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S2 DVD Extras: John Shea Interview
John Shea: I think Adam’s story is one of betrayal, you know? He’s somebody who believed he’s an idealist. He’s a wounded idealist. I think he’s felt the sharp pain of a knife squarely placed between his shoulder blades. I think a lot of what he does is trying to recover from this betrayal. That is, as a young, extremely talented geneticist working out of Stanford University, hired by Genomex, which he thinks is a young up-and-coming genetics, scientific, maybe drug corporation that’s going to be doing all kinds of interesting research. And he does his research in animal husbandry. So he’s doing his genetic research, trying to improve livestock, trying to improve farm technology. And in the genetics that he’s doing, it’s about genetic splicing, genetic engineering. And so he’s hired by Genomex, which sounds like the kind of company that would be able to use his innovations in these worlds. And what he discovers is that these innovations that he’s come up with scientifically are being used secretly in secret branches of Genomex to experiment on human embryos. And a lot of his bosses have taken human embryos that are brought to Genomex to try to help cure them, and in fact what they’ve done is they’ve horribly in many cases altered them, without the parents even knowing what is going on. Or babies are bred, embryos are...you know...so anyway...he discovers that this world is going on and he feels completely betrayed because this is not what he agreed to do. And so what he does is that he has gone--he quits Genomex. He downloads the lists of all the people who have brought their children to Genomex, all the names of all the thousands of people, and he goes on the run. And he quits and he takes the money that he has made through the nineties through brilliant investing like a lot of people did, and he builds this kind of secret world into which he can put all of his laboratory equipment and then he vows to make amends for what Genomex has done to all these people. And his idea is trying to save these people who have been genetically altered before the government gets them. Before Genomex, as it turns out, is not the corporation he thinks it is, trading publically in the New York Stock Exchange, in fact, it is a secret branch of the military industrial complex, and in fact what they’re doing is they’re genetically altering these people for their own purposes. To use them in battle, to use them in espionage, to create people with special powers that...you know...I believe that the government played around with AIDS and viruses and things like that in the 70's and 80's and the price we’re paying for those things today, they’re doing the same thing right now with genetics. So, anyway, Adam is determined to set things right, so he forms Mutant X. A team of people, he hunts down a few of the people. He finds Shalimar, he finds out where she is and he says, you know, “Have you been noticing the fact that you have been developing these odd powers?” And of course she has, and there are other people who have. Because what happens is, the genetic enhancements that he’s created are time-released. And so what happens is that as these embryos mature into young adults, they begin to manifest these powers. But in often cases they think that they’re freaks, and they don’t want to tell anybody about it and they’re feeling extremely insecure about things and so they oftentimes hide them, these powers to their families and friends. So these people are extremely vulnerable. So the government is obviously trying to hunt these people down and either kill them or exploit them in one way or another before the word gets out about their secret experiments. This is the backstory in which we discover ourselves for Mutant X.
You know, he was brought into Genomex and he did experiment. Then at one point, he was hired to come in and work and try to save the experiments that had gone so badly wrong by the other scientists. And so he comes in and he begins to experiment on these people. And finds out that many of them have been given by the other Genomex scientists these extraordinary powers, but they’re kind of devoid of any conscience. They have created, in a way, a little mini-race of sociopaths. And so the question is whether or not science can give somebody a conscience, can give somebody a sense of moral responsibility. And so he begins to go in and genetically play with this, and in fact he makes mistakes. And these people are even more screwed up then when he got them and he realizes that things are going horribly wrong. And so he is in a way responsible, you know? And I think that when he gets to that point, he realizes in fact that things are getting worse rather than better, that’s when he leaves. That’s when he goes to create Mutant X.
