggie sees Debbie Weaver as sort of his guru,” notes Jo. “She seems to be the wisest and smartest of human beings and my character will trust her word over everyone else’s, including Marty’s. Having said that, I believe he considers Marty to be his culture guru in the sense that Reggie thinks he’s just so cool. As the show’s first season has progressed, all these amazing relationships between the characters started to come out, and as they have, the writers have been writing for them.

“There’s this wonderful scene that I did with Jami and Toks after the episode "Dream Weavers," which is where Amber Weaver sort of breaks my character’s heart. In that scene, I felt comfortable enough to really explore the range of emotions that might be happening in Reggie’s heart and head. It was scary at first because I was sitting with two incredibly talented actors, but, again, I felt totally at ease with my fellow cast mates as well as the director and Dan Fogelman, who was sitting behind ‘video village’ tossing things out for me to say and do.

“That was a fun and exciting moment to play with everything that Reggie is experiencing. For me, it’s been a blast to relive through him your first love, your first heartbreak, your first argument with your dad, etc. Most of the big moments that they’ve given me on the show are ones that I’ve experienced in real life, and, again, I’ve loved getting to relive them on the series. I think that’s why the scene I just talked about is especially memorable for me. In it, I tried to be as truthful as possible as an actor and not force the humor. In doing so, I hoped viewers would think, ‘Oh, that’s exactly what I went though,’ and, ‘Oh, it’s funny,’ because of the honesty of the situation and the fact that Reggie is an alien.”

The actor recently had a chance to connect with his geek side when Star Trek’s George Takei (Mr. Sulu) and Star Wars’ Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker) guest starred on the first season finale of The Neighbors.

“I think it was our last night of shooting and we were on location in our Hidden Hills neighborhood,” recalls Jo, “so our green room was in someone’s house. George Takei was just sitting there going over his lines, and because I’m such a quiet, introverted guy, I was afraid to approach him. In my head I was thinking, ‘What should I say? What shouldn’t I say?’ I didn’t want to bombard him with ‘fan’ questions or step over any bounds, but as soon as I began speaking with him, he was so easy to talk to. We had the most delightful and honest conversation. Afterwards, I called my girlfriend to tell her how awesome George is.

“The day before George came to work with us, I was on set talking with one of the costumers, who asked me, ‘Did you hear the news, Tim?’ I was like, 'What news?’ and that’s when I found out that Mark Hamill was also coming on the show. I couldn’t believe it. On that day, I had finished work, but I hung around to watch George and Mark film their scenes. After maybe two hours of me sitting there like a fly on the wall, they wrapped. I thought, ‘Okay, it’s time for me to go home. I don’t want to stand in line to get a picture taken with them or to get something signed. I might as well just retire from any type of nerdity because this day cannot be topped.’

“As I was leaving, all of a sudden I heard someone say, ‘Where’s Tim Jo? We need to take a picture with Tim Jo.’ It was Mark Hamill calling out for me. There’s a TV Guide article that came out today [March 4, 2013] with Mark talking about his appearance on the show, and if you look at the article, they attached a picture to it — it’s the one where I was pulled over to take a photo with Mark and George. They were both having a discussion where George was saying, “Well, on Star Trek we’ve got the Vulcan sign,’ and Mark saying, ‘We don’t have any type of sign on Star Wars. I’ll just point. It sort of resembles a light saber.’ That’s quite the memory for me,” enthuses the actor.

Born Timothy William Jo, the actor considered a variety of career paths before focusing on the entertainment industry. However, no matter what type of work he would ultimately choose, Jo had one specific goal in mind.

“Being a middle child, I just wanted to make my parents proud, so the search began for what profession I should pursue in order to make that happen,” he says. “I jumped around from business to marketing to communications, and I finally settled into acting. I don’t know if my first acting teacher was just being kind to me, but she made me feel like I was doing something right and that I was good at it. That was when I began to think that this [acting] could possibly be something that would make my parents proud, and that I should pursue because my teacher believes that I’m good at it, so maybe I could make a career out of it.

"That was ten years ago, and I’m so stubborn and was so naïve at the time, but I never looked back after that. Even in the hardest of times, I don’t think I could do anything else to make my parents any prouder. This is a tough job, but I’ve always felt that I’m good at it and it’s what I plan to do to put food on my future family’s table.”

