Category: Interviews (Page 21 of 69)

TCA Tour: A Chat with Chi McBride of “Human Target”

January 21, 2010 /

You know when Chi McBride is at one of Fox’s TCA parties because you can smell him. Not him personally, but, rather, his omnipresent cigars. When he was at the tour in the summer of 2009 to preview the network’s then-upcoming series, “Human Target,” I ran into him smoking a stogie with Ron Perlman of “Sons of Anarchy.” The scent stuck with me, so when I stepped into the Fox party at the winter tour and caught a whiff of cigar smoke, I immediately followed it to its source and soon sat down for…

Chi McBride: How are you?

Bullz-Eye: I’m good. I hope you saved one of those for Ron Perlman. I remember last time around…

CM: Yeah, you know what, I’ve got a couple with me, so… (Trails off) Is Perl here?

BE: He’s supposed to be.

CM: When he gets here, I’ll make sure he gets one. (Grins and puts his cigar case back in his pocket)

BE: Well, last tour, I talked to Darryl Bell.

CM: Did you?

BE: Yep. We were talking about “Homeboys in Outer Space,” and he said you had a chat with him after you had gone through “The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer.” He said you just told him, “Look, everyone who is criticizing what you’re doing would take your job from you in two seconds. This is one blip on both of our careers, and we are moving on.”

CM: That’s the way I looked at it, you know what I mean? I knew what I was doing, and I knew what I wasn’t doing, you know? People had to say whatever they had to say about it. You know, everybody thought my career was over but me. I said something that my old, wise aunt always told me: “Boy, this, too, shall pass.”

BE: So how did “Human Target” come on to your radar? Was it pitched to you?

CM: Well, what happened was… (Hesitates) You know, what’s funny about it is, it was the first thing I read during pilot season. But, you know, it was the first thing that I read, and what happened was, there wasn’t anything in it for me. Winston was this British character, and the guy was kind of a nervous Nelly kind of guy. So I told my agent, I said, “Listen, there is nothing in this for me, but if somebody does it right, this could be a good show for somebody. Good luck to them.” And, you know, as time progresses during the pilot season, people’s names get bandied about on all different kinds of projects. And I started hearing that people wanted to talk to me about a variety of things. So one of the meetings that I took was with Jon Steinberg and Peter Johnson, the producer and creator of “Human Target.” So we met and we talked about it, and I said, “Well, I’ve got to tell you: there doesn’t really seem like there is going to be a lot to do for me in this, so I don’t know that I’m that interested. And as far as the British accent…I mean, I can do it, but it just seems to be that for the sake of it.” And he agreed. And I told him, “You know, the way I would want to approach it is that I was a guy who was ex-law enforcement, you know, and there is something about my past on the force that I got into this business.” But I didn’t want to, as an actor, be stuck behind a desk. But I wanted the character to feel like this was his chance to be stuck behind a desk with a nice cushy job, getting plenty of money…and that’s good. And that he would end up going out in the field in a sort of “just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in” kind of thing. And that’s the attitude that Winston has toward going out in the field, but he goes out there and he definitely shows his skill set. You know, the thing about Winston that you’re going to learn is that his temperament is not what it seems. He’s a guy who doesn’t have an off switch. And that’s one of the other reasons why he wanted to get out of the chasing-guys-down business. So it’s going to be really interesting. And we agreed on all of these things, and they decided that they wanted us to work together. And you know, I’ve got a wonderful relationship with Warner Brothers Television, so they signed off on it, and here I am.

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Actors, External Entertainment, External TV, Interviews, News, TCA Blog 2010, TCA Press Tour, TV, TV Action

TCA Tour: Breaking Bad

January 17, 2010 /

AMC may have broken its streak of perfection in late 2009 when their miniseries remake of “The Prisoner” met predominantly with either indifference or annoyance, but there’s plenty of reason to expect that the network will regain its good name in full in 2010.

For one thing, there’s the announcement that Kurt Ellis, the screenwriter behind HBO’s “John Adams,” is setting his sights on Warren Harding and developing the miniseries “Black Gold: The Teapot Dome Scandal.” Then, of course, there’s the fact that we’ve been chomping at the bit for Season 4 of “Mad Men” ever since the dissolution of Sterling-Cooper back in November, which means that we’ll pretty much forgive the network anything when the series returns later this year. Joel Stillerman, AMC’s Senior Vice President of Original Programming, Production, and Digital Content, gave us this one-liner: “Betty is off to Reno, Don is shacked up in the village, Sterling Cooper is held up in a hotel room, but maybe most importantly, Joan is back, and it should be another great season of one of the best shows ever.” Sounds good to me. More details are also emerging about the latest addition to AMC’s slate of original series, “Rubicon,” which Stillerman describes as “an incredibly compelling mystery that pays homage to the great conspiracy thrillers of the ’70s like ‘The Parallax View’ and ‘Three Days of the Condor,’” adding, “We thought, if we could find a way to take that style of storytelling that has stood the test of time so well and spin it off into a serialized drama, we would have something really great.” Let’s hope they do.