Certainly one of the themes which goes through that, which is that if you’ve done things in the past that you want to atone for and you have any sense of conscience at all, then you try to find ways of fixing your mistakes. And I think he realizes that he’s made mistakes and now Mutant X is an attempt to rectify those mistakes. But, you know, everyone has a dark side, I think. And certainly Adam has one. There’s an episode in the first season where somebody actually has this ability to alter moral polarity and you begin to see his dark side. Where that which is the savior becomes the destroyer, the protector becomes the attacker. And it’s about–everybody I think fights with these things within themselves, and certainly Adam has his well. I think he’s tried to devote himself to the light side and he’s trying to do right, but of course the battle is always going on. And I think that as the season’s progressed, what we will discover is that the dark sides, there are secrets to his past that will reveal themselves, and that, like most human beings, he is not all what he seems to be. Which makes it interesting, because there are surprises in store. And I like that. I like that as an actor too, not knowing really where the character’s gonna go, because then there’s a danger to that which is exciting.
When I first met these guys who are doing Mutant X, they offered me this job and I flew up to Toronto to meet with them and I read the script. I thought that it was going to be successful, for a few reasons. One, because I thought it was original. There was a cross of genres here that I hadn’t seen before. A cross of action and adventure and sci-fi and drama, so it wasn’t just one genre. It was a cross-genrel [sic] piece that had an original tone to it. I liked that. And the second thing was, I mean, I wanted to play it. I had done one other thing remotely in this genre, after 40 films and 25 plays in New York and things in England. Instead of playing the villain...the last time I did this, on on Lois and Clark. I played this Lex Luthor character, this kind of Machiavellian sociopathic dark-sided person with a sense of humor, I was getting to play the light-sided person. So I was going to play the hero role rather than the villain role. Having played the villain, I didn’t want to reprise that role at all. But I learned a lot from the Lex Luthor character, and I learned a lot about sociopathologies and all kinds of dark-sided things. Anyway...and I’ve also played Richard the Third and some other dark Shakesperean characters, and I find it interesting to bring that, you know, there was an echo of that in Adam. And so he’s not just a pure, unadulterated hero. He’s much more of a modern man, much more complex. And that’s one of the things I liked about the writing. And I told them when I met them, over at my first dinner, is that I also have a lot of rage inside, and they should feel free to tap into that rage because it’s like an arrow in my quiver that they can draw upon. You k now, if they want someone who can snap, or if they want to sort of tap this cauldron that I carry around sometimes inside of me, despite all my attempts to be Zen-like and Buddhist and enlightened and peaceful, there is always within me a certain amount of outrage. And so I think that that’s a great thing for actors. That there’s this tension between the sense of outrage and a sense of volatility, as well as a kind of effort to be at peace.
I think Adam has the difficulty of all creators, that is, if you create something and you begin to fall in love with it, but then it begins to mutate beyond all of your controls to keep it. Things start to evolve beyond your control, you also risk the loss of it. And that causes quite a bit of pain. And I think what he sees is that that which he has set in motion is a kind of dominoes effect. They are falling and he doesn’t know where it’s going to end. There is a certain amount of his skating just on the edge. He’s surfing on the edge of a huge wave of change and he doesn’t know where it’s gonna take him or his team. So he’s doing the best that he can with everything that he’s learned through martial arts, through meditation, through zen philosophy, through tai chi, through yoga, through any other discipline that he has for self control and self discipline, he’s just trying to stay there on the edge in the here and now. Because if he thinks to far in advance in the future, that’s when the surfer falls off the board and that’s when he tumbles and that’s when he dies. So they’re all just kind of surfing on the edge of unpredictability and he’s doing his best to keep his balance.