Ten weeks after Jo moved to Los Angeles to try his hand at acting, he booked his first role in the 2009 movie Bandslam. “That was a gigantic leap for me,” says the actor. “I learned a million and one lessons on that film, and on a personal note, I met a number of people who are still among some of my closest friends to this day. I discovered that there are a great many goodhearted people that work in this industry and I strive to be like them and get to know more people like that.

“I have to say that working on The Neighbors has been one of the most fulfilling experiences that I’ve ever had as an actor. It's less to do with the work that we’re doing, which I think is fantastic, and more to do with the people that I get to work with as well as the kindness I’m surrounded by. It’s great to come home at the end of the day and think, ‘Man, I’m a really lucky guy.’”

When The Neighbors first began airing, it received some less than favorable reviews. Since then, however, some of its harshest critics, both in the industry and home audiences, have given the series a second chance and developed a bit of a soft spot for it. What does Jo feel it is that people are responding to?

“When you first hear about a show involving aliens, you probably think wacky adventures and lame humor. Yes, this is a comedy, but it’s a comedy about anyone who has ever felt like an outsider,” he muses. “The alien thing is just one part of it. This is a story about people who feel different and are pressed into a situation where their culture is so unlike that of those around them, and what kind of adventures can come out of that.

“I grew up in Mesquite, Texas, and we were the only Asian/Korean family in the neighborhood. Our Weavers were our next door neighbors, the Hewitts. We always hung out with them and we’d exchange Korean food recipes for macaroni and cheese recipes. I think most people have lived next to a Hewitt or a Weaver family, and maybe that’s why viewers have been more accepting and finally opened up their doors and let The Neighbors into their living rooms each week.”

Please note, all photos from The Neighbors are copyright of ABC.

]]> Heart & Soul: Interview with Arctic Air's Stephen Lobo tag:www.themortonreport.com,2013://1.9175 2013-03-22T00:45:00Z 2013-03-22T01:46:50Z Buckle up and come along for the ride as actor Stephen Lobo talks about playing pilot Dev Panwar in the hit CBC TV series Arctic Air. Steve Eramo http://scifiandtvtalk.typepad.com/scifiandtvtalk/ Most people are familiar with the saying, “Better late than never.” For actor Stephen Lobo, that old adage is particularly meaningful when it comes to his professional life. “I got into it [acting] late,” he recalls. “I started theatre school when I was 27 and graduated when I was 30. I had dabbled in it maybe a couple of years before that and thought, ‘Okay, this is really something I want to do for a living. I need to develop my [acting] chops, though, so I should probably go to theatre school.’

“Growing up I tended to go with the wind and wasn’t focused or committed. Acting was the first thing in my life that I committed to, and then everything else fell into place around it. I took my first acting class while at university. I was pursing a career in environmental science and I liked the whole idea of it, but it wasn’t sparking me inside. Then, however, I took that first acting class, and it was my teacher who told me, ‘You know, this is something you could do for a living.’

“Prior to that, acting never really presented itself as an option. I thought it was something other people did up there on screen. I didn’t think it was something I could do. Once my teacher planted that idea in my head, though, there was no turning back, so I did everything I could to make it work. Fortunately, it’s been working and I’m thankful to have found it.”

Lobo’s commitment to his craft has garnered him a long and quite diverse list of credits on the big and small screens. Currently, TV audiences are enjoying his work as Dev Panwar in the hit CBC series Arctic Air. Although the actor had plenty of experience in front of the camera prior to trying out for the show, this was one role that he was surprised to book.

“My original audition was only one page,” says Lobo. “I went into the casting director’s office, did one take, said goodbye and then left. I never thought about it again because I didn’t think I’d get it. I never get the action role, or even in this case the comedic role.

“Months passed and then out of the blue I got a call telling me the job was mine, which is the most bizarre thing. Auditions are usually pages long and there is callback after callback and meeting after meeting, but it was like this just dropped out of the sky and landed in my lap. As you can imagine I was incredibly grateful, and I think part of it had to do with my past relationship with [director] Gary Harvey. The two of us worked on a TV show about eight years ago and it’s just a hunch, but I have a feeling that he might have put in a good word for me.”