But enough about the new kid on the block. Let’s talk about the network’s other high-profile series: “Breaking Bad,” which will kick off its third season on March 21st.

It will, I’m sure, not surprise you that there will be little in the way of revelations in this piece, what with the season premiere still more than two months away as of this writing, but I can tell you that, within the first five minutes of the panel, the discussion had already veered between a religion called Santa Muerte and a teddy bear’s eyeball, so, y’know, make of that what you will.

Like many dramas on TV, the cast members of “Breaking Bad” have almost as little idea what’s going to happen next as the viewers do, rarely knowing how things are going to unfold until they get the script for the next episode.

“That’s what makes it exciting,” explained Bryan Cranston, who plays the show’s cancer-ridden meth dealer, Walter White. “Just like you watching it, we are reading it, and the feeling has the same impact, as much surprise as you have. We often comment to each other, ‘Did you read it yet? Did you read it?’ ‘Yeah, don’t tell me. Don’t tell me. Don’t tell me.’ ‘I’m only halfway through it.’ ‘Oh, yeah. Oh, my goodness. You are not going to believe it. You are not going to believe it.’ So you have that kind of anxiety and anticipation of what’s about to happen, so it’s never boring and always a surprise and a turn here and there.”

As expected, Cranston wouldn’t offer specifics about what Walt would be going through in Season 3, but he was willing to speak in general terms, at least. “There are actually a couple turns that happen emotionally, some physically,” he said. “I’m starting to completely accept the metamorphosis of my character. I’m breaking out of the cocoon and ready to become a different person, and that transition over time is one of the things that was the most compelling for me about wanting to do this show is that (creator) Vince Gilligan said he wanted to do something that he’s never seen before, and that’s, as he famously puts it, turn Mr. Chips into Scarface. And it hasn’t been done on television before unless someone can cite an occasion where you actually see a person completely change who he is by the end of the series or near the end of the series. I will be a completely different person from the milquetoast person you saw in the pilot.”

(You may recall that Cranston spoke to this issue when he chatted with Bullz-Eye in conjunction with the most recent TV Power Rankings.)

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External Entertainment, External TV, Interviews, Mad Men, News, TCA Blog 2010, TCA Press Tour, TV, TV Dramas

TCA Tour: The Ricky Gervais Show

January 17, 2010 /

If you’ve never listened to the podcast that Ricky Gervais does with his writing partner, Stephen Merchant, then you’ve been missing out on one of the funniest things that’s available for download. Part of it comes, obviously, because of the well-established quick wits of the aforementioned two gentlemen, but the show’s X-factor, if you will, comes from the third man in the recording studio: Karl Pilkington. Although he’s still pretty much a non-entity in the States, you can count on him achieving – at the very least – full-fledged cult status when HBO debuts their new animated series, “The Ricky Gervais Show,” which, despite its title, easily features Pilkington as heavily as Gervais.

There’s no real way to make sense of the way Pilkington’s mind works; we can but marvel at the way he perceives the world and the comments that he makes about it. Here are five moments from the panel which demonstrate what I’m talking about:

1. When asked about Pilkington’s absence from the panel, Gervais explained, “He’s on his way to Rio, I think, to do a documentary called ‘Seven Wonders,’ which we have arranged. We send him around the world to see what he thinks of the seven wonders, and he’s not impressed so far. He thinks the pyramids are overrated. I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘It’s a bad design. It’s a bad design.’ He said, ‘The lounge is going to be huge, but the bedroom is going to be tiny.'”

2. “Some of the things that Karl has come up with are incredible,” said Gervais. “I mean, he thought Anne Frank was just avoiding paying rent.”

3. “His serious understanding of evolution,” said Merchant, “is that…he went, ‘Yeah, I know evolution. It starts germ, fish, mermaid, man.'” Said Gervais, “I was trying to get the rudimentaries of evolution to him, and I was explaining to him that we are closer to chimps than chimps are to the gorillas. He was going, ‘No, we are not.’ I go, ‘No. We are.’ I said, ‘We are 98.6 percent genetically identical to a chimpanzee.’ I said, ‘That’s 1.4 percent difference between us and a chimp.’ And he went, ‘That’s got to be the ass.’”

4. “I call him every day, three or four times a day, just to find out what he’s doing,” revealed Gervais. “I called him the other day, and I said, ‘What are you doing?’ And he went, ‘Just walking in the park.’ I went, ‘All right.’ We went, ‘Oh.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘A worm just fell from the sky.’ And I went, ‘What do you mean?’ He went, ‘He just fell out of the sky.’ I said, ‘Well, a bird probably dropped it.’ And he went, ‘Oh, yeah, there is a bird.’”

5. “We did one podcast,” said Gervais, “I think it was in December 2006, and I said, ‘What was the highlight of the year? Looking back at this year, what will stand out for you?’” And he said, ‘Probably that time I saw a grub eating a biscuit.’ I go, ‘What do you mean?’ He went, ‘Well, I was eating a biscuit. I put the rest on the windowsill. I looked around, and there was a grub eating it.’ I went, ‘Why is that an event?’ He went, ‘I never thought I would see that that year. It made me think, ‘We couldn’t be more different, us and the grub, but we both like a biscuit.'”

