"I've got back into warm beer and pies again!"

How is it being back in Blighty?

I’ve been back a while now so I don’t think about it too much. It’s nice. London’s home and it’s a nice opportunity for me to catch up with friends that I’ve neglected for a few years. So yeah, it’s great.

Were you commuting?

Between London and LA? No, we bought a house in LA about two and a half years ago, so LA’s been home for that. For the three years before that it was a bit of a London/Vancouver – where I shot Battlestar – commute. But for the last year I was actually LA/Vancouver back and forth. So I’m used to the back and forth. But right now we feel pretty settled here until the end of Law and Order and then we have a few decisions to make.

One of those actors that has homes in LA and London…

Yeah, I actually don’t enjoy that frame of mind. I think I’m much more of a “nester” that would enjoy the occasional foray to work somewhere. But the idea of doing what we do, which is coming to London, renting a house, getting a school for the kids, all that does not appeal to me. We’re going to have to make up our minds and make a bed and lie in it, as it were in the near future. I get stressed by my gardener in America and things that have to be done to this house that I haven’t seen in six months. People have to be paid…

You can’t be stressed by a gardener, surely?

I am stressed by a gardener. It doesn’t rain very much so if you haven’t got a gardener then everything will just die. Anway, its minutia. I’d rather live in one place.

Does what you’re working on next dictate that? Do you have something lined up?

No I don’t. I finished Law and Order and the big question mark in the future is whether Law and Order is going to happen again. We’ve been optioned for three [series] if they want to do three, so that’s one question. I’ll probably go back to LA when I finish… to chase up my gardener.

Hmmmm.

Yeah, don’t take that the wrong way! [laughs]

That’s my headline.

I’m going to chase my gardener. Jose Viromontes, his name is.

I’m never going to be able to spell that.

Anyway! So yes, I’m going to look for work over there. Part of the reason for me doing Law and Order was to have six months of the year working in telly, which is great and is sort of the day job, and to have six months free to pick and choose stuff that might be, you know, one-off film, theatre hopefully and things that are sort of artistically interesting rather than necessarily looking after the bank balance.

You mentioned Law and Order maybe going to a second series. Surely with the success of the franchise so far that’s a given?

Well you know, I don’t think there’s any givens in this present climate. You know what, I think when I started the job that’s the kind of mentality I had. The closer you get to something you realise how many things can go wrong. And obviously the present economic climate I know ITV are struggling for advertising revenue and they’re cutting their production and stuff. So we don’t know. We don’t know. But I would like it to happen again, I’ve enjoyed it very much and it does give me some sort of stability and be able to choose things for the reason that you like to choose them, ie merit rather than just purely financial and stuff like that.

But it’s such a huge franchise. I wasn’t really aware of that.

It’s funny, a lot of Brits aren’t. It’s on every night here. It’s on every night on Channel Five. So it’s there, it’s just not necessarily been highlighter penned in the old schedules in this country. But in America it’s iconic.

You mentioned work and the current economic climate. Surely now you could easily live off the convention circuit?

Ummm. I’ve done a few conventions in my time, it’s very nice to be able to, you know, redecorate the odd room on the back of just appearing and getting the adulation of the sci-fi faithful. I actually quite enjoy them because when you work in telly you don’t often meet your audience and the sci-fi audience is like no other, they’re so ridiculously informed about what you’ve been in. They know more about you than you do. They’ve made sense of all the things that made no sense! So it’s quite handy talking to them before something like this, because I’ve learnt more from talking to fans of Battlestar Galactica than I have from actually making the show [laughs]

When you started doing Battlestar had you any concept of that level of fandom?

No, none at all. Oh God no. Well the only thing that approached it, I did Hornblower. It was my first ever job and it attracted a weird kind of historical geek and they had mini conventions. They had mini Hornblower conventions, which weren’t anything like Battlestar Galactica conventions. So I had a little insight into that. But people say ‘now you’ll have these things called conventions where they say can you fly to Tampa, Florida for the weekend’ and I was like ‘yeah whatever, that won’t happen’  but of course it did.
It’s surreal. It’s the single thing that people are most curious about in my life, is that. So it’s a good talking point.