In Arctic Air, a business deal takes Vancouver businessman Bobby Martin (Adam Beach) back home to Yellowknife in Canada’s Northwest Territories. His supposed “quick trip” subsequently turns into a much longer stay when Bobby reluctantly decides to stick around to help his deceased father’s former business partner Mel Iverson (Kevin McNulty) and Mel’s daughter Krista (Pascale Hutton) save their financially strapped airline. Also lending a hand is Dev Panwar, a flight school graduate from India who arrives in town with dreams of the future and making a living flying high above the clouds. Initially it looks as if he may have bitten off more than he could chew, but Dev soon discovers what a unique opportunity he has been given. Funnily enough, the latter was also true for Lobo.

“I’ll never forget shooting my first scene for Arctic Air,” says the actor. “It was me, Adam DiMarco [Kirby Nystoruk] and Kevin McNulty. After we did our first couple of takes, I turned to Adam and said, ‘Wow, it’s like we’ve been doing this for weeks already.’ There was a flow and an ease on set that felt strange as well as comforting at the same time. I took that as a very good sign of things to come.

“As far as Dev, what I think makes him a special guy as well as a real gift for an actor to play is that in many ways he’s the bravest of them all because he has an open heart and approaches everything from that heart. I had some initial reservations about playing ‘the funny brown guy’ in a one-hour drama, having never done that before. I just wanted to sort of gauge what it was I was doing and where the laughs would be coming from, if there were going to be any.

“Dev certainly brings a lightness to the show, and I remember speaking with [series creator/executive producer] Ian Weir about that. I wanted to make sure that what I was getting off the [written] page was indeed their intention, because back then, there was only the one script that had been written. Everyone was, in fact, on the same page with the character, and I think what makes Dev work and click with the rest of the characters and within the story is that he lends a perspective that is innocent.

“It’s like he’s seeing the world for the first time, almost like a child would, and that’s how he approaches things. Even if they aren’t for the first time, he’s doing them as if they were, and does so with a sense of adventure, excitement and joy at being alive. Where the challenge for us in life is trying to keep those things in mind, he holds onto those ideals and they’re his. That’s how Dev walks his path in life, so it makes him, again, a pretty special guy and a real joy to play.

“Getting back to what I mentioned before about the laughs in the story. I hope you’re never laughing at Dev, but it’s almost like there’s a character onscreen that is reflecting back a perspective of the world that doesn’t have a jadedness or cynical view that some of the other characters might share together with us as an audience, if you know what I mean.”

In the summer of 2012, the cast and crew of Arctic Air returned to work to film the show’s second season. Having “broken in” his character and grown comfortable in Dev’s shoes, Lobo looked forward to adding some new layers to his performance.

“In the first season, Dev didn’t know quite where he fit in,” he explains. “In season two, there’s more of a family kind of feeling as well as sensibility among all the characters. Dev now feels like he does belong and is able to offer something to this Arctic Air team.

“So he’s happy and becomes more involved, and what springs to mind is the boxing episode ["Old Wounds"] we did this season. There’s this wonderful camaraderie in it among Dev, Bobby, Cece [Timothy Webber] and Jim McAlister [guest star Aleks Paunovic]. Because we were all much more familiar with our characters, we could better play off each other. This story had a Rocky-meets-The Sting kind of tone to it and was a blast to shoot.

“I also enjoyed working on episode seven from last year, "Vancouver is Such a Screwed up City." Everyone loved that one. Recently, I was at a horse ranch trying to brush up on my riding skills for another episode we’ll be doing called "There’s Gold in Them Ther Hills." It’s a gold rush story where Dev gets ‘gold fever.’ We had a script read-through a couple of days ago and it was tons of fun. It was probably, dare I say, my favorite Arctic Air episode I’ve read so far.”

Looking at Arctic Air’s two seasons, what would the actor say are some of Dev’s major relationships with the other characters on the show and how in his eyes have they grown and developed so far?

“I suppose his biggest relationship is with Astrid [Emilie Ullerup],” says Lobo. “It’s a cool dynamic between them because she’s sort of this Scandinavian beauty who’s just there to work and has this hard shell, whereas Dev is the opposite. I suppose it’s a matter of opposites attract and that type of thing, but he’s just head over heels for her.

“In terms of Bobby, he’s still the hero in Dev’s eyes, and Mel is a father figure, while Krista is the warrior princess. I really enjoy my scenes with Tim Webber, and also Johnnie Reardon, who plays Blake. There’s a real contrast of character that helps those moments come alive, and whenever we’re in scenes together I have trouble getting through them without laughing, because it’s so hysterical,” notes the actor with a chuckle.