And one of the things when I think about what might make the show successful around the world, is the concept that we’re all mutants. I mean, I feel like a mutant. What does mutant mean? I mean, to mutate is to change, and life, of course, is a process of change. And it’s this constant battle between light and dark forces, between yin and yang, life and death, all kinds of, you know, the mutability of human nature and constant sense of surprise. I had a friend die in my hometown last week who was perfectly healthy the week before, and now he’s dead. And I was at his funeral last week, and that’s change. He mutated, you know, he mutated. And everybody has experienced this. Not just the characters in our play, but I think the audience at large. And one of the things we’re trying to do is tell stories about the responsibilities that you have. To try to use whatever powers that you’ve been given for good rather than for evil. And also how to adapt to change and how to sort of–you know, you could be bitter at the changes that you go through, the way these Mutant X people could be. You know, our team could be really bitter, really angry with me, really angry at the process that turned them into these quote freaks of nature. Or, they could take whatever changes, whatever powers, whatever it is that happened to them, and they could use them for something positive. And this, I think, is one of the reasons that these stories might have a moral purpose or have a role in the universe at this point in time, when the world is at war and so many things are changing. We’re trying to tell stories that have some sort of responsibility, and also at the same time be totally entertaining. You know, take an audience to a place that they’ve never been before. In a time where people are afraid to travel and people are afraid to go places physically, they can go places intellectually and in their imagination. They can turn on the television, and once a week we will hopefully take them somewhere they haven’t been before. To a new world where there’s really cool costumes, really cool special effects, really cool martial arts, really cool action, and stories which I hope will have some kind of core of morality to them. A kind of tone or lesson or something that will leave them somehow richer for having watched the show.
Well, it’s so cool that at this point in my life I get to do these martial arts things. After 40 films, you know, I never had a chance to do this. When I was younger, I had a friend who was a black belt, a guy named Rich Meredith. Again, I had a friend who died, a very good friend who died. Death and I are old friends at this point in my life, but he was my first great friend who died, and tragically and suddenly. But he taught me. His legacy was he taught me martial arts, and I used to spar with him. We lived on a little island in Massachusetts, and I would sort of arrive on the island I would hear this unearthly kind of howl and I would come out my door and he’d be waiting there for me. And he and I would immediately start sparring. I hadn’t seen him for a year and we would start sparring with each other and do this great battle. And I knew that at any moment he could kill me, but he never did. He held it back and treated me like a cat with a play toy. But he taught me a lot. So here we cut to 20 years later and they offered me the job on Mutant X. And so I’ve got a chance to take some of those skills and hone them a little bit better and do some of those things that he taught me on the show. And it’s kind of cool to do and I love doing it. I was an athlete, you know, I played football and track and those things in school, and I still do a lot of yoga, tai chi, a lot of physical things. So that I feel like this is an opportunity for me to express myself physically for a change, and it’s great. And it’s fun to do. And this team that we have, I guess you’ll talk to them sometime later on, they’re first class. You know, we feel really lucky to be working with them.
Well, everybody gets along. Everybody gets along. You know, this is being shot in Canada. I’m the only American in the show. I came up from New York, and so you don’t really know what to expect, although I had shot a film here years ago. But what I was delighted to find is that the crews here and everybody here is as good as any crew that I’ve ever worked with anywhere in the world. And I’ve shot films all over the world, including the big Hollywood studios, and this crew is first class. One of the things that makes it great is that we-technically, if you want to know–is that they’ve gathered the best personnel. I think probably the best crews live in Toronto, and of the best crews that are in Toronto, we have guys that have worked together for many many years. They have a kind of teamwork that you’d find in a well-oiled American crew that had been working in studios for many many years. And it starts at the top, with out executive producers who want this thing to be unique and original, and then it filters its way down through our producers and all these crews. We shoot on 35 millimeter, for people who want to know this, and you’ll show this, but 35 millimeter means that we’re shooting it like a feature film. We shoot with two cameras all the time, almost every scene. So what that allows us to do is to shoot extremely efficiently, but also to shoot lots of material so when we get into the cutting room, it looks like a very expensive, much more expensive to show than it actually is because of the way the money is spent intelligently. I’ve shot a lot in England, I know this is going to be shown in England as well, and one of the great things about the way the British crews work is that they always shoot with two cameras so that they’re always getting different angles, getting different takes, getting great coverage. And then they can use that in the editing room. That’s how we shoot this and it proves to be the difference between having a show that looks like every other television show and one that looks like our show.
