Moviefone Editorial

Author: Scott Huver

  • ‘Scandal’s’ Belamy Young: New President Mellie Feels ‘Invincible’ with Olivia Pope at Her Side – But Is She?

    There’s a new President in “Scandal’s” Oval Office, and Bellamy Young, the actress behind Mellie Grant, can’t wait to start exercising some executive privilege.

    As Shonda Rhimes‘ shock-a-minute Beltway potboiler launches its seventh and final season, the frequently beleaguered, always in-the-mix Mellie has finally had her greatest triumph, following her ex-husband Fitz Grant into the nation’s highest office -– the first woman to do so. But just what kind of president will Mellie make?

    Moviefone had the new President’s ear and Young spilled a few juicy secrets from “Scandal’s” swan song season.

    Moviefone: How’s life as President of the United States?

    Bellamy Young: It’s delicious! Mellie has wanted it for so long and eventually I did too, which is a luxury I have never afforded myself. I never have a dog in the hunt because our writers, they tell a far better story than I would ever conceive of, but Lordy, I really wanted it. Mellie being in her Oval Office –- her Oval is beautiful! They’ve built the most beautiful Oval Office.

    Nicer than Fitz’s?

    I think so. It’s specially made with all these quilts from feminine leaders over the years. And I get a little verklempt and overwhelmed to sit in there most days just because… I had two lines in the pilot, and I’ll get very overwhelmed because I will sit behind a desk in the Oval and think about what a ride it’s been and how lucky I feel.

    Is it a unique opportunity for you to play a female president?

    You know, I think about how much it meant to me to see 24.” I’m behind on TV, but I know we have a female president on “Homeland” and “House of Cards” and “Veep,” but I’m so honored to get to have the mind of Shonda Rimes sitting in that chair especially in this day and age. I am truly humbled by the opportunity.

    Tony is a Goldwyn so he wears power effortlessly. That was not my experience in life, so I have been very consciously trying to rise to the occasion because it means a lot to me and I’m trying to do a good job.

    Where is Mellie emotionally after the first 100 days?

    I think Mellie feels like she knows what she’s up against, but she feels invincible with Olivia by her side. She knows that whatever she does will also have the corollary commentary about what she wore or how her hair looked that day, but she knows that together they can change the world. No, I think that what’s interesting is that she has no idea what’s going on in Olivia’s mind.

    Do you know how the series is going to end yet?

    No. We see the scripts just the day before we start shooting them, we really just see them at the table read. I think… this is not a weird thing to tell. Someone asked Shonda, “So is it going to end where you thought it was going to end?”, because she said she knew this wasn’t going to be like “Grey’s Anatomy” that goes on forever. And she said, “No I thought it would end with the inauguration. But then the world changed and I felt like I had more stories to tell with this forum.”

    I am so curious. I was so proud of last season. I thought they did beautiful story work. Especially on the scramble, because we had to toss the whole second half. We did five episodes and took of time for Kerry [Washington] to have a baby and the world changed, And the season was supposed arc out that the Russians hacked the election but then the Russians hacked the election and Trump won so they threw out all the other scripts. So they were writing, responding to things last year, and I thought where they went was amazing.

    Shonda’s pulled back from “Grey’s Anatomy” –- she’s really with us this year, she wrote our first episode. Just to know that she has a fire in her belly about what she wants to say to the world right now, I’m very lucky to be a part of that.

    How do you feel about saying goodbye to the show?

    We cry like twice a day. And I don’t see that stopping. I guess people will have grief fatigue, but I feel like we will pace ourselves. It makes everything so dear, so precious. That first table read was incredible -– we were all really verklempt afterwards.

    And because Kerry is such a good leader and because it’s not just the actors it’s all the writers, all production, everybody’s there, she just took a moment and was like, “I know I can’t do this every table read, but this journey is so incredible and I can’t believe we’ve gotten to be on it together for seven years, because so many people have been here since the beginning, and every moment is precious and we love you guys.”

    The show is called “Scandal” – can you give us a little hint of where the show gets dark and dangerous for her?

    I think this is really a year for Olivia to make a real moral choice. She’s really choosing an existential who she is choice. She has all the power for good because she’s the chief of staff and she has all the power for evil because she has the 613. I think, it will be tumultuous and a cage fight till the end.

    And I don’t know where Shonda’s heart is: if she sees this as a story of redemption or if she sees DC as a place that chews you up and spits you out and you lose your soul. I’m as invested, because I love this show, I love my job. I can’t wait to see what it all means -– but keep your eyes on Olivia.

    How much is your life changed during the show?

    I mean, night and day! In as much as I’ve had a job for seven years, what actor can say that? It’s the best, I love it so much. But also, because I couldn’t be more different from Mellie, so playing her 17 hours a day has changed my molecules. I take a little more space in the world. I would never have done that without her.

    And also, my therapist would like to say that I’ve been re-parented by my “Scandal” family: not just the cast but the crew and everybody and it’s true – the constancy, the love, the support, there’s never any drama, there’s never any undermining. I can call them in the middle of the night. I’ll be able to call them 14 years from now when something goes right and something goes wrong. This whole experience has been utterly transformative.

    Has the show politicized you more?

    Definitely. I always try to be an informed part of the democracy because democracy is like a verb, democracy is something we do -– we have to participate or it fails. But I’ve never felt like I owned it or like I’ve been part of things like I do now. And I wish everyone did because no one is more important than anyone else in democracy. But it’s definitely made it real to me in a way that that was just academic before.

    Were you always rooting for her to endure and survive? Did you think for a while Mellie was the bad guy?
    What I love about Shonda is that she lets you be all things. You’re the villain at one time, and the hero the next. It’s just messy human behavior. And as much as I doubt myself constantly, I never doubted Mellie. She’s got a thousand-yard stare, and as much as she fails she gets up. Every time.

    And she doesn’t worry what people think, she’s willing to do whatever to get there. I always believed in her. I didn’t necessarily think she’d win, because she’s not a winner -– that’s never been Mellie’s thing, so I was shocked and thrilled and I think she’s been planning her whole life what kind of president she will be. I know she feels very at home in that office. But I’m sure there’s a lot of failure to come in that regard as well. But I like it because I know she’s in the ring. My stepfather said, “As long as you’re swinging, your dangerous.”

  • The Cast of ‘This Is Us’ Spills the Secrets of the Heart-Tugging, Tear-jearking New Season

    Get the tissues ready: NBC’s family drama phenom “This Is Us” returns for a second season tonight, and based on what the cast has revealed to Moviefone the storylines are poised to once again hit the audience right in the feels.

    Sterling K. Brown, the newly minted Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series Emmy winner for his performance as Randall Pearson in the show’s freshman season, admits he was eager to slip back into Randall’s very sensitive skin. “He has such incredible highs because his heart is so wide open,” says Brown. “It also means that he can have it broken. It’s been a joy to play him. I hope to be able to do it for several years to come because you don’t see people wear their hearts on their sleeve the way this character does.”

    The season will kick off following Randall’s intention to adopt a child, “He’s very conscious of wanting to pay homage to his mother and father and to William’s legacy, and try to do something for a young person that was done for him,” says Brown. “The thing is, he has a different wife and she has different ideas on how that’s supposed to self-actualize, so I can’t do it exactly the way Jack and Rebecca do it because Randall and Beth are their own couple. So I have to pay respect to that couple hood and see how we decide to move forward as a unit.”

    Indeed, there may be some points of contention regarding the adoption issue, hints Susan Kelechi Watson, who plays Beth. “We’re going to open with Beth sort of presenting her side on this adoption issue that’s been coming up, and what it means to her,” says Watson. “What part of her life she feels will be affected by it and all those types of things. We’ll have a chance to see her and Randall on two different pages, for once.”

    Viewers can expect to learn a little bit more about Beth’s backstory as well. “Last season was really about meeting the Pearsons, the core family, and that’s an important story to set up,” explains Watson. “And now we get to branch off into some other things, and explore other relationships, so we will get a chance to see myself and the Pearsons, a little bit of my family.”

    Justin Hartley‘s character Kevin Pearson’s professional circle will broaden to include his new co-star Sylvester Stallone – the iconic action hero will guest star as himself. “He’s in the movie with Kevin so he’s playing a character, and he’s Sylvester Stallone playing a character, so he’s playing himself as well – he’s great at it!” says Hartley.

    “He’s such a good actor that it just comes across so natural and everything, what he does,” says Hartley, who had as much fun with Stallone off-screen as he did on. “He just comes to work, makes everyone laugh, puts everyone at ease, and then gives a wonderful performance. Tells great stories, then he leaves – I’m like, ‘That’s cool walking through the door right there.’”

    Chris Sullivan, who plays Toby Damon, agrees, having met Stallone while both actors worked on “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2,” in which Sullivan was buried under prosthetics as Tazerface. “When Sylvester Stallone walks on the set, everyone is a 12-year-old kid. Everyone is like, ‘That’s Rocky!” Everyone wants to meet him,” says Sullivan. “He walked up to me, and was like, ‘Hey, you mind if I get a photo?’ I’m just like, ‘Sylvester Stallone wants a photo with me!‘ I had completely forgotten that I’m covered in this amazing special effects makeup – he wants a photo with the makeup. He didn’t want a photo with me.”

    “But he came on the set here, and he remembered me!” adds Sullivan. “That was blowing my mind, that Sylvester Stallone remembered me. Now I have a photo without the makeup.”