In addition to the Arctic Air TV show, Lobo has also had the chance to portray his character in a series of webisodes. “That was cool,” he enthuses. “They centered on Dev, so I got to further mine that character and discovered a great deal more about him as well. Each of the webisodes was also done in one long take, and I like the actuality of that, because once they call 'action,’ there’s no turning back. Of course, you can do it again if things go incredibly badly, and there were a number of times when we veered away from the script or something didn’t go quite according to plan, but you just kept going. Those were usually the takes that they used, too.”

Godiva’s, Falcon Beach, Little Mosque on the Prairie and Fringe are some of the actor’s other TV credits along with a few made-for-TV movies. One of his very first jobs on the small screen — which he booked right out of theatre school in London — was an episode of the British detective series Rosemary & Thyme starring Felicity Kendal and Pam Ferris.

“To this day, what I remember about that job are those two ladies and the image they left in my mind about how humble and graceful an actor can be, even when you’re the lead on a TV show,” says Lobo. “There was no hierarchy with them; they were just fellow actors doing their work. We were shooting in this little house and the spaces were so small. I’ll never forget the two of them crammed in a doorway underneath the camera in order to give me an eyeline. I told them, 'You don’t have to do that, honestly,’ and they said to me, ‘No, it’s totally fine.’

“In between set-ups and takes they wouldn’t go off to their trailers. We’d just sit on the set and they would tell stories and I would just listen. It was the sweetest experience as well as a nice early acting experience to have in my career.”

Sci-fi fans are particularly familiar with Lobo’s body of work in that genre, having seen him in, for example, multiple episodes of Smallville as Randall Brady and the current Canadian-made hit Continuum, in which he plays Matthew Kellog.

“Smallville was great,” he says. “Prior to that job, I had never been on a TV series of that scale before. Up to that point I was just doing smaller Canadian shows and tiny budget projects, so I was blown away by the scale and scope of this. My part on Smallville was quite ‘small’,” jokes the actor. I’d come in and bark a line or two at Lois Lane [Erica Durance]. There was one episode, though, where I contracted a virus that turned me into a zombie, and that was fun, too. I loved going there and felt like a little kid in a comic book. It was such a cool experience getting to help tell an iconic, nostalgic story like that.

“With Continuum, I’m in this incredible position where two shows I did back to back — the other being, of course, Arctic Air — were picked up for a second season. That’s something special, too. It’s a very neat thing that they’ve got going on with the mythology that they’ve created along with the stories as well as characters, and it’s just going to get better and better. They know what they’re doing. It’s a tight ship that they’re running and very interesting and challenging story points that they’re tackling. They don’t pose any questions or bring up any ideas that they don’t know the answers to. Simon Barry [series creator/executive producer] has so much more to tell and I’m tremendously excited and feel blessed to be a part of it again in season two.”

Given Lobo’s affable nature, it is no surprise that what he enjoys most about his job is the collaborative process. “Without question, the projects and the roles mean a great deal, but it also has to do with the fact that you’re part of the bigger story, and I like that,” says the actor.

“I like that there’s something bigger going on and the product is more than the sum of its parts. It’s more than just my performance, too, and my performance isn’t just my performance. There are the writers and their words that inspire it. It all starts there, and then, of course, there’s wardrobe, make-up, hair, etc. All those things come together and then a performance happens, but that performance is, again, just a cog in the wheel. There’s the plot along with the story and the interaction between the characters. If you add up all the pieces, it makes something bigger, and then there’s a creative vision behind that. Most writers with a story to tell want to do so in order to comment on something and reflect our lives as human beings back to us. That’s what really excites me and gets me going as an actor.”

Please note, all Arctic Air photos copyright of Omnifilm Entertainment, and Continuum photo copyright of Shaw Media/Showcase.