You don't imagine there being a Hornblower convention.

Well in America they talk about genre stuff, genre material, and that encompasses basically everything now. It’s not just sci-fi, it’s horror, it’s comics, it’s anime. You go to Comic Con in San Diego and it basically encapsulates everything. Actually maybe not Law and Order. Law and Order’s maybe the one thing that it kind of mutually excludes. Procedural, real-life, work place drama is probably not convention fodder. I can’t see people turning up dressed in a mac like Bradley or a green jacket and dressing up like us. But hey, I can probably live with that.

You never know.

That’s why I’m doing Law and Order, for a break from all that.

And sci-fi attracts a big gay following…

It does, yeah. It must be the dressing up.

You think?

Well I don’t know [laughs] But it does. They come together, certainly.

Have you noticed you’ve got a growing fanbase? Or “swelling”, if you will.

Yep. If you will. If you must, yes. No I have, and it’s great. I don’t know why Battlestar in particular – or if Battlestar in particular – has a big gay following but it did seem to. I think Katee’s [Sackhoff] character had a lot to do with it. She is the most kick-ass pin-up for the lesbian community and they adore her. She gets bombarded. And I think maybe that sort of rubbed off and I became the male equivalent.

It might have been the vests as well.

[Beams] It might have been the fact that I had a personal trainer and I got into crazy shape, yeah.

That’s the thing I was going to ask about Law and Order, you’re always in a suit or shirt and tie…

No nudity.

I wasn’t going to ask that. But oh, no nudity?

No afraid not. And it’s just as well because I don’t have the same sort of physique to show off [laughs] I’ve come back to the UK and I’ve got back into warm beer and pies again. Much happier and much rounder.

Good call! How can you be arsed with all that exercise anyway? Was it just something you had to do?

I quite like a challenge. Whatever it is. If someone throws a crossword puzzle across I’ll try and do it until it’s done, it’s kind of in my make-up, so when the producer said to me ‘you’re going to play this character, we’d like him to be really military, to really look the part’, to be a razor, or whatever they call these sort of marine types. So yeah, they paid for me to have a trainer for a while. I was quite athletic, I was fit and played lots of sports, but I never really had a proper trainer telling me what to do to get really lean. I enjoyed it, it was a real life-lesson. Now I have that in my head.

Part of being an actor is that you wear different clothes, you try on different accents and voices. It’s even more fun if you try and change your physical look. I really enjoyed it. It was quite fun to be really fit and muscular for a while and be able to see my six-pack, which I’ve never been able to see ever before and since [laughs] So why not? But I’m enjoying not doing it now, I have to say. It’s much nicer going to work and thinking ‘I can tuck into the sandwhiches when they come round’.

My shirt is loose, no-ones going to know… It says in the press release that your approach to policing is ‘part seduction, part force…’ A bit dodgy?

It is a bit dodgy isn’t it? I’m not sure that’s entirely fair. Those things were written before we started shooting so part of it’s true. He’s a young guy, loves his job, very passionate. He’s quite black and white because he’s not very experienced in the ways of the world, so he can’t really empathise with people having made bad decisions in the way that his partner has and can. As a result he is quite forceful, he believes that things are the way it should be and people transgress he doesn’t really process that perhaps very empathetically.

And he likes to flirt, so… Mind you there’s not really much of that to be honest. There’s a lot of subtext in the show, they’re really just doing their job. There’s not much kitchen sink, it’s not going home and some dysfunctional relationship at home and the washing up hasn’t been done. There’s none of that. It gets right along with it. It’s like a moral sudoko our show.

Again, throwing the headlines at me.

There you go.