    Sullivan says Toby will be doing his best to keep his romance with Kate Pearson thriving. “We’re going to see him and Kate really doubling down on their relationship, kind of getting past all the courting, all of the grand gestures and really getting down to like building a foundation for a long-lasting relationship,” he reveals. Does Toby have a truly sincere and intimate relationship in him? “I hope so. I want to be on this show for like six more seasons!”

    The actress behind Kate, Chrissy Metz, is in agreement. “I don’t want Chris going anywhere. Never,” she says. That means, however, that the couple has some work ahead of them if they hope to stabilize their connection.

    “Here’s the thing,” says Metz. “I think we all have pockets of bliss and being in love with our partners in some capacity. But what’s so beautiful about the writing is that there are swings, and ups and downs. Unconditional love is all through that, all through the really difficult parts, and then the really beautiful moments. So I think that’s real love, and real love is intimacy. The intimacy is honesty, and I think what’s really beautiful and people relate to, is that they’re really brutally honest with each other.”

    Kate’s also branching out creatively and professionally. “She’s really making it a point to pursue her singing career, sort of following her mother’s footsteps – and what does that mean for her?” says Metz. “She’s a mid-30s girl who’s never sang, and she’s in Los Angeles. It’s not like she’s in New York and doing theater, where it’s a little more acceptable – it’s a little different game. So there’s ups and downs, and there’s swings and shifts, so we’re going to get to see all of that, and how it plays out – and how it of course affects Toby and Kate’s relationship.”

    The storyline has been a thrill to Metz, who reveals that she was never encouraged to pursue her own musical ambitions, despite her stunning pipes. “It was always like, ‘Oh, you’re going to be a comedian. You’re funny. I don’t know if music is your thing,’” she says. “It was always something I wanted to do, but it was never really encouraged. So in that capacity, I totally get it, sort of feeling like friends or people who have found success or are better than I am.”

    “Then I realized, everybody’s voice is different. Everybody’s acting is different,” she adds. “We can all appreciate any of those things. It’s a little tricky because she’s still in that beginning stages of her music. She’s never been, like, properly trained or any of that. So it’s like this real raw vulnerability that I love. I think that’s what people relate to in music.”

    As Kate’s mother Rebecca, Mandy Moore says she was eager to crack open the source of the two characters’ unspoken friction, “why it’s so sort of frayed and disconnected in the present day. It’s interesting to sort of see the parallels in their lives with music, and where sort of, maybe, the resentment started with her mother. It’s like two sides of the same coin. They’re both right and they’re both wrong.”

    “I read it, and I bawled,” Moore admits. “I was like, ‘I think I have some stuff I need to deal with with my own mother.’ It really touched something in me.”

    And then there’s the lingering mystery in the show’s flashback sequences regarding the doomed fate of Milo Ventimiglia‘s Jack Pearson, the super-dad of the Big Three who’s grappling with the imperfections in his relationship with Rebecca that resulted in that fiery, wounding argument that closed out Season One.

    “We find them in that immediate fractured moment just beyond,” says Ventimiglia, “and they have a long, uneven, unpaved road to walk to get back to being better. Some hurtful things were said, some things that you never want to bring into a relationship but the intensity of that fight is always going to cool off. But what doesn’t go away is the hurt and the pain and what these people who have spent twenty years together experience.”

    “For all Jack’s perfection, or perceived perfection, I think what we’re going to see a lot of this year is Jack’s imperfection,” adds Ventimiglia. “Not that we’re going to see Jack acting poorly or being poorly. We’re just going to address the things that have impacted his life to where he puts on this ‘amazing man’ quality, but really buries everything else because he does not want it anywhere near his family, anywhere near his wife, anywhere near his kids.”

  • Playing the Menendez Brothers’ Attorney for ‘Law & Order True Crime’ Changed Edie Falco’s Mind About the Verdict

    After playing the matriarch of one of TV’s most beloved crime families and a nurse who dabbled in criminal behavior, Edie Falco‘s arguing for justice for two of the 1990s’ most notorious murder suspects – on screen and off.

    “Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders” takes creator Dick Wolf’s venerable ripped-from-the-headlines TV franchise into actual non-fiction territory, exploring the infamous shotgun shooting deaths of Hollywood executive Jose Menendez and his wife Kitty in their Beverly Hills home at the hands of their two sons, Lyle and Eric Menendez. Falco portrays the brothers’ protective, courtroom-shrewd and media savvy attorney Leslie Abrahamson, who introduced the controversial “abuse excuse” defense, which posited that the brothers were driven to murder their parents after years of emotional and sexual abuse.

    It’s a stance that, upon close inspection, resonated with Falco as she dug into the research to help bring the trial to life on television, and one that ultimately –- as she explained to a small group of press during NBC’s press day for the Television Critics Association last month –- changed the way she looked at the much-publicized case.

    Leslie Abrahamson was a very polarizing figure at the time. What was your take on her after studying who she was in real life and who she was in the media depiction?

    Edie Falco: Well, she was polarizing in that she was not at all interested in giving the sound bites that people wanted. That she really was really unpopular for representing boys who looked like monsters, because of what the media was being fed.

    Leslie had a sort of mothering effect on the boys, which was unusual given the tragedy they were involved in. What was interesting about figuring out how to bring that to life?

    Well, I’m a mother, and this is an awful thing for kids to go through -– or anyone to go through. Of course the crime is one thing, but being on trial and just the niggling questions into their past and the unkindness by the opposing team. I think it’s important to help these people show up with their best selves. And she took that seriously.

    Did you do a lot of research, or watch tapes of her in action in court?

    Yeah, there was a ton of stuff out there. Even though this took place pre-YouTube, there’s a ton of information on her, yes.

    What did you admire about her as a professional?

    That she took her job seriously, and she didn’t always have to believe that her clients were innocent. It was irrelevant to her. Her job was to prove them innocent until proven guilty. And she took it very seriously, and I respect that. It was not about how other people perceived her or how they perceived her clients. It’s that she was going to at least make sure that according to the law they were given a fair shake, and I respect that.

    She was also great in front of the media.

    Yes, yes, she was, I think she sort of enjoyed it and she became friends with them, and she knew their names and she knew how to ask for some space when she needed it. I think she knew how to befriend them so that she didn’t make them an enemy, because that would have been disastrous.

    How closely did you follow the case at the time it was happening?

    It was all in the background. It was, also, I didn’t have the interest in it that I have now, and I didn’t realize that the main people who watch these things are women. And I’m very curious what that’s about. That’s another discussion, but anyway, I’m among them, the fans of this crime genre.

    It was peripheral, like the O.J. [Simpson] case was. It was always on, there were a million things to pay attention to at the time, media-wise. So it was always on, and you heard the verdict. And I made the exact same assumption that everybody else did: two bratty kids from Beverly Hills who wanted money, and it really made me think how much we are what we are fed.

    Has this project made you reconsider those initial preconceptions?

    All of them. Everything. Things are not what they appear.

    What was your own life like during the early 90s, when this was going on?

    I was making a movie. I remember… yeah, I was on a beach making a movie when this verdict went down. So I was already working in my low-budget movie world.

    You sport a fantastic looking wig. How do you feel about it?

    How do you know it’s a wig? I’m just saying! Well, we’re very early on in this, but I have to say, I do kind of love the wig, and have my own little relationship going on there. But it was also the hair I wanted at that age and could never get.

    Was there more pressure on you when you’re playing a real person – especially a person that’s still living?

    Yeah, the pressure is self-induced, if I decide it’s more pressure than it is – but I’ve decided it isn’t. That she’s about what she did, and that remains my sole focus, really.

    Do you ever carry parts of your characters with you at the end of a project?

    Nope, I’m done. It took a lot of years of working to recognize that it doesn’t help me to carry it home and really get that it makes it worse. I have real kids and they make absolutely sure that they are the center of my attention when I get done with work.

    You’ve set such a high bar for yourself with the roles that you’ve played. When you go looking for the next thing, is it tricky to balance between wanting to keep to that standard and just wanting to work?

    It is complicated, but there is no intellectual program. I will know when I read it. And maybe some day, if I really want to work, maybe my standards are different. I don’t really know. But it all plays in when I read something: If my heart is racing, it’s where I’ll be next.

    What was the gut reaction when you read this, that first overwhelming feeling?

    Well, that there was so much about this and about those boys that I didn’t know, that made me realize that we are a product of what we are fed from the second we’re born, and to the same degree, what I was fed about this case turned out to be inaccurate and certainly incomplete.

    And I like the idea that people can shake up their beliefs about something and can change. I think that’s the mark of a healthy human and this might be an opportunity for other people to recognize that in themselves as well.

    So is it safe to say that you’re convinced about the abuse defense?

    There’s no question. And you’ll see. I mean, this stuff was just not made known, was just not made available. And there are two guys, like real men my age now, sitting in jail. I mean, it’s one thing when it’s a story that’s made up by Dick Wolf and his writers. They are two real men. They went through this and now are sitting in jail for the rest of their lives.

    Is legal jargon easier than medical jargon of “Nurse Jackie?”

    They’re both challenging, unless you put in the eight years of schooling. But, you know, that’s my job.

  • Jim Parsons On the ‘Big Bang’ That Produced ‘Young Sheldon’

    The Big Bang TheoryDespite his plethora of off-putting peculiarities and his sky-high self-regard, “The Big Bang Theory’s” Sheldon Cooper has become one of the most beloved characters in television history. And now TV audiences are getting a chance to fall for him all over again. Only this time as an 80s-era little boy learning to navigate the world with his advanced intellect in “Young Sheldon.”