They called me up and asked me to do it. I mean, they...I was the...whatever...if you ask various people, they’ll tell you different stories. But I think that what happened was that I heard from Jay Firestone, who runs the Canadian co-producing company, that he was on a yacht in Caans. And they were running names by him at the Cannes Film Festival, and they said, “What about John Shea?” And he said okay, because he knew that I had done this Lex Luthor character and Lois and Clark had been a global success for Warner Brothers. And so he needed a kind of bankable name upon which he could then create the show and sell to the foreign, you know people all over the world. So I became the American star. You know, luckily I had done that show, because otherwise I don’t think they would have asked me to do the part. So work creates work, they always say. And so that work created this work.
I had come to Mutant X... The last thing I had done kind of in the public eye was Lois and Clark, which you know, was kind of this global thing. For five years after Lois and Clark, I disappeared. I directed a film, I wrote and directed a film called Southie. It’s actually playing in England as well. And then I stayed on the stage in New York and worked off Broadway for the last 2 years. So that I was kind of doing my art form in a very low-key kind of way. So Mutant X was for me a return to a very popular, very mainstream entertainment. And I knew that if I wanted to come back, I wanted the show to be as good as the last mainstream entertainment which I did, which was Lois and Clark. And I thought that Mutant X had that potential because, as I said before, the originality of its genre and the mix of writing and tone that it ha. You know, it has a sense of humor, but at the same time it’s not like Lois and Clark because it’s not just treated like a romantic comedy. This is much more dark and much more contemporary.
The most frustrating thing about television, well sometimes for me in the genre... I’ve played great roles in film and on stage. I’ve done all the classic plays. And so when you’re used to playing great characters, it’s like mountain climbing. I’ve climbed great mountains, and sometimes television writing can be like strolling across a flat field. And so what I’ve always urged the writers to do here is to write me scenes, just occasionally, that I can sink my teeth into. Where I feel like I have a...I’m stretched as an actor, and I can go someplace new and someplace different. Otherwise, it becomes artistically boring and we just kind of, you know? But I have to say with some relief that as the seasons have gone on, they’ve done that. And I’m encouraged by the writing team that we have now, which is also mutating as we speak, that there are new writers coming in who are hopefully gonna write interesting things for me to play. There were some scenes in some episodes last year where I got to really change and it challenged me. Also, the sheer volume of work that I have to do. Sometimes I’ll shoot 12–last week I shot 16 pages of dialogue in one day. And oftentimes it’s talking to people who aren’t there, because I’m looking at screens or I’m acting with holograms. I mean, I’m acting in thin air. And in a way, it harkens back to, like, Shakespearean plays where Macbeth is talking to witches, you know? They’re not there. You can’t see them. But he’s talking, he’s having scenes. You have to pretend, even in Shakespeare’s day that something that isn’t there is there. And that’s much like Mutant X. So in a funny way, my Shakespearean training has come to bear as I talk to actors oftentimes who are not on the set. And that part is actually really fascinating to me, and is a real challenge. Also, what I’ve discovered about television acting is that it’s very much like sculpture. Somebody once asked me what’s the difference between film and theater acting and television acting, and I have to say that film acting is like oil painting. Because you have the time, the luxury of adding brush stroke by brush stroke onto a finished portrait of a character. Because you shoot them over long periods of time, let’s say 3 or 4 or 5 months in a big feature film. In a play, it’s much like sculpture because you are constantly trying to perfect a character, again, over a long period of time. And every performance you’re perfecting, you’re molding your performance over 6 months or a year, that I‘ve done plays. Television acting is much like watercolors. And it’s not a lesser art form at all; it’s a very difficult art form. To be a great watercolorist, it means you have to make your decisions about what it is you want to do very quickly and you have to work much more quickly than you do in either the stage or feature films. And so we don’t have a lot of time to rehearse, and we don’t have a lot of time to do many many many takes, so it forces us to come to the set prepared, sort of en guarde and ready for action. Bang. And so it’s like a watercolorist who approaches his camera, who approaches his paper, whatever easel, and he looks at what he’s gotta do and just does it. And so it teaches you to act intuitively and to be right there in the moment because you don’t have the luxury of making mistakes. And so that part of it I really like. The other great thing about working on a television series is that we shoot 22 hours of these. 22 episodes in a season. That’s like 11 feature films, okay? ‘Cause each one’s an hour. Now that’s 22 hours of film that we’re shooting. That’s just 11 feature films. That’s like shooting 11 feature films in 8 months. That’s an astonishing amount of work for everybody, for the crews, for the writers, for the producers, for the actors. And it’s also like shooting one long feature film that’s 22 hours long. And people are going to be watching your DVDs. They’ll see how the show just kind of evolves in this long epic film that will take an audience through this entire season.
