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| Eureka! A Sci Fi Event Four-Part Feature |
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| Interviews - Actor | |
| Written by Jenna Bensoussan | |
| Thursday, 30 August 2007 | |
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Eureka's quirky bunch is first up in our four-part feature run. The cast in attendance included Colin Ferguson as the dumb, but street-smart and lovable, U.S. Marshal Jack Carter; Erica Cerra as the tom-boy-ish chick with an attitude - and a gun, deputy Josefina (Jo) LupoNeil; Grayston as the nerdy, and sometimes oh-so-sexy house voice, Douglas Fargo; Joe Morton as the vengeful, scientific genius that always saves the day, Henry Deacon; Ed Quinn as the cocky, too smart-for-his-own-good, Nathan Stark; and Salli Richardson as the down-to-earth, level-headed, fearless leader, Allison Blake. For all of Eureka's familiar, small-town trappings, things in this secret hamlet are anything but ordinary. The stereotype of the absent-minded professor exists for a reason, and most of the quantum leaps in science and technology during the past 50 years were produced by Eureka's elite researchers. Unfortunately, scientific exploration is rarely what one expects, and years of experiments gone awry have yielded some peculiar by-products. Sci Fi's hit series, Eureka, took off in its first season, now boasting oodles and oodles of fans all across the world! With the show in its second season, stakes are high for the cast and crew to reach the same level of perfection as its previous successful season. This next set of 13 episodes brings about a twist in events and characters. "There is a big shift, it’s like turning a dial a number of degrees, everybody, all of the sudden, looks at each other in a different way, and the way you would think, in an almost stereotypical way, the characters would react in different situations and different power shifts, the opposite is true. Different relationships form, different bonds form and different conflicts too," says Quinn. Grayston agrees, "A lot of the plots are a bit more character-driven this season. Everyone gets a bit more dynamic." Morton interjects, "It ups the challenge. Once you come back the second season then it’s, will we come back the third season, will we fulfill this season what we hope to fulfill so the audience stays with us for yet a third season. It’s sort of like any kind of game that you play – once you start winning you wanna keep winning and that becomes the challenge – can we keep winning? I think everybody this year got excited by the arc that we were presented with, and trying to fulfill that arc, and trying to keep the characters with as much integrity as we could possibly keep them. That becomes an exciting thing to do, and a real challenge for us." Season changes aside, cast members commented on some things that excited them about this second round. Ferguson was just happy "they were coming back this season," while Cerra whispered her excitement over the fact that the "stages are better," and that she was "just happy they get to see each other again because they have so much fun." Quinn talks about a road trip he and Ferguson took after the first season...something about driving across the states from east-coast Canada to the West Coast! It was at this time the reviews started coming out for the show. With Eureka being well received, they spent the entire trip saying, "Wow they like it," back and forth to one another. Quinn says, "It gives you a confidence, and an enthusiasm that you just can’t express."
Laughing, Grayston coughs up, "I was very excited to come back because the food is
delicious." *Cue room laughter* {mosgoogle right} With the first season a success, one might think the second would be a breeze, but Ferguson lets loose a different perspective about the the second season, saying it's "the same amount of ungodly pressure." Grayston follows up, "When making a TV show you’re always under the gun. There’s always a large amount of stuff to do in a day that you can’t always…like, we haven’t been able to fit in some things. As an actor it’s fun—just the challenge of trying to do that quickly and trying to make it good." "There’s pressure. We raised the bar last year. It comes to the point where you come in everyday, and sometimes you get frustrated. I think we all get frustrated. Then all of the sudden you’ll see that the work you did was actually better than you thought, and that you were being extra hard on yourself. It’s everybody on the set. People work so hard to make it so good that every once in a while we need to take a deep breath and go ‘alright, you know what, we’re fine, we’re gonna be fine’, but I think that was the work ethic we brought to it last year that brought the show to a certain level, and that’s the work ethic we’re bringing this year," reflects Quinn. Morton explains, "It never feels like you’re working fast enough. Television is like this ongoing machine that never stops. So, you’ve got the actors who’re trying to make the scene as powerful as they can make it, the crew who’s trying to make it look as good and sound as good as they can make it, and we only have a certain number of hours per