    “We’ve been talking about this story on ‘The Big Bang Theory’ for ten years,” says Chuck Lorre, the creator and executive producer of the ratings-rich sitcom that, a decade ago, first introduced the world to Sheldon, and to the soon-to-be-Emmy-winning actor behind the character, Jim Parsons. “The origins of Sheldon have been something we’ve been interested in writing about for a couple-hundred episodes of ‘The Big Bang.’ And so last fall, when Jim sent me an email discussing the possibility of actually taking it a step further, it just seemed like the greatest idea in the world.”

    Key to transforming Sheldon into a kid version of himself was stripping away many of the character’s distinctive quirks, neuroses, anxieties and arrogance and revealing the innocent, if crazy smart, child he once was.

    “So we made a decision early on that we’re going to enter his life when he’s very naive, when he’s not yet become cynical and overly controlling,” explains Lorre. “He has his idiosyncrasies, but he’s a much more vulnerable and naive character as we enter the story in 1989.” Thus, “Young Sheldon” introduces the lead character at nine years of age, just coming to grips with the fact that his oversized intelligence marks him as different from other kids his age. Iain Armitage plays the budding scientist, who’s nurtured by his doting mother Mary (played by Zoe Perry, the real-life daughter of actress Laurie Metcalf, who plays the same role on “The Big Bang Theory”) amid a family who loves him, but does not understand him.

    Parsons joined Moviefone and a small group of press to further reveal his hands-on role in the development of a smaller bang theory.

    On the adjustment to providing the new show’s narration in characters as Sheldon:

    Jim Parsons: I would say what’s most different in just that it’s speaking not as a new character, but in a new way. And the most exciting part of it is that. And it’s what Chuck and [co-creator] Steve [Molaro] really did with it, which is that they turned it into a real origin story, which was a term I’d never even heard of until we were doing “Big Bang.” I’d seen origin stories, whether it was movies or whether, but they’ve taken this and really made it like seeing the beginnings of a superhero, in a way. A genius, in this case.

    On conversations with Iain Armitage about his potentially life-changing role:

    I’ve talked more about that with his mother, and I don’t even think they need it. They’re not unsavvy people, but I still think even if you think you know it, it’s always trial by fire in this business. When I saw the marketing and all the posters and stuff with Ian’s face on them, I texted her immediately. It was like, “Prepare.” But she’s seen them, and again, I think that they’re prepared.

    I’ve talked more with Ian about the peculiarities of the character. One of the hardest things, I think, for someone like Ian playing this character is that Ian is so empathetic to other people, and so in tune to other people’s needs. And as an actor, he brings that. He’s a very good responder to people. So those are great qualities to have, but in this particular character, you almost have to let them play under the surface, and trying to explain in certain parts where it’s like you don’t understand what they mean, or you don’t understand what you said was rude.

    Because he’s so smart and he’s so empathetic, his first take on a lot of lines would frequently be to almost apologize as he’s saying them, and you have to go, “No, back it up. You have no idea you need to apologize.” And once he does that, he loves it. He loves getting to do it. But he’s very intuitive, and in some ways that can be a habit that needs to be broken at certain times with this character – which is a very weird thing to tell an actor!

    On his role as producer:

    Honestly, the biggest thing I’ve done so far is talk to Ian about those kinds of things I was just talking about. That’s been my biggest contribution, other than opening this whole idea up to begin with. I feel, in some ways, very naïve and green, as far as being on this side of the camera. I still feel very much – and I think I always will, to a degree – a real sensitivity to not getting in the way of another actor.

    I don’t know that there is a born director inside me, I don’t know that that’s true. I really am clawing and feeling my way as this goes. And I also have not had to do anything with this show while my show’s working at the same time, so that’s gonna be a whole other beast, and we’ll see if my head explodes.

    On the “Young Sheldon” stories he’d like to see:

    The ones that Steve touched on are certainly funny. For me, I think partly because I don’t invent the stories, I memorize them, and they kind of get in one big blob in the back of my head, it’s more of an aura. It’s more of an essence. And again, which has been so touching to me about watching this come to life, it’s just like there’s these people that I’ve imagined in my head, be it his father, or his young mother, or his brother and sister. To see them for the first time has been very moving to me. And with every story they’re writing so far, you do feel the treasure chest sort of cracking open more and more. It’s like one thing feeds on another in a weird way.

    Again, back to that origin story type thing: it’s the same person as a young person, but a young person is also in some ways a completely different character altogether, certainly in his case. I thought what they did with him not knowing what comic books were yet, or thinking they’re for kids, I think that’s genius. I mean, he’s obsessed with them as an adult, so we have that seed planted now, that you just kind of salivate for waiting for the episode where that cracks open in his brain, where he’s like, “I love this!” When does he start dressing like that? It’s what he wears all the time, as an adult. So things like that, and I’m not a writer, but I could have never dreamed up approaching it like that. It just wouldn’t have occurred to me.

    On whether the storylines of “Young Sheldon” might influence the way he plays his role on “The Big Bang Theory” in the future:

    I think in an unconscious way it already has. I think that there’s something so touching to me about seeing it. It’s very funny: obviously. I feel great love and respect and empathy for any character I play. That’s the whole point. That’s the joy of doing it. That being said, it’s a job, and it’s been a decade with this one. And so to finally see this character that I’ve been riding side by side with for those 10 years embodied as a young person, it creates a real feeling of sympathy, in a weird way.

    I think of this character in a way that I hadn’t necessarily before. And Ian, he embodies it. He is the visualization of that. And so now I’ve got this distinct picture in my head. I haven’t had to do an episode yet, since we’ve done this, but I don’t know. I know I feel certain things already. We’ll see how it plays out on a day to day circumstance, I can’t tell.

    On how the adult Sheldon would reflect on his childhood:

    I think if you look at it in terms of like Sheldon would be very interested in putting together an autobiography for the help of all of humanity, because you have a right to know and it can help you to know, then I think in that way, yes. He would love to go back and say, “This is how I became the wonderful creature before you. These are the hardships I’ve dealt with. These are the dumbbell parents I had to deal with to get to where I am.”

    And in the same regard, which is becoming very clear – and this is a very interesting juxtaposition to that – the obvious devotion and care that his mother took with him. A character who I feel we’ve ridden this line with her the whole time on the adult version, which is that he is just… she drives him crazy, and she is a constant calming, reassuring force in his life.

    And I think that’s one of the most moving things about getting to watch this so far and work with this so far, is to see the infancy of that relationship. And the two of them are fantastic together dealing with it. They’re both such sympathetic characters, as human beings, Ian and Zoe – who I call “Laurie,” all the time! It’s so shameful.

  • ‘Star Trek: Discovery’s’ Jason Isaacs Says Similarities to Other Captains Ends With “Fire Phasers’

    Star Wars Rebels” and “The OA,” where he’s specialized in playing bad guys (or at least morally complicated ones). At last, though, Isaacs’s next foray into the realm of the fantastic finally appears to place him firmly on the side of the righteous, playing a Starfleet captain in “Star Trek: Discovery.”

    However, when we meet Discovery’s Capt. Gabriel Lorca in the new “Trek” series (set roughly ten years prior to the original 1966 sci-fi series) he’ll be commanding a starship during a wartime, so it’s very possible he might not always be able to act as morally upright as some of the franchise’s more iconic ship captains, possibly warp speeding into grayer areas of conduct.

    Isaacs assures Moviefone that the while the new series shares many of the “Trek” series’ classic trappings, expect the similarities to end there. “This is a 21st century ‘Star Trek,’” he promises. “It’s ‘Star Trek’ not as we know it.”

    Moviefone: What’s it like to sit in the captain’s chair?

    Jason Isaacs: I don’t sit in the chair very much. I try and get out of the chair and walk around, for two reasons: one is, all the other captains sat there; two is the poor directors have got these exciting action-packed scenes where nobody moves. I feel for them, so I get up and run. I stand in front of the screen. I conduct the action like the spaceships are an orchestra and the torpedo are my violins. And I run to the different stations and talk to them.

    Have you talked to any of the franchise’s other captains?

    I’ve worked with Jonathan Frakes, who just directed, who was hilariously irreverent but actually, incredibly nuanced in his understanding of what the world was about. And I approached Patrick Stewart from behind recently, and he was mobbed by all the people, and I was just taken aback by how upright his posture was, and how often he had gone to the gym, and felt that I needed to workout before I spoke to him up front.

    Does it feel like you’ve joined this special club?

    It doesn’t, only because there’s so much to concentrate on. There’s so much drama going on in the scenes. I’m looking at the other people in my crew and trying not to get the ship blown up. I’m trying to make sure as few people as possible die, and to solve the crisis and secrets we’ve got going on.

    But only when I come to [conversations] like this am I reminded of this enormous weight and expectation, and I try and shake it off, because you couldn’t do the job otherwise.

    How is your character different from the captains we’ve known before, and what does he have in common with them?

    How were any of them similar to each other is the question. This is a 21st century “Star Trek.” It’s “Star Trek” not as we know it, it really is. First of all, it’s serialized. The episodes are different length, but it takes on much more complicated troubles and ethical dilemmas. The characters themselves have far more secrets, and far more twists and conflicted agendas than ever before. And they can delve that much deeper into their relationships with each other because it’s an unfolding story over the whole season. So in that sense, it’s completely different.

    Legacy aside, what was interesting about this character?

    Legacy aside –- well, the legacy is not what’s interesting. If I thought I was taking this job because I wanted to be like one of those other incredible people, and the series that was iconic to me in my childhood, I’d have run a million miles. And if I want to go and fire phasers, I can do a laser course with my kids.

