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Comics Continuum 9/17/01: John Shea
MUTANT X'S JOHN SHEA
John Shea, who stars in the upcoming Mutant X syndicated television series, said he was particular about his return to a television series after Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.
"After being part of that team that created Lois & Clark and been involved in that creative team for a period of over four years and having seen it go global, and become a global phenomenon, I waited five years," said Shea, who played Lex Luthor in Lois & Clark.
"I retreated into the independent film world, to the New York theater world, and I didn't want to come back into the mainstream television world until I knew that I could come onto something that was equally good and not be embarrassing. I knew I wanted to do something different and that was going to be a hit.
"I read a lot of pilots. I was offered lots of TV series, and I waited until Mutant X came along. It was the perfect place, it was the perfect series at the perfect time in my life."
This time around Shea's the good guy. He plays Adam, the leader of Mutant X whose last name is shrouded in mystery and who just might be the smartest man alive.
"He was a scientist, a 19-year-old prodigy at Stanford University, a bio-geneticist, hired away to go work for a company called Genomex," Shea said. "He started working doing agricultural cross-fertilization using cross-gene work, thinking that this work was going to be for Alberta, for Saskatchewan, for Kansas and Nebraska. Then, of course, it turns out that the things that he was developing agriculturally, maybe even for animals in terms of genetic engineering and cloning, was being secretly being by the darker side of this corporation for human genetic engineering.
"He discovers that the Genomex is actually a cover corporation for a wing of the CIA - the American Industrial Complex - and that they're using the genetic research to develop these powers in human embryos. So, he's disgusted by this, and he downloads everything he can before he can be captured. And then what happens in the course of the series is that the embryos that were experimented upon are now coming into maturity and people are discovering, much to their surprise, that they have these astonishing powers.
"They also find out they are being pursued by this branch of the government called the GSA - or the Genetics Security Agency - which is now trying to track us down, hunt us down, to exploit the powers for their own dark purposes. You can imagine how they could use guys like this in espionage and the military espionage and in mind control. Or they will kill us if we don't play their game.
"What Adam, my character has done, is he's used the money that he has made the money in the Internet - before it all went south, like last December - and invested his many millions in an underground sanctuary."
While Shea said it's fun to be a hero, he considers Adam to be more of an anti-hero.
"It's complex, a very human being, not a one-dimensional super-hero by any stretch," Shea said. "The guy is a scientist, and that's already a weird thing to be, and a complicated thing to be. Secondly, he is on the run, so he's a fugitive scientist. He's being hunted down by the GSA, but actually part of the government, and that's the law, so he's an outlaw scientist. So that becomes complicated for me emotionally, intellectually and spiritually. And it makes him much more interesting to play."
Shea said that Mutant X does differ from X-Men, taking a more realistic look at the possibility of mutants.
"The beauty of the way this show is created is that anybody in the audience could be one of these new mutants. It's not like you look so different from somebody else," Shea said. "There's an episode where a young boy is being kidnapped. And he gets really angry at one point and suddenly fire erupts from his hands and he burns something accidentally. He doesn't even know that he's got the power. It just manifests itself. He looks like a normal kid in seventh or eighth or 10th grade. Suddenly, it just erupts.
"This stuff has been genetically implanted and it all manifests at different points at the maturation of the person, and then the person has to figure out how to deal with it. Oftentimes, they're embarrassed by it. Oftentimes, along with the power, comes a chagrin and a responsibility. They're feeling like outcasts.
"Our job is to try to find them before the other guys find them and try to deal with that kind of power however it's manifesting."
With 44 episodes ordered, Shea said there will be lots of room to explore the Mutant X members and discover other new mutants.
"One of the best things about Lois & Clark is that we tried to make those comic-book characters human and bring to them all kinds of emotions you might not read in a one-dimensional or two-dimensional comic-book style," Shea said. "We're creating a drama here."
Having been involved with a comic-book show before, Shea knows the importance of visuals. He said Mutant X is raising the bar for TV.
"The stuff that we can do on this show couldn't be done on a television show, even when we were shooting Lois & Clark," Shea said. "Because in the last seven years, the technology has allowed us to do astounding things on a weekly basis that seven years ago, you could only do on a feature film. So it looks astonishing."
Mutant X begins in syndication the week of Oct. 1. Look for more from The Continuum's visit to the set in Toronto soon.
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