I’d read that you hadn’t seen the original show and that you’d been advised not to base your character on an existing copper…

Yeah that was something that Eddie Olmos told me. He did Miami Vice all those years ago. I think it’s just good advice. Because as actors you do rip off everything. I was thinking the other day – death. Great dying scenes. None of us have ever died. So all we’ve ever done, most of us have never seen someone die. Maybe one or two, whatever, I’m not going to go there. I haven’t, for whatever reason. So all you really do is sort of refer to the great dying moments in movies and in the theatre. That’s all we have.

I spent some time with real policeman, some uniformed coppers, some CID. Being a policeman is something that never crossed my mind. I never fantasised about that at all.

Were you ever a fan of old cop shows?

Errrr, yeah…. I think I used to like Starsky and Hutch. Cagney and Lacey. Mainly American shows I have to say. I never – forgive me – watched The Bill. I’m trying to think of a British cop show that I watched. Dempsey and Makepeace!

You forget that Dempsey and Makepeace was a British cop show though…

It’s kind of American, yeah. I never watched The Sweeney, I was a bit young. Morse, kind of. I wasn’t a great TV watcher to be honest.

Yes, I noticed that you’d never watched an episode of Coronation Street. Very wise.

I don’t think I’ve ever watched a whole episode of Coronation Street. I’m not – it’s probably a fault but I’m not a great populist when it comes to viewing fodder. I tend to seek out the more… I am in love with The Wire. I’m besotted by The Wire and I can’t get enough of it. So that’s the sort of thing I seek out, the American stuff at the minute, though I’ve seen some great stuff since I got back. I really enjoyed Little Dorit actually, and I enjoyed Steve Coogan in that thing called Sunshine. That was great.

Anything that’s flagged up on your radar that’s made you think ‘ooh, I’d like to get involved in that’? There’s a bit of a renaissance going on with British drama at the moment.

Yeah, they’re coming out with concept shows, which is the way that TV is going. Unlike the American model they’re trying to come up with things that aren’t just the bog standard hospital, police… And Law and Order is a concept show, believe it or not. It’s a game of two halves, the way it ends it halfway and starts a completely different show based on the same case. It drops its characters half way and introduces new ones. I was talking to Dick Wolf last night and that was groundbreaking. He told me – maybe I shouldn’t say this – that was because at the time half hour shows were much more saleable than hour long shows, and he wanted to make an hour long show so he thought he’d make it digestable in two bite sized chunks. Rather than make it as a lump.

The first half is kind of a ‘who-dunnit’ and they arrest someone. Then the second half really isn’t a ‘who-dunnit’ anymore but can they get who-dunnit, can they pin him in the court? It’s another kind of suspense. It’s not what you expect. It’s a really tight, tight show and it’s different from anything else on British TV at the moment. It’s great to bring an American show back here, that’s never happened before.

So anything you’d like to get involved in then?

Oh, that was your question. Well I have to say now I’ve been working on telly now for six years straight. I really would love to do a play in the West End or a British film or something like that. Something finite, that has a beginning, a middle and an end in two hours.

Having done these big, sprawling Battlestars – 70 something episodes in a big tale and Law and Order which is obviously a big franchise. I would like to do something specific whether it’s for film or theatre in particular.

Television I’ll always work in but it’s a bit harder to find that kind of material. Law and Order I’ve got at the minute so I don’t need to stress about it too much.

Did you take a memento from Battlestar?

Yeah yeah. We were all allowed to take one item, one outfit. But I’d already nicked my outfit when they allowed me to take it! I’d already had it! I had it away when the writers strike hit. In my own head it was my kind of ransom to make sure that we got to finish the show. It was the green flight suit. It’s horrible to wear actually, it’s like a green vinyl thing. But it’s iconic and it’s cool. The wardrobe designer just emailed me and they’ve sold off all my clothes at a big auction! It make like $28,000, my three main outfits. I’ve got one of them so hopefully that’s worth a few bob that I can keep for a rainy day. And then my dog tags, I swiped those.

You know what’s going to happen, one day you’re going to bump into someone at a convention wearing your clothes.

I will. I guarantee that will happen. And I will offer them half what they paid for it back.

http://news.pinkpaper.com/Feature.aspx?id=955