    What was interesting is the story they had –- which I can’t tell you about, but is the kind of unfolding, deep, kind of labyrinthian story which had twists and turns, and reflected the human condition.

    We live in these very troubling times. I don’t want to make it sound serious. It’s an adventure. It’s a sci-fi adventure with complicated characters. But I don’t know how to explain the world to my children right now. There’s ugly things going on. The most powerful man in the world says it’s okay to make fun of disabled people, grab women’s crotches, makes immigrants and the children of immigrants terrified in school, and I don’t know how to explain the anarchy and chaos at the head of the world, and how we seem possibly to be edging towards war on three or four different continents.

    But one of the things I can do as a storyteller, which is not much, is be part of stories that hold up a vision for the future where we just do better. We do better as humankind, and in the sci-fi world, we do better as different species working together. That’s one of the main attractions: holding up an optimistic beacon.

    Is he a good captain?

    This is a time of war. So he’s good at war, depending on your perspective. We send people out to do our bidding and we want victories. We don’t really want to know what they do to get there sometimes. Do the ends justify the means they do if we’re not looking at the means too closely?

    This is set ten years before the original “Star Trek.” Is the ideology the same?

    [The writers and producers] are all very reverent. There’s a lot of diehard Trekkies – you can cut them open and they’ve got “Trek” DNA, being a writer. I don’t. I don’t have that. I think it’s a story told fresh with completely fresh 21st Century’s perspectives. The only way to honor Gene Roddenberry‘s legacy is to embody it, and then throw it away, and tell new stories for a new age.

    These very troubled times we live in, and the difficult dilemmas that we face, and that’s what they’ve done. And there are places, obviously, where they observe canon to do with things like uniforms, and badges, and stuff. But there are places that all the rules of storytelling are reinvented, because it’s a new audience. It’s certainly not only made for the people who have been watching it for 50 years. That would be an insane idea.

    Thus far, what’s been your most “Star Trek”-y day on set?

    The first time I said “Energize.” The first time I said “Phasers to full.” The first time that I’m engaging with another captain. The first time that I sit in my chair and say, “Warp speed!”

    Any of those moments are iconic. Those things pass in a split second. There are interesting and new, I think, much richer relationships between the people on the ship than you’ve ever seen before. Particularly since you’ve got 15 episodes for them to go on the rollercoaster journey that you go on in times of war with your shipmates.

    Everyone’s always reminding you of the weight of the franchise and its history, but this must be a fun time in your career.

    Of course it’s fun. I’m putting on a space suit and running around and firing phasers! And the show, any piece of entertainment, no matter if it’s serious or lighthearted, should be fun to watch, in the sense that it finishes and you’re exhilarated by it.

    This one I think will start conversations and not finish them, and that’s a big difference from the old “Star Treks.” But I don’t care about the legacy. I don’t mean to sound irreverent when I say I don’t care about the diehard “Trek” fans. I only don’t care about them in the sense that I know they’re all going to watch anyway. I look forward to them having the fun of being outraged so they can sit up all night and talk about it with each other.

    “Star Trek: Discovery” premieres this week on CBS All Access.

  • ‘Star Trek Discovery’ Producer Alex Kurtzman Reveals the Secrets Behind the First ‘Trek’ Series in 12 Years

    For Star Trek” actually was a discovery.

    The writer-producer has occupied a rarefied place in the world of the venerable science fiction property for nearly a decade. After having a hand in some of the most high-profile film franchise launches and sequels — including “Transformers,” “Mission: Impossible III,” and “The Legend of Zorro” –- he and then-writing partner Roberto Orci were tapped by their friend and collaborator J.J. Abrams to help reboot the aging “Trek” franchise. They turned the clock back to recast the classic characters of the original series and, with some time-travel tools, reset the timeline; they opened up the canon to an entirely new open-ended mythology.

    Orci was the avowed Trekkie, and Kurtzman was the far more casual fan who, in the process of reshuffling the deck for Kirk, Spock, McCoy and their crewmates over the course of two films, developed a deep and abiding affection for the “Trek” franchise.

    So when “Star Trek” was slated to return to its small screen roots in the form of “Star Trek: Discovery,” in an effort to attract eyeballs to and build original programming for the new streaming service CBS All Access, it was only logical for Kurtzman to take a hands-on creative role.

    First arriving in support of original executive producer Bryan Fuller‘s vision for the series (set a decade before the adventures of Kirk’s crew and in the original continuity established 50 years earlier), Kurtzman would soon assume creative stewardship of the series when Fuller left/was forced away from the series.

    Now, as he stands at the helm of once of the most both buzzed-about and creatively risky series launches of the fall season, Kurtzman chats candidly with Moviefone about bringing “Trek” back to the small screen for the first time since “Star Trek: Enterprise” signed off in 2005.
    Alex Kurtzman arrives at PALEYFEST 2014 - "Sleepy Hollow" on Wednesday, Marh 19, 2014 in Los Angeles, Calif. (Photo by Annie I. Bang /Invision/AP)Moviefone: You admittedly weren’t the world’s biggest “Star Trek” fan when you first got involved with the franchise. What do you love about it being the shepherd of it at this point?

    Alex Kurtzman: I find myself in a very surprising moment that you would even call me the shepherd of it. And the truth is, I’m not. The truth is that we all are. I can say, personally, that I have fallen deeply in love with “Trek” now over the last ten years.

    I love the fact that everybody comes up to me and says, “I used to watch that show with my family, my dad, with my mom, with my brother or sister,” and it’s meant something so deep and profound to so many people for so many generations, that your love of it becomes the inheritance of that knowledge, and then you seep yourself in the lore of it, in what canon is.

    To be able to be around the debates about what canon is, which now I’ve been involved in for a long time, and everyone having a very different opinion about what you can and can’t do, what’s violation and what isn’t, it’s like a very warm bed. It really has been that for me. I was a moderate fan who became a real fan.

    There’s going to be always these debates about canon and continuity. What’s the fun part of leaning into that and spelunking around the mythology for things that you can exploit further?

    When we did the first movie, it was sort of profoundly strange that, in all the time and in all the iterations of “Trek,” there had never been a story told about how Kirk and Spock met. It was this amazing, like, “Wait, how is that possible?”

    I think what’s exciting for me is, to jump back ten years pre-Enterprise, and to be opening doors to things that have existed in canon as lines of dialogue that were thrown away, or occasional off-handed references to the things that happened, suddenly become the crux of a story. And that’s really exciting, to be able to take those little kernels and build them.

    What lessons did you learn working on the films about being able to bend “Star Trek” and not break “Star Trek” that you brought to the show?

    That first and foremost you have to be respectful of canon, and you have to have an active debate about what breaks canon and where the violations occur. As long as you’re doing that, and making conscious choices knowing certain choices will be really questions — for example, when we were doing the first movie, we blew up Vulcan. When we first had the idea to blow up Vulcan, everyone, all of us, we were sort of like, “Man, we can’t do that. Can we really do that?”

    Then we had to pitch the idea to the late, great Leonard Nimoy. “Hey, guess what? You’re responsible for blowing up Vulcan. What do you think?” Ultimately, in a weird way, having his blessing meant that he understood that we were coming to a decision like that from the most reverential place. That it was coming from a place of story necessity, that was respecting and honoring canon.

    So that, for me, was one of the biggest lessons that I learned from making the films. You have to push the boundaries, but you can’t push it without listening to the fans.
    The idea to make your lead character, Michael Burnham, related in some way to Spock’s father, Sarek, is a big swing. Tell me about getting there and deciding, “Yes, that’s a move we want to make.”

    Sarek is obviously a character that we’ve written before in the films. The idea that if you look at canon and you say, “Wait a minute — Spock has never mentioned a half-sister.” That in and of itself is a fascinating dramatic question: Why? That’s a whole story now. The idea of getting to tell that part of the story with Sarek, who also has never mentioned that character, it opens new and fertile ground for the character that we haven’t explored yet.

    For other pre-established characters like Harry Mudd, give me a sense of your approach to them and how you wanted to make them your own to a degree, but also be faithful to what came before.

    Harry Mudd is obviously a fan favorite. Casting Rainn [Wilson], there was such a safety net just knowing it was going to be Rainn. His comedic timing is brilliant, but Harry was actually motivated by personal things. So there’s a real character reason for why he does what he does. I think fans are going to recognize that we have tipped our hat to it in every way. But also, we brought something new, because Rainn is now playing him.
    As far as this point in continuity, I’m wondering if this is the right analogy: if Kirk’s Enterprise is a Kennedy Camelot era analogy, is “Discovery” analogous to the postwar era leading to that?

    Yeah, I think [producer] Akiva [Goldsman] said it really well: With certain things like the Prime Directive, let’s not assume that the Prime Directive exists and that Starfleet is following that rule yet. That, to me, alone is really interesting. How do they get there? How did that come to be? What events took place that forced them to come up with a prime directive? That’s a great dramatic question.

    So the idea is that, by the time Kirk is governing the ship, ten years have gone by, and certain rules have been established. But the beauty of going ten years back in time is that a lot of those things haven’t been established yet. So characters are going to have to forge what Enterprise inherits.

    I’m sure in the first season you’ve got to set your own ground rules, and get the show up running. But there are also so many great actors that have been involved in “Star Trek” that are still with us, still young. Do you want to actually use some of those actors in their iconic roles, if you can find a sci-fi way of making it work in the story?

    I think we’re kind of open to anything, as long as it doesn’t feel like we’d be making such a weird jump in terms of age or time. So yeah, I’d be open to it if it felt right.