]]> Beneath the Sea: Interview with Phantom's Johnathon Schaech tag:www.themortonreport.com,2013://1.9173 2013-03-19T22:30:00Z 2013-03-19T23:37:29Z Actor and all-around nice guy Johnathon Schaech talks about playing Cold War political "cheerleader" Pavlov in the feature film Phantom as well as his roles in other upcoming projects including 7500, the Showtime cable TV series Ray Donovan and The Appomattox miniseries. Steve Eramo http://scifiandtvtalk.typepad.com/scifiandtvtalk/ In 1998, Johnathon Schaech was cast as the legendary escape artist/magician Harry Houdini in the TNT made-for-TV movie Houdini. His work garnered the actor critical praise from Variety, in an article citing "an exceptional performance by Johnathon Schaech." The project was executive produced by Trilogy Entertainment’s John Watson and Pen Densham (who also wrote the script and directed), both of whom were also impressed by the actor’s efforts.

Almost 15 years later, when the two were helping cast the 2013 feature film Phantom, they wanted Schaech to be a part of it. As far as what role the actor would play, he had his heart set on a particular one right from the start.

“When I first read the script, I thought, ‘Would they give me the character of Pavlov?’” says Schaech. “’He’s really critical to the whole storyline. Am I asking too much?’ So I asked them and they said, ‘Well, there’s actually this other role we’d like you to do.’ However, because I had nerded out on the Pavlov, role, I began working on it as if it was already mine.

“A big table read of the script was scheduled with the entire cast including Ed Harris, David Duchovny and William Fichtner, and I was set to read for another character. On that day, as I was driving to the studio, I got a phone call from Pen Densham. He told me that the actor who was set to read for the part of Pavlov wouldn’t be able to make it, and could I read that role as well. I said, ‘Yes, of course,’ and then thought to myself, ‘If the acting gods are working, they’re working right now.’

“I got to the table read, did my thing, said good-bye to everyone and left. Fifteen minutes into my drive home I received another call, this time from [executive producer/director/writer] Todd Robinson. He said, ‘I’ve talked with everyone here and we want you to play the role of Pavlov. You brought so much humanity to this character that I want to continue the [creative] process and explore this role with you.’ I couldn’t believe it. I started shaking so much that I pulled over to the side of the road. It was a dream come true.”

In Phantom, Dmitri “Demi” Zubov (Ed Harris) is the Soviet captain of a Cold War submarine who is secretly suffering from a medical condition that affects his perception of reality. He is also haunted by demons from his past, and that poses a problem for Demi when he is sent on a classified mission. His command is subsequently challenged by Bruni (David Duchovny), a rogue KGB agent determined to seize control of the sub’s nuclear missile. Like all the characters in the film, there is a specific reason why Schaech’s character was chosen to take part in this operation.

“Pavlov is a political officer on board the submarine, so he’s not necessarily a solider like the rest of them, even though he was properly trained to do certain things, including command the ship,” explains the actor. “Bottom line, though, the real reason he is there is that the Communist Party always put a political officer on board the ships because they didn’t trust the military.

“One thing you often read about political officers is that they were usually the ‘cheerleaders’ for the motherland, and that was very much a part of the Pavlov character. Initially, he’s very much the cheerleader and is like, ‘Everything is great. Look, we’re doing something wonderful. We’re making history.’ Then, however, the deeper issues of what was really going on begin to surface. These are things that Pavlov is unsure about, and this pushes him not only past his political ambitions along with overall ambition of doing what he feels is the right thing, but also to a far deeper place. He ends up being challenged by those he calls his friends and to look inside himself as opposed to just going along with the rhetoric.

“As an actor, what I used to help me with this performance was resisting the lure of mediocrity and, instead, having Pavlov rise up to the challenge of trying to do something great with his life as well as stand up for what he believes to be the right thing,” continues Schaech. “The way Todd wrote it, my character was the moral compass of the storyline. So I had to make personal choices in order to constantly have that response inside myself to then bring to my performance.

“The thing is, I didn’t leave Baltimore at the age of 18 to come out here to Los Angeles and do mediocre things with my life. I came out here to do something special, and as I learned, it wasn’t to become famous. It was about doing great things with my life, and the same was true of Pavlov. Politically, he wanted to rise up to greatness and do great things for his country. Acting-wise, I was faced with greatness all around me on the set of Phantom with individuals like Ed Harris, David Duchovny and William Fichtner [who plays Demi’s executive officer, Alex]. Every morning these guys would show up to work with their A-game on, so my biggest challenge was to always try to rise up against the danger of mediocrity and take risks. I think that’s how the inner dynamics of Pavlov were created.”