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External Entertainment, External TV, Interviews, News, TCA Blog 2010, TCA Press Tour, TV, TV Comedies

More “Powers” talk with FX’s John Landgraf

January 17, 2010 /

You may remember that, back in August, I spoke with John Landgraf, FX’s President and General Manager of FX, to get the latest update on the network’s attempts to transition Brian Michael Bendis’s “Powers” from comic book to the small screen. At the time, he could only reconfirm that it was in development, adding, “We’ve seen a draft of the script, we’ve given the notes on it, and we’re waiting on another draft.”

So what’s the latest update? Is “Powers” dead at FX?

It is not.

“We have a new writer who came in and who’s working with Brian Bendis,” Landgraf confirmed. “He’s a really, really good writer who got really excited about the project. He came in, and they pitched us a new take. Because part of what you’re trying to do with ‘Powers’…and I think I said this to you when I talked to you before…is that you have a great property, a really robust property, but it has to be adapted to become a weekly television series. So you’re asking yourself the question, ‘What stays and what goes?’ For example, the Retro Girl murder story: should that whole story be told in the pilot, or do we introduce it and tell it later? But the new writer and Brian have got a good take on it. They came in about two months ago and pitched what they were doing, and it was great.”

Unfortunately, you may have noticed the same thing I did: Landgraf’s pointed avoidance of revealing the name of this “really, really good writer.” Alas, he’s unable to reveal said writer’s name at present, but he assured me that, when he’s able to do, he’ll be in touch. Yeah, I know, that’s what they all say, but since he remembered our discussion from August, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that my continued enthusiasm will result in getting the information, so watch this space!

External Entertainment, External TV, Interviews, News, TCA Blog 2010, TCA Press Tour, TV, TV Action, TV Dramas, TV Sci-Fi

TCA Tour: The Vampire Diaries

January 17, 2010 /

What is it about the pilot episodes for vampire series that leave me generally indifferent to them? I’m a sci-fi and fantasy guy from way back, so you’d think it’d be like shooting fish in a barrel for a show about the undead to win me over, but I was underwhelmed when I first screened CBS’s “Moonlight,” and although the feeling wasn’t quite as intense, the sensations were definitely similar after I checked out The CW’s “The Vampire Diaries.” More surprising, however, was that my wife – a dyed-in-the-wool fan of both “Twilight” and “True Blood” – felt the same way I did. I had been resigned to the fact that we’d be adding it to the TiVo queue no matter what my opinion of the series might be, but, no, it didn’t earn much more than a shrug from her, either. It’s clear that neither of us are arbiters of taste for the nation as a whole, however, as the show recently took home the award for Best New Drama categories at the People’s Choice Awards.

Hey, fair enough: I gave “Moonlight” a second chance when it came to DVD, and I’ll do the same with “The Vampire Diaries.” When it comes to TV, I’m always ready, willing, and sometimes even hoping to be proven wrong.

Given that I have no particular frame of reference to the goings-on in the show, I’m having to kind of guess what information that emerged during the course of the show’s latest TCA panel is of particular interest to fans, so here’s hoping that you’ll appreciate some of these facts:

Are we going on see the cork being pulled from the church basement bottle, as it were?

“Oh, you mean the tomb?” asked Kevin Williamson, the show’s executive producer. “Well, you know, quite possibly, yes. I mean, that’s the fun of the back nine (episodes). Yes, Damon has an agenda. He’s going to save Katherine. He’s going to do everything possible he can to get to her. And so, yeah, that tomb is still in play.”

When are you going to explore more into the teacher? Is he a Van Helsing-type, or is he a vampire? Because there’s definitely something with him.

“Yes, there’s definitely something with him,” agreed Williamson. “We’re going to have fun. He just sort of has blown onto the scene, and we haven’t had a chance yet to sort of explore his background and stuff, but in the upcoming episodes, we’re actually going to learn more about him. We’re going to see some of what his past was like and what brought him to Mystic Falls, and we’re going to see what his little agenda is…because, you know, everyone’s got a little agenda.”

“We’re going to meet his wife in flashbacks, played by Mia Kirshner,” revealed Julie Plec, Williamson’s fellow executive producer.

Is Vicki really dead?

“Vicki is dead,” confirmed Williamson. “I’m so sorry. She’s gone. However, she will live in spirit and stuff, and it’s going to take a long time for Jeremy and Matt and his family to truly get over Vicki and maybe possibly start learning the truth about what happened to Vicki. That’s something, I think, Jeremy is going to struggle with. Of course, we now have Matt’s mother coming to town, so Vicki will still be talked about, but, unfortunately, Vicki left us. She was our very first vampire casualty.”

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External Entertainment, External TV, Interviews, News, TCA Blog 2010, TCA Press Tour, TV, TV Action, TV Dramas, TV Sci-Fi

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