    “Discovery” premieres first on CBS Sept. 24, and subsequent episodes can only be watched via subscribing to CBS All Access.

  • Ken Burns’ ‘The Vietnam War’ Captures the Epic and Intimate Qualities of America’s Divisive Conflict

    The Civil War,” “The War,” “Baseball,” “Jazz,” “Mark Twain,” “The Central Park Five” –- a vivid and compelling life on screen.

    Now, in trademark epic form, Burns is tackling one of the most consequential, divisive and, several decades after the fact, still raw facets of the American experience: “The Vietnam War.” His latest is a ten-part, 18-hour magnum opus on PBS that –- assembled over the course of ten years –- explores in revealing detail, the years-long conflict in Southeast Asia that constantly tore at the country’s cohesion and frequently tested its soul.

    Working in concert with his longtime collaborator Prohibition,” Burns tapped a plethora of various archival material –- including historic photos, film and news broadcasts, freshly-discovered home movies and unheard recordings from within the White House, and startlingly candid interviews with over 80 witnesses from all sides of the conflict at home and abroad –- to evoke the essence and impact of the most painful and polarizing war this country waged in the 20th Century.

    And as Burns, Novick and producer Sarah Botstein reveal to Moviefone, they had little notion when they started on this particular journey a decade ago, just how potently the lessons and conundrums would speak to the nation caught up in all-too-familiar-sounding division in 2017.

    Moviefone: A journey this long as to have some surprises along the way. Were there some things that were dramatic revelations in the course of doing this?

    Ken Burns: Many, many, many things, and some of them come in tiny little facts, some of them come in big facts – Ho Cho Minh’s centrality, he shares power. By the end of episode one, he’s not in total control of the Politburo, and we learn of new leaders, and that’s a revelation I think that really shocked us, and as we began to work on our film, really changed it. So here we were adding another character that the popular wisdom about Vietnam just doesn’t have, and he’s an important part of the story, and that was wonderful.

    Or just little tiny events: how the Gulf of Tonkin proceeded, which is not so little. We plowed through to, and to understand a little bit more detail and some of the motivations for why certain ships, and certain navies, and certain reactions took place, I think is revelatory.

    Then of course it’s all the little tiny things that our veterans are saying to us, that are just sometimes not even words. It’s a twitch of a cheek, or the tremor of a lip, or something like that that speaks volumes. Or the Gold Star mother, her son fought, watching across her face, and you realize, oh my God. Just watch her in the pain and suffering of having to relive something. But then sharing to us, but also understanding – and I think this was their calculus, in the most generous and human way – that by sharing their story, they would help to sort of lessen the pain of other families. That is a selfless act.

    Those intimate moments are juxtaposed with these revelations of iconic figures. For me, one of the startling things was listening to John F. Kennedy’s private recording, and the regret you could hear in his voice, the concern about the war. Finding those gems, and the seismic impact that they have – tell me a little bit about bringing the intimacy to the iconic.

    Lynn Novick: That’s a great way of putting it, really. That’s exactly what we tried to do. It’s an organic process. When we started, we didn’t quite realize the richness of the presidential audio material. I think we knew it existed, but we hadn’t listened to it at such length. So we started off with some of the more obvious selections –- I would say like “the greatest hits.”

    We realized what a treasure trove that was, so we signed one producer whose job was “You’re in charge of audio,” and she spent hours and hours and hours listening to the raw material, which is available online, and also consulting with the foremost experts. Because a lot of this material actually hasn’t been transcribed.

    So it’s available, but you have to know what you’re looking for. So if you want to go, “Okay, August 15, 1967 –- what was LBJ talking about on the phone?” And you have to listen to ten phone calls, and each one’s an hour. How are you going to find it? To find the material that hadn’t been sort of surfaced, we had help. But then it was the usual process, like we do for interviews, and footage, and everything else was sort of distilling down to the essence.

    We started off with each clip was like two minutes long, three minutes long, and then we had to boil down to, what do we really need to hear of what they’re saying? And we had a lot more of what you see in the film. For all of us, one of the revelations of the project, was getting this sort of eavesdropping, inside scoop on what our leaders were actually saying to each other and to their inner circle while they were coming out in public and saying sometimes the exact opposite. If you’re running a country, you can’t share your doubts about everything with the public every minute either.

    So we understand the challenges of leadership in a war: if we had tapes of FDR, maybe he would be worrying before D-Day that it’s all going to go to sh*t. But we don’t have that. We have the public pronouncements and maybe some letters. So it just raises questions in your mind about what is the nature of leadership, and what does it take to run this country? And it’s also profoundly disillusioning to hear the doubts they had from the beginning, and yet, they continue to escalate the war.

    Work on this project, which is so much about a schism in the way that Americans feel and think about a certain topic, and having worked on documentaries about the Civil War, and even the national divisions in the beginning of World War II –- tell me a little bit more about what you think people are going to see, trying not to read too much into the parallels of today, given that we’re at a point of great schism in our thinking once again.

    Burns: We’re obligated as filmmakers, and I think in the case of something as complex as Vietnam, we didn’t even have the luxury to sort of pay attention to this. This is a film that was begun in 2006, where we felt there were lots of parallels with the Afghanistan and Iraq, and we’ve always been mindful of that –- and more than that, super conscious about not to point arrows at it.

    So rather than say that we think this will happen or that we hope this will happen, we just know that, because history is this way and human nature is this way, that this film will resonate in the present. And it is our fervent wish that the divisions that metastasized in Vietnam that are on vivid display today might have the possibility of at least offering an opportunity for those people willing to suspend the binary, and hear what the other side has to offer, or the other sides, in the case of the Vietnam. I don’t just mean the three sides, but all of this.

    And what we quickly discovered, was that we often focus, as your question does, on the obvious political differences, meaning, “I disagree with you.” But in point of fact, these differences go inside most of the characters that are in our film. So we’re dealing with kind of epic internal, psychological, and spiritual existential struggles within people about what to do ethical, all sorts of different dilemmas, and that is a really good place to be. If you can forgive yourself, you can forgive a lot of other people. A lot of this is that our default position is often a certainty that nobody really believes.

    Lynn’s just made a perfect case with regard to the tapes. Lyndon Johnson can go out and say, “Everything’s hunky-dory,” and then go in, and you can hear this thing just writhing in agony and angst and worry about it. And the same thing with McNamara and later on, there’s cold calculation that were part of Nixon and Kissinger, but you can hear the machinations of policy being formed, and then outside, it’s a whole different kind of tactic that’s conveyed.

    We like the fact that we’ve got two presidents here, Johnson and Nixon, who are revealed as intimately as some of our ordinary characters who have offered up the way in which they themselves have been torn on the bias, not just the country. That, to me, is an exciting possibility.

    I know from my own experience with my stepfather, who did three tours of duty in Vietnam, and is only just now starting to talk about it a little. Did you find in the ten-year process of making the film a sort of loosening of tongues gradually, or were people ready to share their experiences right away?

    Novick: Over the course of making the film, I don’t think so, per se. I think we just gravitated towards people who were ready to talk. It wasn’t possible for us to convince people who were super reticent, and there are many. But it did feel that most people we approached wanted to share their stories.

    Burns: And we weren’t having arguments with people. We weren’t bringing our beliefs to the interview, nor were we pairing them with somebody like a son-in-law, who might be in opposition to them. But we do know that once the film is out, you have the possibility of maybe watching together, and maybe having those kinds of conversations.

    Novick: What’s a really interesting question is why our veterans elected to talk, and partly it would be the universal experience of a combat. If your stepfather was in combat, or experienced any kind of traumatic experience, or saw things that were really disturbing to him, that he might not be able to actually be afraid to speak about it, because it would be too destabilizing to him, and that would be unique to any war soldier coming home: that civilians can’t understand, like Ken was saying, what you’ve been through.

    But in Vietnam, for Americans, they came home to a country that was very conflicted about the war. So the inner conflict Ken was talking about, you also walked off the plane into that. You’re dealing with having had traumatic experiences, perhaps, or disturbing experiences in the war, and you’re wrestling with that, and then you get off the airplane, and you come here, and there’s people, protesters with signs, and having to sort of face that you’re not going to have the warm embrace of a country grateful to you for your service for winning a war, as their fathers have had.

    That is almost as traumatic as going to war in the first place. So it’s like trauma leveled on trauma, and unpacking all of that. That’s what our film, we think, will help people do, and make it possible for these conversations to happen, because it’s more complicated than any one of the things I just said.

    Would you say that even 50 years later this subject is a hot button?

    Novick: Yes. A lot of it has to do with the very nature of our political discourse today, which is so poisoned. Regardless of what you do in your heart of heart’s belief, your own political politics would suggest that you almost have to retroactively adjust those beliefs into a kind of hardened silo of a certain set of positions, left or right, that don’t permit you very much latitude.

    So yeah, what we hope is that the film will show such a variety of perspectives, the kind of “Rashomon” that it is, that it’s going to be impossible to hold on to certainty, when in fact this is the demonstration of the uncertainty principle.

    How did this experience change the two of you?

    Burns: I joined the Navy SEALs! [Laughs] No -– it’s profound. It’s really profound. All of us, we’ve all been through a lot of stuff together, and we’ve had to wrestle with a lot of really complicated things. It’s been the most challenging and the most satisfying of anything we’ve done. I don’t recognize the person who started and the person who finished.

