Due to the phenomenal success of “Heroes,” NBC kindly put together a teleconference with the show’s creator, Tim Kring, and two of the shows stars; their names are Ali Larter and Santiago Cabrera, but you may know them better as Stripper with the Crazy Reflection and Artist Who’s The New Nostradamus. It was a packed call, so we only had the chance to ask one question per person, but here’s what we got out of them…
Bullz-Eye: Ali, in a series that has its fair share of disconcerting moments, yours is definitely the story that’s playing out the most like a horror film.
Ali Larter (“Niki Sanders”): (Laughs)
BE: Given your history with “Final Destination,” did you slip into the role pretty easily…?
AL: You know what? I’m in a bit of fear and distress right now, but if you hold on for just one more episode, we’re gonna get a little romance, you get a little bit of cheekiness in it, and, actually, what’s amazing about this writing is that it really pushes me and makes me kind of find all different tones within our show, so…you’re getting there. That’s just the first couple of episodes. It definitely opens up to a whole new world.
BE: Oh, please let the romance be with Hiro’s buddy…
AL: (Cheekily) Maybeeeeeee…!
BE: Santiago, I’ve been blogging about the show for our site, and I have to wonder: if you had the ability to see the future, do you think maybe you’d spend maybe a little more time trying to change the events you were seeing and less, uh, kind of…whining about it?
Santiago Cabrera (“Isaac Mendez”): Well, I think it’s, uh…I think it depends whether you’re in control of it or not. I think that’s the interesting thing about the surprises that this character can have. It’s that, at the moment, he’s not conscious of what he’s doing, so it’s a pretty freaky thing, and there’s maybe that nature of, “Am I evil, is this coming from inside of me?” Or, “Why is this all happening?” But obviously, if you’re in control of it and you can put it to good use, you can do what you want with it, and that’s a different story. And I think that’s the great thing about this show: that it starts from the beginning of everyone discovering these things for the first time, and, obviously, it’ll be a process of going through each character, and it’ll take people to different places.
BE: And Tim, when I did our fall preview, I opened my comments about “Heroes” by observing, “Whoever had ‘21 years’ in the pool on when NBC would finally decide TV critics had forgotten about ‘Misfits of Science,’ you’re a winner.”
Tim Kring (creator): (Laughs)
BE: And then I proceeded to laugh out loud when I saw on your IMDB entry that you were actually a writer for that show.
TK: Oh, is that right? So that was just a lucky guess…?
BE: It was. Have you been hoarding ideas for 21 years?
TK: Actually, “Misfits of Science” is so long ago that I barely – literally – barely cannot remember what I wrote. But, y’know, I’ve had a long and varied career, so when you look back at it, there’ve been many various genres that I’ve been involved in.
BE: So it hasn’t been haunting you ever since?
TK: No, not really; I’ve just been going where the road takes me. As a writer, if you look back at your career, it’s hard to make any sense of it. It just goes where it wants to go.
