The actor probably most known for his role as Doomsday on the series "Smallville", chatted with Collider recently and discussed how proud he is of his new show, his co-stars, and what it's like to play a centuries old vampire on screen.
Here's a small bit of the interview.
Question: How did you originally get involved with this show?
SAM WITWER: I auditioned. As I understand it, I think the casting director, Deedee Bradley, contacted my agent and said, “Why haven’t you sent Sam Witwer for this?,” because she cast me in Smallville. I know that she was involved with getting me out there. When I received the script and they were saying, “Do you want to audition for this?,” I don’t know what I was doing at the time that made me so lazy, but I originally didn’t read the script and just misjudged it. I thought, “Oh, it’s just another vampire thing. I don’t really want to do that.” And, a friend of mine basically tapped me on the shoulder and said, “That’s Being Human, though.” And, I was like, “Yeah?” She said, “But, it’s Anna Fricke, Jeremy Carver and Adam Kane involved as producers. Are you an idiot? What did you think of the script?” And, I was like, “Well, I didn’t read it.” Frankly, my job is to read scripts. She shamed me into doing my job, and then once I did, I have ever since thanked her profusely because it would have been the biggest mistake of my life to not audition for this project. It was me being an idiot, briefly, and one of my friends pulling me out of it.
And then, I auditioned and, shortly after the audition, the process began. After the first time they saw me, we all sat down and had a talk about what the series was, the way I saw it and the way they saw it, and it turned out that we all saw the same type of series. As wonderful as those scripts are, there’s a bad version of those scripts waiting to be made. You could definitely mess it up. In fact, you could mess it up very easily because you’re dealing with all these different elements, with the comedy and the darkness and the drama, and all of that, and figuring out how to balance it to make it work. It could be too campy or too serious. Thankfully, when I saw some of the episodes that we had done, after having shot them for several months, it was really cool because it was the series that I saw in my head. It was like, “Yeah, this is what I thought we were doing.” I really owe a great debt of gratitude to Jeremy Carver, Anna Fricke and Adam Kane for having the talent to be able to execute these lofty goals that we had. They really did a great job.
Question: Did they change the names of the characters to help it feel different from the original series?
WITWER: I think they would have done it anyway, but that’s one of the benefits of doing that. These are not the same characters. Don’t think of them as the same characters. There are a lot of similarities, but for example, Bishop is not Herrick (from the original series). Not in the slightest. He’s not the same guy.
Question: Is it challenging then to remember that none of you can touch Sally, since she’s a ghost
WITWER: That has been a problem, yeah. We’ve nearly blown brilliant takes with that whole rule. There was a scene recently where Meaghan touches a real person for the first time, and she was so excited. It’s really funny.
Question: Do you have any films coming out that your fans should keep an eye out for?
WITWER: There’s a film that I did about a Star Wars/Star Trek geek, who loses everything in the recession and decides to join the mafia, so he has to go move in with his mom in her basement, back in Chicago. We shot that in Chicago. That’s called The Return of Joe Rich, and it should be interesting. I’m the title character, Armand Assante plays my mafia uncle that I try to get in with and Talia Shire is my mother. It’s a fun indie. We’ll see how it comes together. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’ve seen pieces of it. It was definitely fun to shoot. Other than that, there’s some other projects that I can’t talk about just yet, but there’s stuff coming.
Click the source for the full, long interview over at Collider.com
'Nuff said!