    Novick: It’s been such a privilege to get to know some of the people. Really spending time with these just remarkable human beings, even if it was just an hour for an interview, or if it was they were an advisor, or people that we didn’t interview that we got to know over the course of the project, the witnesses that lived through it, each one of them gave us something.

    On any project, we accumulate kind of life lessons, and some just understanding something deeper. But here, there was just this overwhelming sense of resilience and endurance. At the very end, you hear something where someone’s reading something, and the last thing that’s said is that they endured. That was a really profound thing. Life is extraordinarily difficult. So we’ve seen these people, all of them, they are enduring. That has affected us in our very core of our being, I think. Sounds so pretentious to say that, but it really is true. You can’t even really put words around it, but I think it’s true.

    The other thing I just have to say is that we just had this extraordinary collaboration of the three of us, with Geoff Ward and our editors, and with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Because of the material we were given, you check your ego, yourself, everything at the door and just make the best film you can make. It’s been an incredible experience for all of us.

    Everything starts with the conversations that you are having with the people that you’re filming, and after people see this many more conversations are going to result.

    Burns: That’s what we hope. When we say we hope this initiates a national discussion, that’s really important, of course, if that can take place. And what would that mean? Is it that the entire country would come into the stadium that we would talk, or that maybe it would be conversations would happen on Fox with a certain sort of not the way Fox is, and stuff would happen on MSNBC, not the way MSNBC is.

    But actually, it may just be as one of our own coworkers said is that, I went and instead of calling my dad and talking to him for two minutes – “Hi, Dad, how you doing?” “Fine”, “Great,” “Goodbye.” – they talked for 45 minutes about “What you were doing? What you felt,” all of that sort of stuff. We think those kind of interior, intimate conversations are equally as important as the national ones, because of course in their totality, they represent the possibility for transformation and reconciliation, and the things that you’d want to have happen out of such a divisive moment.

    How about on the educational side? What are you excited to see happening as younger kids really are exposed to this story for the first time?

    Sarah Botstein: One of the most exciting things for us is, once the film’s been out on the air and the country has seen it, then the teachers get their hands on it, we’ve spent the last year and a half developing curriculum for both high school history and high school English classrooms, because English classrooms often have more flexibility in how they can teach a subject like this than history classrooms.

    What we found in my now focus group of two groups of a couple hundred kids is just that they are extremely interested in learning from this specific period in our history, and how to apply it to what is happening now. Which nobody could have predicted in 2006.

    But there’s a lot that’s very, very relevant to their lives, and whether it’s the conflicts around the world counterinsurgency and nation building and what’s our role in a democracy to “What’s my role as a citizen?” and “How can I question what’s happening in Washington?” and “How did we get here?” It’s exciting to see another generation of people interested in the subject, and interested in what public television has to say and the work that we do.

    Burns: And we like the fact that, for documentaries, they’re often evanescent. They grab ahold of a contemporary hot button issue, and that passes. And what we like is that films that we made 30 or 40 years ago are part of a conversation that’s still going on today.

    That’s the great beauty of history too, that because it does reflect the moment as well as the past moment, then you have a chance for these things to be evergreen, and have some durable educational value, and that’s exciting, as well as just the popular entertainment. We don’t set out to make educational materials. We’re making a film. We’re making a story. We want to be artists. Every time you set out, you want to make the greatest film ever made! And one should have that arrogance.

    Novick: And you always fall short.

    Burns: And you always fall short.

    Novick: But it’s okay.

    “The Vietnam War” premiers on PBS on September 17. Check your local listings.

  • From ‘Manhunt: Unabomber’ to ‘The Melendez Murders,’ Elizabeth Reaser Is TV’s True Crime Queen

    Elizabeth Reaser may not have expected to relocate from the shadowy “Twilight” world of vampires and teen angst into a realm of sensational, ripped-from-the-headlines true crime, but she’s perfectly happy taking up residence there.

    After building an impressive resume on the small screen in the wake of “Twilight’s” mega-success –- including high-profile guest stints on the debut season of “True Detective” and the final season of “Mad Men” –- Reaser is becoming an increasingly familiar face in series that were inspired by headline-making crimes of the 1990s. She currently appears in the Discovery’s first scripted miniseries, “Manhunt: Unabomber,” and she’ll soon appear in a key role in the first installment of NBC’s new “Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders.”

    And as she reveals to Moviefone, she’s a true crime addict enjoying the current niche she occupies, content to be a working actress exploring ever darker new worlds.

    Moviefone: After years of working on the “Twilight” films, was it nice to have your schedule free up and be able to explore further opportunities like this?

    Elizabeth Reaser: Oh gosh. Yeah, it’s been completely different. So many different things that I’ve gotten to do between “Mad Men” and doing plays in New York, and “Easy,” the Netflix thing that I did with Joe Swanberg that was all improvised. It’s just been a great, great time.

    What did you see in “Manhunt: Unabomber” that tripped your radar and said, “I think this is a project I want to be a part of?”

    Well, the true crime stuff, I confess to being obsessed with! Any of those kinds of shows I get really sort of sucked into, and I thought the writing was really good and illuminated just a lot of stuff that I didn’t know about.

    When I was growing up it wasn’t interesting to me, the Unabomber. I was young, so I learned a lot about it, and just how they caught him I thought was really interesting, and they were able to tell that story but also get into the domestic lives of these people, which made the whole thing feel very real and more high stakes in the way that it was at the time.

    What was the eye-opening aspect of this story, for you?

    Well, for me, I was really interested in playing this woman because she’s the wife of the FBI profiler who caught the Unabomber, Jim Fitzgerald. Her name is Ellie Fitzgerald, and she was a nurse and had a very full, important life of her own, which we don’t explore at all.

    What really interested me about her was that she wanted nothing to do with us, the real person. I’ve never met her, I’ve never seen a picture of her. All I know is that she was a nurse, she has sisters, she’s devoted to her family, and the person that emerged, that came off the page, I felt was a really interesting woman -– a smart, cool, loving person that I just thought would be interesting to get into with Sam Worthington, so we just got to develop this relationship on screen.

    If she had been interested in talking to you, what kinds of things would you have wanted kind of ask?

    Oh, I wanted to ask her how she felt about Jim, about how she felt about her husband and about his work and what she wanted for her own life and what was important to her, what she cared about. And [how she felt about] her kids, and her life as a nurse because I know she was a nurse from a very young age. She, I think, did a lot for her community.

    I think she’s very, very private, which in this day and age makes her even more interesting to me. She wants to keep her life to herself, and I guess I’d want to know what’s important to her about this story. Because it’s a responsibility when you play someone who’s a real person, and I care that whoever she is, that at the end of the day that she’s not mortified by my portrayal of her. I want her to feel not forsaken, I guess. I feel responsible to her, but I’ll never know.

    What was the thing that you learned about Ted Kaczinski that most surprised you? Because this is as high concept of a criminal as there ever was, what was the eyebrow-raiser about him or his story?

    I was really fascinated by the brother aspect, with David’s relationship to Ted, and the fact that David -– and his wife actually, the wife of David Kaczynski -– really recognized his way of speaking in the manifesto that was published. She spoke to David Kaczynski and had to convince him, and then he had to convince himself, and take the step to turning his brother in. That was something I didn’t know about.

    I just didn’t know enough about the Unabomber before any of this, and now I know far too much, but it’s interesting how many people, when I’ve told them about that I was doing the Unabomber project that they said, “Oh, I really agree with his manifesto.”

    So many people, he really had a lot of things to say that were, some of them were totally wrong on so many levels, and then some of them, his ideas about technology and certain things that are way more resonant now then even then. That so many people actually related to the Unabomber’s message is just really, really interesting.

    Tell me with the true crime genre in general, what draws you in, what lures you in to those kinds of stories?

    Well, I think the OJ [Simpson] one, I remember being young, again, during all that stuff and not that interested at the time, but I remember my dad watching the Bronco live, and I remember thinking Why does he care? What is this?

    But I just remember, that really changed the world in a way. Those cases, that and the Menendez brothers – which is the other thing I’m working on right now, the “Law and Order” true crime Menendez brothers, so all I do now is true crime!

    And 90s era-specific true crime!

    Which is so interesting, because those were televised, and those ratings that they got had a big impact, obviously, going forward with how we consume television and what we consume.

    Now that you’ve taken a good look at that story, what was the intrigue for you there?

    Well, it’s intriguing to me because the idea of the abuse excuse and obviously there was something in that family that was poisoned. But for my money, it’s legally irrelevant. It’s entirely irrelevant. And I’m playing a prosecutor of that case, so that’s a really important point for me. I’m very inside it right now, but what we’re doing is we’re exploring a lot of that stuff and how the legalities of that.

    It’s also just such a horrific, wild, and just an insane story. I mean, you see why it captured the imagination, and I think being in Beverly Hills and with all that money and being good looking, all these elements just add up to good television, and that became a part of the case itself. I think that was something also that happened with the O.J. stuff. The way we started consuming these things went.

    You really established yourself with some standout roles on television and then you went into one of the biggest movie franchises of all time. And now you’re back here in TV, where TV’s evolved into almost long-form movie-like quality. Tell me a little bit about that experience to be right in the thick of it during this significant evolution of how we watch our entertainment.

    I just think we’re so lucky. At least as an actor and as someone who loves to watch, I just think it’s so much better. [Television is] so much better than the majority of movies I think, just from my taste. I know it’s hard to get people to go out and see movies, and I get why.

    Then you get to watch something like “Manhunt” or something like this, and you get to watch it unfold over a longer period of time. You get to delve deeper. It’s because the writers too are getting a lot more power. Writers in television have the power. It’s all about the writers and the producers, so the storytelling can go much further, I think.