Does the actor have a favorite scene from Phantom? “There’s one where my character has to stand up to all his comrades and call out their leader, the captain, and make them see what he sees, which is that they’re wrong,” he says. “That was tough. There was a ton of submarine jargon that I had to get out, while at the same time hit emotional beats and make sure that the entire crew heard what was going on and what the truth was.

“So that was a big scene, but the most memorable scene for me is a really private, intimate one I had with Ed Harris. In real life, when you’re serving aboard a submarine, you get to know your fellow crew members and what they like to do. Ed and I both enjoy baseball, so on the day we shot that scene, he went to his truck, pulled out two baseball gloves and tossed me one. Before we got into that submarine to film that scene, the two of us started playing catch and running lines back and forth. That’s one of the greatest moments of my career that I’ll always remember, I feel very blessed that I got to be a part of this movie.”

From beneath the sea to flying high above the clouds, Schaech can next be seen as pilot Captain Haining in Japanese filmmaker Takashi Shimitzu’s sci-fi thriller 7500. As with Phantom, he made very specific choices when it came to playing this character.

“When you’re a captain, you can’t show anyone that you have problems,” notes the actor, "and when faced with difficult situations, you start to look at your life differently and what you may have done wrong. The thing is, you won’t be able to make amends if things go wrong in a very final way, if you know what I mean. So that was the big thing for me when playing this part. When the you-know-what hits the fan, I knew my character had to win out or else he would never be able to make up for anything he may have done wrong in his life.”

Schaech is also looking forward to audiences seeing him in the upcoming Showtime cable TV series Ray Donovan and the miniseries The Appomattox. “With Ray Donovan, I’m getting to work with people like Liev Schreiber and Elliot Gould, and in the next episode I’ll be working with Jon Voight,” he says. “So I’m stepping back into the ring with some of the greats. These guys are terrific, and, again, I came to Los Angeles to become the best actor I can be, and I’m getting to act with the best, first in Phantom and now Ray Donovan. I always dreamt of being a movie star, and although I’m not one in real life, the cool thing about Ray Donovan is that I get to play one. That’s fun,” enthuses the actor.

“As far as The Appomattox, that’s another great role. The story is based on the American Civil War and how all the generals and captains were in the same school before the union split, so now they’re fighting against their comrades.

“I’m often cast as foreign individuals, and it’s fortunate that I can pull off accents. It’s always such a compliment when someone tells you that they’ve heard some of your previous work and want you to, in this case, play someone with a German accent. My character of Johann Mueller is an immigrant who arrives by boat to America, comes ashore and is basically told, ‘If you fight for us, you can become an American citizen.’ There was this hope, this dream of freedom in America, so right away my character is given a musket and put on the front lines, like many of these people were. I’m having a ball working on this as well.”

Born in Edgewood, Maryland to Joseph Schaech, a Baltimore City police officer, and Joanne, a human resources executive, the actor broke into the industry doing commercials. He eventually moved to Los Angeles to continue honing his craft. Schaech spent four years studying with the  legendary acting coach, the late Roy London. During that time, he had small parts in various productions before landing the lead role in Franco Zeffirelli’s period piece Storia di una Capinera (Sparrow).

“That was pretty much trial by fire, especially because I had to do an English accent,” recalls Schaech. “I was put out there with Vanessa Redgrave, Sinead Cusack, Frank Finlay along with other great Shakespearean actors of the time, and Franco Zeffirelli made me step up to the plate. For my screen test I did a scene from [David Mamet’s stage play] Speed-the-Plow. I guess there was an edge or rawness to my performance that intrigued Zeffirelli, and he basically cast me because of that.”

How to Make an American Quilt, The Doom Generation, Woundings, Prom Night, Quarantine and Takers are some of the actor’s other film credits. On TV he has appeared in variety of made-for-TV movies as well as such series as The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., Models, Inc., Time of Your Life, Masters of Horror, Cold Case and CSI: Miami. In his spare time, Schaech is actively involved in helping protect arts education in public schools and serves on the board of directors for the charity Adopt the Arts. He also supports the national nonprofit organization TACA (Talking About Curing Autism), which helps educate, empower and support families affected by autism.

There is no denying that acting is one of the most difficult and unpredictable careers to pursue, but whenever the going gets tough, Schaech has something that he can turn to in order to help him soldier on.