The other day I had a scene where I had to talk into a television monitor. And I had to imagine that I was talking to the other actors who were on location out here in the woods. And they were reporting back to me back at Sanctuary. Now this particular actor was Shalimar. She was supposed to be onscreen. Of course she wasn’t onscreen because they add that later in post production with the special effect. And I have to say for the first couple of days I just couldn’t get it. It was the first time we’d ever done this particular special effect, that is instead of just communicating with these rings, that is vocally, I could just access a two-way screen. So I can just talk to them and they can talk to me, and remote control. But what I had to do is I had to literally imagine her eyes looking at me. And until I got to that level of concentration where I could see her face, I couldn’t do the scene. So it involves a power of concentration. And just putting yourself into a place where that becomes real to you. And if it’s real to me, then it will become real to the rest of the world when they watch it.
Well, I trained in the method as well. You know, I went to drama school in America. I went to Yale drama school. I studied for three years, acting and directing, and I did everything. Every technique from Stonisklavsky and certainly the method. And what happens is you do draw upon your emotional life. But I find that the older I get and the more I do, I can very easily–I’ve experienced so many emotions at this point in my life that they’re all right there under the surface. And so if I have to worry about somebody in a scene or feel concerned about them, I don’t have to think very hard about how to feel that. It just comes naturally. That’s one of the great things about being an actor, is that the older you get, the more you’ve experienced, the easier it is to act, in a way. Because as a young person I can remember being in scene I was doing on Broadway. I was playing Romeo and Juliet, and I was playing Paris at the time. And I actually got to play Romeo once, but I was playing the character called Paris. And I had to go in and view Juliet, and I remember just I had to see her body and then I had to swordfight Romeo, and then I remember tears had to come to me. Well, as a young actor, I didn’t have anything to cry about. I was on top of the world, you know? And I used to stick my fingers in my eyes before I went on stage just to make myself cry. Cause I knew that the scene itself was so intense that if you saw the woman that you loved dead, you should have tears. I couldn’t do that. But now if you ask me to cry, I’ve experienced so many painful things, like sudden deaths of people that I loved, that tears come to me very easily. It’s one of the best things about growing older, is that you get to take the seemingly negative things that have happened to you in your life and turn them into positive things, turn them into your art form. So Adam, if required to do so, can do those things now much more easily.
Well, the beauty of television, and again, of Mutant X, is that every day is different. It’s not like a play where you’re doing a long run of a play and you’re having to repeat the same words performance after performance after performance. And I’ve done that 4, 5, 6, times in my life where I’ve done plays for 6 or 7 months and then I usually say, okay, I’ve explored this character enough. And I need out! And I’ll pass the role onto somebody else. But with Mutant X, what happens in a television is that every day is different. You’re never repeating the same scenes. Every day is completely fresh. The character is the same, but the character is constantly evolving. The character is constantly mutating. And so, again, it’s about being there in the present and going with the changes.
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