    Are you drawn to darker material? Is that the stuff that you tend to want to be in?

    I always was when I was younger, and I definitely am, but I think sometimes it’s just my face! It seems sad or serious or something, because in my real life, I would love to do comedy. I got to do a little bit of comedy on “Easy,” the Netflix thing, and some things here and there, but people just don’t see me, unless they know me, they don’t see me as a funny person.

    They see me as someone who can cry and be dramatic, but I’m happy to do it. What more interests me, whether it’s funny or serious is just telling the truth and trying to be as honest as possible, whether that’s comedy or drama, whatever it is, I just want to tell a story that feels real to me. That’s always what’s the most funny, or the most moving or the most interesting to me, the moment-to-moment sort of reality.

    What does it mean to you to sort of know that because of your “Twilight” experience, there’s always going to be a certain fanbase that’s going to check out whatever you do? They love you in those movies and they’ll say, “Oh, she’s in this? I’ll watch that.” Is that a cool extra to have as an actor?

    It sure is. I’m very grateful to have done “Twilight,” first of all because it was just an incredible experience, and to touch -– touch sounds so weird, but to be able to reach that many people all over the world. I mean, that just doesn’t happen very often.

    I didn’t know it was happening while it was happening. It was a wild, crazy ride for all of us, and now, yeah, I think that those kids are growing up, and I always hear from them on Twitter and stuff. It’s very sweet. It’s a real fandom, and they’re still committed to it.

    What was it like for you to step off that ride and look at what was next? Was it an unusual experience?

    It was unusual. It was hard. It was hard trying to get jobs after that. I had some long stretches where I didn’t work very much. I was really trying to find my way back into feeling like an actress again, because when you do a big movie like “Twilight” a lot of times you don’t really do much acting. A lot of times you’re just getting your hair and makeup done, and you’re standing in front of a green screen, or you’re running through a forest. It’s all part of your job, and so lucky and grateful to be doing it, but it’s not like going and doing a play at Lincoln Center where you’re really being challenged as an actress

    I felt like after that it was really important that I sort of learn how to act again and invest in serious stuff so that I could begin to sort of work in a way that felt, I don’t know, just meaningful to me from an acting standpoint.

    I imagine your role on “Mad Men” did a lot to get more work coming your way all of a sudden. People went, “Oh, yeah. Okay. She can do that?”

    Yeah, “She’s not just a person in white makeup!” No, “Mad Men” was great because Matt Weiner‘s just a genius, and he controls every aspect of the storytelling, and it’s just so high-end to get to work that way, and with Jon Hamm, who’s such a brilliant actor. I was also such a huge fan of it, so it was like stepping into a fantasy.

    I bet. What are you looking forward to? After these current projects wrap, what do you think’s next on this horizon?

    Well, I don’t know. There’s some things, like, bubbling up, some more very exciting things, but I can’t really talk about it yet, but I just feel lucky. It’s funny because sometimes people don’t realize how truly hard it is to get an acting job, no matter where you’re at in your career, and every time I actually get a job, it feels like a miracle of some sort.

    I grew up in Michigan, and I still feel like that person that couldn’t even dream of a situation where I’m sitting here with you right now doing an interview, talking about a TV show that I’m in. The fact that I’m on television still kind of blows me away every time I see that or every time someone even says to me, like, “Oh, I saw you in the …” It’s like a shock every time, because it still doesn’t seem real after all these years. I’m just so excited.

  • How ‘Outlander’ Star Caitriona Balfe Studied Legendary Actresses to Make Claire a Fan-Favorite

    The long wait is over: Claire Randall and Jaime Fraser are finally back on your television screen!

    Just not, y’know, together.

    That’s the bittersweet element for the legion of pining fans as “Outlander” returns for a third season, nearly a year and a half after Starz aired the Season Two finale. As the show resumes, its two central lovers are still separated by over two centuries of time: Caitriona Balfe‘s Claire is in 1968 Scotland, decades after her return to her original era. Sam Heughan‘s Jamie is still in the 1740s Highlands after the fateful Battle of Culloden.

    Balfe tells Moviefone that the new season — which is based on “Voyager,” the third book in Diana Gabaldon’s bestselling novel series -– is all about the build-up to a hotly anticipated reunion, zigging and zagging across time and continents. It also tosses out all sorts of curveballs before Claire and Jamie are at each other’s side once more.

    “I think anyone who’s read Diana’s books will say, ‘Oh, crap –- I never saw that coming,’ because it’s just a sequence of twists and turns. I think that’s the great thing about this series of books, and it’s a great thing about our show,” says Balfe. “You’re constantly being kept on your toes. I mean, who would have thought we would end up on ships and in Jamaica this season? You never know what to expect. And the great thing about it being a time‑traveling fantasy is the story can go anywhere, and very frequently does.”
    You’ve said that to inform your performance as Claire at the age we see her in the new season, you took a look at various actresses with long career spans at dramatically different ages. What was the takeaway for you?

    Caitriona Balfe: It’s a great way to be able to see someone at a certain age, and then look at them at another age without trying to look back at photos, or whatever -– Julie Christie or Jane Fonda or even Cate Blanchett or Helen Mirren, because I watch their films anyway. I’m like, “Oh!” There is a lightness or a looseness to their physicality then.

    I think it’s when people mature or they get older, there’s usually a confidence that grows within them, and that usually manifests in just carrying yourself a little straighter and owning your presence a little bit more. That’s what I was trying to play with.

    You even look at films of women who are much, much older -– Emmanuelle Riva or someone like that – and people still stay young inside. Our bodies betray us, but at 50, Claire’s not there yet. She may have a creaky knee once or twice, but you’re not in a territory where your body really breaks down. Yeah, it was more about how she carries herself.

    Interesting, too, is that spirit that she has -– you’ve got to modify it given her circumstances, age and the era that she’s in, but that’s always there in some form. Tell me a little bit about playing that.

    Well, Claire is a feisty, ballsy woman and she’s formidable. I love that about her. But one of the key things to her as well, that we’ve seen in Season’s One and Two, is that she’s also very sexually liberated, and she’s also very free. She feels very elemental, like of the earth, to me; but when we meet her in Season Three, that’s the thing that I tried to put to the side.

    It manifests differently within her. She still gets on with her life and makes it a success, but there’s just this rigidity — not necessarily a rigidness to her, but there’s a brittleness that you don’t see previous. I hope that maybe you’ll be able to see that loosen up after she reunites with Jamie again.

    Tell me about evolving Claire as a mother.

    It was nice to play those scenes. I think motherhood for Claire is so fraught with complications. Obviously, that’s not the ideal way she wanted to raise her daughter. She would have much rather raised her with Jamie and all of that, but she takes so much joy in Brianna. But when you keep secrets, then you create a barrier and you create distance.

    Unfortunately, because she had to keep this secret from Brianna for so long, there’s a tension in their relationship. It doesn’t mean that she loves her any less, or any of those things. It’s nice to see later on, when Sophie [Skelton] and I got to do the rest of the Claire and Brianna scenes, where — now that they know the truth — it’s not plain sailing but the begin to be able to dismantle those barriers and have a more honest relationship.
    Can you talk about working with Tobias Menzies now more as Frank than as Jack? That’s quite a shift.

    I think it’s so interesting to watch him play Black Jack and to watch that darkness. But, Claire and Frank, I always love playing those scenes. I love working with Tobias. I think he brings such depth to his characters.

    Frank could be such a boring, stuffy old guy, but he makes him charming and he makes him sweet and you feel for him. It’s heartbreaking that here’s a man who only wants to be loved by his wife and that’s something she’s not able to give him.

    Is there quite a big separation of time that you and Sam weren’t working together?

    Not really. Because we filmed [episodes] one and three together, and then two and eight, so there were a couple of weeks where we didn’t see each other but we’d pass each other in the corridors. We’d do tag team of who gets to go on set and do the heavy lifting.

    Was there ever talk about keeping you two apart for a long time so that the separation would perhaps inhabit your performance a little bit?

    I think initially, of course, the writers, the producers and everyone would have preferred to film chronologically but it was due to another actor’s availability that we had to pull something up. So, you know, this is what happens in the land of TV!

  • ‘Outlander’ Showrunner Ron Moore Talks the New Season and 30 Years of ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’

    Few writer-producers in television have had the kind of impact as Ronald D. Moore has.

    From his earliest work on “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and “Star Trek; Deep Space Nine,” to his acclaimed reinvention of “Battlestar Galactica,” to his current run bringing author Diana Gabaldon’s cherished historical romance novel series “Outlander” to life, Moore has been engaging and entertaining fans for more than 25 years.

    With “Outlander” launching its third season Sept. 10 — much to the relief of the show’s diehard fans, who have dubbed the agonizing 16-month wait between seasons “Droughtlander” — Moore joined Moviefone to discuss the making of the newest episodes, the challenges of the new season’s constant hopping through time and countries, and the pleasures and pains of keeping the series’ central lovers Claire (Caitriona Balfe) and Jamie (Sam Heughan) apart.

    Moore also reflected on his long involvement with “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” which celebrates the 30th anniversary of its Sept. 28, 1987 premiere this month, including his experience with “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry and his favorite personal contributions to the “Trek” mythos.

    Moviefone: What were the big challenges for you in the new season of “Outlander” on both a storytelling level and on a production level?