“I recently found some letters that my father wrote me when I first moved out here,” he says. “Being a policeman, he didn’t know anything about show business, but one letter will put it in perspective for you. Every time he walked up a flight of stairs, he didn’t know what the suspect was doing up there or what would be waiting for him.

“The fear and adrenaline would hit him no matter what, and he said, ‘That’s the same thing you will have to face, the unknown, and it’s the unknown that we’re scared of. When I get to the top of those steps, the suspect might have a gun. Well, I had a gun. If he had a knife, I could somehow get rid of it. If someone was being hurt, I could stop that. I found I was able to get through every single day even though I had a fear of the unknown. It’s the unknown that’s going to get you, but just know that if you keep God in your heart, you’ll make it.’”

Please note, all photos of Johnathon Schaech by/courtesy of Alan Mercer, Houndini poster copyright of TNT, and all Phantom photos copyright Phantom/RCR Distribution.

]]> Law and Order: Interview with Justified's Jacob Pitts tag:www.themortonreport.com,2013://1.9165 2013-03-13T17:05:00Z 2013-03-13T18:05:47Z Actor Jacob Pitts talks about playing one of the good guys, Deputy U.S. Marshal Tim Gutterson, in the FX TV series Justified. Steve Eramo http://scifiandtvtalk.typepad.com/scifiandtvtalk/ When he was 13 years old, actor Jacob Pitts was interested in one day becoming a lawyer, but he subsequently realized that his desire was being driven by a romanticized vision of the profession. “At the time I was deep into John Grisham novels, and I think I assumed that being a lawyer involved lots of intrigue, judges and those types of things,” he notes.

“The acting came along as a result of my being a natural ham,” jokes Pitts, “and doing high school plays. I eventually broke into the business thanks to a series of connections and lucky happenings. I was working with people who were doing readings in New York, then ended up meeting so-and-so and I was just at the right place at the right time. I wish I had some sage advice to pass on to aspiring actors, but I don’t. I was just extremely fortunate, and here I am today.”

Seventeen years later, Pitts’ interest in law and order was rekindled, albeit fictionally, when he was cast as Deputy U.S. Marshal Tim Gutterson in the FX network TV series Justified. The role came about thanks to a prior professional collaboration with the show’s creator/executive producer, Graham Yost.

“I had met Graham while doing an HBO miniseries called The Pacific, and when he was developing Justified, he offered me the part of Tim Gutterson,” says the actor. “Of course, I said, ‘Yes.’ As an actor, when you’re offered anything outright, it has to be a pretty calamitous disaster to turn it down. However, the pilot script for Justified was great and it had wonderful characters in it like Dewey Crowe [Damon Herriman]. That was attraction enough for me.

“We shot the pilot episode in Pittsburgh, which was my first time in that city. I spent my off-time going to various music stores and catching up on my dearth of knowledge on The Doors, so it was a terrific experience for me all around.”

Set in Lexington, Kentucky and the state’s eastern hill county, specifically in and around the rough Harlan County, Justified tells the story of Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant). A law officer who tends to defer to older and more “reliable” ways of upholding justice as opposed to more modern methods, his work ethic ultimately gets him transferred back to the last place he wants to be. Given his surroundings, Raylan can use plenty of backup to help get the job done, including fellow Marshal Tim Gutterson. For Pitts, feeling completely at home in his character’s shoes took a bit of time.

“I think Tim was fairly undefined in the show’s first season,” he explains. “I’d done a couple of TV pilots before that didn’t go anywhere, and with those, I made very specific [acting] choices with my character. I wound up not being very pliable when it came to direction. I couldn’t go very far with the character and I’d be rather stiff in my acting. With Justified, I decided not to make any choices until I saw them specifically laid out in the script.

“Because of that, in the first season I didn’t do much other than deliver information and do some utility work, so you were left with kind of a bland, nothing character. In-between the first and second seasons, I did a bunch of mental ‘pushups’ and adopted a different type of approach. So with my character, it turned out to be, I feel, a complete do-over when you compare seasons one and two to each other. I’m rather proud of the fact that I had the guts to do that.

“So Tim has become better defined and more specific in terms of his accent, his walk, the way he carries himself, etc. Between the second season and now [season four] I feel I’ve also given him sort of a laconic, deadeye spirit as well as gone for a bit more goofiness, I guess you could say, and made him somewhat closer to who I am as a human being. I’m far more at ease now in playing around with my performance and it feels good,” enthuses Pitts.