day, per week, per episode to get all of that done. Once the train starts to go down the track there is no stopping it. And you just have to keep up. And really, from a day to day, sort of minute to minute standpoint, that becomes a major challenge for every episode." "I can see Colin at the engine, throwing wood, saying 'let’s go, let’s go'," laughs Richardson. *Cue Quinn's steam engine, whistle-blowing sound effects* Most television shows do not give actors very much leeway when it comes to the script, tweaking lines or mixing things up with their characters. Fortunately, the cast of Eureka don't have this problem—writers and producers actually consider the little guy down in the trenches. "They’ve been great, and it costs them a ton of energy to keep the door open because we’re a particularly vocal group, so they’re always dealing with calls in about this and that. We have input in the sense that we are constantly pitching stuff, but ultimately it’s their decision on where the characters go. But as far as the day to day...a lot of the time they’ll write something that won’t fit into a certain space (due to time constraints) so they do allow us to tweak it, make it fit, and make it work, because it is better that it be real than we adhere to something that doesn’t fit in the space," says Ferguson. Richardson chimes in, "With most shows, they don’t want to hear anything you have to say. I think it’s really what makes the show better, that they give us the opportunity to tweak some things because we are sitting here in the trenches and sometimes we can catch things that maybe one writer didn’t because, you know, we’re anal and crazy and we remember this and that and that. It just makes it so much better that they’ve let us in that door a few feet more than they’d like to."Morton agrees, "It is completely collaborative. It gets down even to our script supervisor Alex who’ll also come up and say 'I have an idea, if you say blah blah blah blah'. And very often it makes sense. Again, the train is running, we’re trying to keep this mythology of the show on track. We have 13 hours, or 14, or 15 in some cases, to get the show done in seven days per episode so it has to be collaborative, otherwise, you would just be fighting all of the time. "We also have a wonderful producer, Grant Rosenberg, who’s up here with us all of the time. He is our liaison between the writers back in LA and what we do up here, and he is extremely resourceful in terms of helping us figure out our day to day, moment to moment, problems as we move through the script. It all kind of works. Everybody, basically, is throwing some kind of coal on the fire to keep the engine moving, otherwise, we really would come to some sort of crashing stop." The acting is also better when input is allowed from the actors, according to Cerra, primarily due to the fact that "you care more about the character because you’re allowed to give your heart in the character as apposed to just doing what someone else is telling you to do. It’s nice." "It makes it feel more organic with us. It flows a little bit better," says Grayston. Shooting away from Hollywood provides the cast their own little dramatic environment, away from the hustle and bustle of LA life. Says Richardson, "When you’re here, we go to work and we go home. You get the rest you need or the rest you’re trying to get, and you’re not distracted by real life. Because our 'real life', for most of us, is in Los Angeles. We’re just in this little cocoon of work and doing the show, and you’re not distracted by any parties you wanna go to or anything else that’s going on, it’s just your work and your little bit of family time at home."
"It’s actually really boring," laughs Morton. Location isn't too much of a concern for the actors, but sometimes, the techno jargon can be a bit much for the them to try and pronounce – they really have to sound like they know what they are talking about. It isn’t always the big words that cause problems though, “Some of the most difficult ones are actually the easiest. The other day I couldn’t say ‘skin pigment’. It kept coming out as pigskinmus," laughs Quinn. The great thing about Eureka is its unique character interactions, storylines and blend of humor, sci-fi and mystery. As Grayston says, "It's a whole bunch of things together." Morton continues, "It’s more character-driven. It’s beyond sci-fi. It’s kinda based on the Einstein idea of bringing geniuses from around the world together in one place to do better for the world…all those things sort of spinning around."One thing is for sure, a few episodes of this amazing show will have your head spinning for more! Don't forget to tune in to Eureka every Tuesday night at 9 p.m. EST on Sci Fi. For more information you can check out their official site—and don't forget to glance over the exclusive photos from the press event below!
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ACED Magazine was recently invited to a special Sci Fi event, where we visited the sets of various television shows—Stargate Atlantis, BattleStar Galactica, Flash Gordon—and of course, Eureka! While there, we took part in a series of cast interviews.
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