As Tim Gutterson has grown as an individual, so have his working relationships with those around him, including Raylan Givens and their boss, Chief Deputy U.S. Marshal Art Mullen (Nick Searcy).

“I’d like to think that there’s a Butch Cassidy/Sundance Kid-type of vibe at this point between my character and Raylan,” says Pitts. “It’s probably not as developed as it is with Boyd Crowder [Walter Goggins] and Raylan, but I feel we’ve landed on that between Tim and Raylan. With Tim and Art, in upcoming episodes we’ll see more of a dynamic with them, which isn’t so much between those two as it is between me and Nick Searcy.

“I have to tell you that Tim Olyphant is brilliant. I don’t know how he is able to keep in his head the 50 or so pages of script that we have each week, most of which are his, and then also have [creative] designs on just about every aspect of the scenes when it comes time to film them. I don’t know where he finds the hours in the day, and it’s an example that I don’t think I’m even going to try to aspire to, but I can still admire it.

“As far as Nick Searcy, we’re a couple of silly billies on set and I have a lot of fun working with him. One of my favorite Justified episodes is one that aired just recently. There was a long stretch of material in it that went on for about five or six pages in the script. We shot it as one entire sequence and I had a great time. It was with me, Nick and Ron Eldard, who plays Colt, and I would say it was probably some of the best dialogue that anyone has ever had to work with on a TV show,” praises the actor.

In addition to Justified, Pitts has appeared in a variety of made-for-TV movies as well as other series such as Law & Order, Sex and the City, Ed and Person of Interest. His first professional acting role was on the small screen and to this day remains unforgettable for him.

“I was a guest star on Comedy Central’s Strangers with Candy with Stephen Colbert, Amy Sedaris and Paul Dinillo, who are these great comedy deities from Chicago’s famous Second City improv theatre,” he recalls. “I spent pretty much from the age of 11 to 14 worshipping at the altar of Comedy Central and taping hours of Saturday Night Live, Kids in the Hall and Monty Python off that network. So to get my first-ever acting gig on Strangers with Candy just felt serendipitous and filled a kind of ‘boy-of-destiny’ ideal in my mind. It was neat, but I was terrified. I spent most of my time trying to avoid looking directly into the camera and trying to get the words out of my mouth. I had a blast, though.”

To moviegoers, the actor is probably best known as Cooper Harris in EuroTrip. His other feature film credits include K-19: The Widowmaker, The Novice, Quid Pro Quo and 21, which won the ShoWest Best Ensemble Award and was inspired by the story of the M.I.T. blackjack team as told in Ben Mezrich’s best-selling book Bringing Down the House.

“They shot 21 in Las Vegas for about a month and we lived in the Aladdin Hotel, which was soon to be the Planet Hollywood casino hotel. You don’t have to go anywhere in Vegas in order to live. They have the shops and anything else you need right inside the hotel, so there was, I think, a good week-and-a-half where I never left the hotel,” says Pitts with a laugh.

“That was a fun time and the movie had a terrific cast. One night a bunch of us went to the Playboy Club, and I wound up sitting down at one of the blackjack tables and across from this bald, cigar-chomping longshoreman-type of guy. At one point he looked over at me and asked, ‘So what do you do?’ I said I was an actor, and then asked what he did. He told me, ‘I make chemical/biological nuclear weapons for the government.’

“We talked for a while and then he got up and excused himself. He left every colored chip imaginable sitting right there on the table with the certainty that no one would take them. I didn’t see him for the rest of the night. For some reason I find that moment pretty emblematic of Vegas.”

In addition to Justified, Pitts can be seen in the upcoming film That Thing with the Cat, which was shot in the Bronx. The actor has also lent his vocal talents to another new project. “A friend of mine, Danny Bland, has written a book called In Case We Die [scheduled for a July 2013 release], and I’ll be heard on the audio version of that along with another friend, Damien Echols, as well as some various rock ‘n’ roll luminaries including Wayne Cramer [co-founder of the Detroit rock group MC5]. It’s a very good book about a guy in the Seattle grunge scene and his recovering in the '90s. It’s sort of like [the 1996 film] Trainspotting only in Seattle, so I’m hoping people will check it out."

Please note, all photos copyright of FX.

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