    Ronald D. Moore: The production challenges were much bigger. The scope of the season is so big. Traveling through the different time periods –- not just 20th century to Scotland, but also ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s in the 20th century. And then all the Scottish stuff. Then pivoting the show in the middle, and going to South Africa, and the ships, and then Jamaica. It was very complicated production-wise. That was easily the biggest challenge.

    In terms of story, actually, this was an easier book to adapt than the prior season was, so that laid out pretty well. Just in terms of story, probably [the most challenging aspect] was figuring out what the Claire/Frank story was going to be. That took the most thought, because it wasn’t really in the book, so we constructed it from various other books and backstories, and things that were suggested but maybe not clearly defined.

    Was it at all worrisome keeping your two leads apart for a length of time in the story?

    Not to me. I kind of felt like, every week, the audience is going to be saying, “I can’t wait for them to get back together.” But good. You want to build that yearning and that desire, so that when it happens, it has a big emotional payoff. I feel like if we they had gotten back together after one or two episodes, it’d be nice, but it’d be kind of like an “Okay -– great.” Holding it as long as we’ve held it, I think that builds the suspension and tension.

    What do you think it did for the characters to leave them apart for so long, in the ways you were able to explore them?

    It’s nice to see them in isolation from each other, because so much of the show is about them together. Splitting them up allows you to sort of see them interact with other people more, and sort of explore them in a different way, so that the relationship between the two of them isn’t front and center.

    So you can do things: Jamie’s relationship with his family gets a little bit more time. His relationship to John Grey and Murtagh, and Willie -– you open up all these other doors that, when it’s just Claire and Jamie, that sort of dominates everything else. There’s plenty of that to play in the show, so it was nice to have a one stretch of time where we could do other things.
    Did you want to try to keep your two stars apart as well, so there might be a little extra magic when you did finally get them together on camera?

    I don’t know that we talked about that overtly. Not really. I just wanted to keep them apart for the audience. If you look closely through those episodes, you’ll see that, even when they’re thinking about each other and they’re either doing flashbacks or hallucinations, or whatever, we were careful never to put them in the same frame together, so that the audience never had a moment of the satisfaction of seeing the two leads share the screen. So that was a deliberate choice. They were still sort of around each other in Scotland, so they weren’t really in isolation.

    Did you have any surprises along the way as you were in production, little zigs and zags that you hadn’t anticipated but turned out well?

    The only thing that comes to mind off the top of my head is, in the Battle of Culloden, this sequence between Jack and Jamie was not quite as big and interesting as it was on screen. I wrote it, that they have this moment, and the two men fight, and they collapse together. But the director and the cast just opened it up more and gave it a deeper emotional resonance.

    It was also the serendipity of they just happened to be shooting at magic hour when that sequence happened. It’s a gorgeous sky. It looks fantastic. A lot of that was just an accident, and they just embraced it and went for it. Then Tobias [Menzies] and Sam found that moment… All that wasn’t scripted -– that’s just something that they found. So that’s an example: you just find something and it works really well.

    Did you cast your John Grey [with Australian actor David Berry] with the thought that this is a character that does have his own adventures, and maybe you will bring those to life on screen sometime?

    A little bit in the back of your head you’re thinking about that. That’s come up in casual conversations. It’s not really in active development, so we didn’t really set him up with that specifically like, “Oh, and this is potentially a lead of another show.”

    What do you love about what you guys have been able to bring to Diana Gabaldon’s stories at this point?

    I think we’ve just opened up the world a bit. Primarily, the stories are told from Claire’s POV. In Season One, we hewed pretty closely to that. But as the series has developed, you start broadening it out and opening the show up a little beyond Claire’s internal dialogue with herself, and her single perspective on the world starts to broaden out to Jamie and to other characters. It’s really nice to sort of have opened up the whole world of “Outlander” a little bit more on camera.

    As a crew, were you very excited to create the other eras? To break away from the historical period that you’d already spent a lot of time in?

    I don’t think anybody was excited to do the other periods, except maybe the writers! It’s just a pain in the ass for production. They have to keep track of all the stuff: “What’s Claire’s hairstyle in the 50s versus her hairstyle in the ’40s? Wait a minute -– now we’re in 1968. Do we have the right set dec for that on the same set, and later, tomorrow, we’re shooting Jamie in Scotland!” It doesn’t make anybody happy to go sliding around time.

    What got you creatively energized when you think about the next season?

    Again, it’s a whole different show. Now it’s the American colonies, about a decade before the American Revolution, in the hinterlands of North Carolina. You’re essentially doing version of “Little House on the Prairie.” It’s a pioneer story. You’ve got Native Americans, you’ve got Antebellum south with slaves. You’ve got the first stirrings of things that will become the American Revolution. You’ve got new villains.

    Like every year, it’s “Oh, we’re starting from zero, and what’s this year of TV going to be?” It’s exciting. It’s challenging. It’s tiring, because you would like the familiarity and the comfort of just, “Okay, let’s go shoot in the CIC again.” You long for those kinds of days. But creatively, the show never gets boring. You’re never sort of like, “Oh yeah, we’re doing one of these episodes again.” It’s a completely different challenge every time you sit down to write one.
    I also wanted to ask you about “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” and the 30th anniversary.

    Is it? This year? Sh*t. I must be getting old. Wow, that’s a trip.

    What does that mean to you now, looking back to see what you all were able to accomplish with that series, with that group of characters, with that group of actors, against almost impossible odds?

    It’s hard to really think about it in those terms. We were so inside of it, and it was such hard work, and we were doing it so intensively. Now, I feel like doing 13 episodes or 16 episodes is a back-breaker, but we were doing 26 a year — and you just did so many of them, and you were constantly writing and constantly producing. It’s amazing we were able to do it at all.

    But it is remarkable. It’s difficult, in some ways, to remember what it was like. When I started on the show in its third season, it was not really accepted as real “Star Trek.” The fans were very skeptical, and the fans were kind of split. There were those who liked “Next Gen,” and there were those that hated it. I remember going to a convention when I was still a fan, and there were like the bumper stickers and the t-shirts that were about “real” “Star Trek,” and various things -– “the bald guy” was not accepted.

    And then that all shifted and changed, and suddenly, it became “Star Trek.” It’s really funny to remember that there actually was a moment when “Next Gen” wasn’t taken seriously by the fans themselves, who almost didn’t embrace it. Even though they were watching it religiously, they were still bagging on it privately and among each other.

    So I guess I’m just really proud of the fact that we just loved the show ourselves, and we were committed to what we were doing, and we never doubted for a minute that it was “Star Trek.” We just sort of waited for everyone else to catch up.

    What were the big tools that you walk out of that experience with as a writer and as a producer?

    It was becoming a writer and a producer. “Next Gen,” I was there for five years, and I learned writing. I learned what it was to write for television. I was a complete neophyte. I’d never written for TV before, and I was surrounded by much more experienced writers. By the end of that experience, I had learned television writing and television production.

    When I went to “Deep Space Nine,” it was like a graduate course. It was like, “Okay, now let’s push even further. Let’s get deeper inside of character. Let’s challenge the format itself. Let’s try to make it more serialized. Let’s challenge the idea of what ‘Star Trek’ could be.” So it really taught me not to be satisfied with what a show is, that there was always a better show that you could make tomorrow. [That] was really the biggest thing that I took away from that experience.
    Being a fan before you got involved with the show, what was your favorite contribution to the “Trek” mythology? You obviously gave a lot to the Klingon empire.

    A lot to the Klingons. You know what the funny thing is? I really liked naming starships! I really enjoyed that. If there was a chance to name a starship, I love doing it, and creating a different class of starship. I really got into that.

    I was always pulling back into references of either naval history that I thought were really cool, or I was naming ships after the Hornblower series, or something else — or some random ship that had been mentioned once in an original series episode and I was going to do a new one. That was, like, my favorite gig. I always liked to name starships.

    I know that Gene Roddenberry wasn’t in his best health around the time that you came on, but were there things that you learned from Gene in particular from your personal encounters with him? Or just from the way he organized the show?

    The show was pretty disorganized when I got there, so I sort of learned, “Don’t do this.” I started third season; he was still definitely involved third season. He rewrote a script while I was there. He was throwing out scripts. He tried to throw out a script of mine, but didn’t, ultimately.

    Then his health kind of started declining as the fourth season moved on. I didn’t really have many story meetings with him. He was just a genial, bear-like guy, with a quiet sense of humor. Everyone really kind of liked him as a person, intuitively. He just had this enormous reputation.

    But you were catching him in a moment of decline, physically, and he was starting to step away from the show more and more. So yeah, there weren’t really TV writing lessons that I had an opportunity to really get from Gene.

    As a fan of the original show, what were the inherent qualities that you were excited to perpetuate forward, those “Star Trek” essences that you really wanted to have in “Next Generation?”

    I really wanted to hang on to the nautical and naval traditions that I thought were embedded in the original series. When Gene started talking about “Next Gen,” Starfleet wasn’t really a military organization, and they were starting to drop more and more of those little touches around the show.

    I thought those were really compelling, and really gave The Original Series a specific identity as a ship in space. So I kept putting those things back in: Everything from, like, the nautical bell at a court marshal hearing, to dress uniforms, to sort of little ways of there being a watch on the bridge, watches relieving other watches on the bridge. Who was the officer of the deck? The chain of command. I was always trying to keep those as part of the “Star Trek” traditions.

    I thought that was important, because it identified what Starfleet was, and it gave a hierarchy and an ethos, and sort of an idea to what there was — even though, yeah, they were more explorers and scientists and so on. There was this core nautical, naval identity of who they were.

    We got to see the original cast in their older years, working together, playing those characters. Would you love to see the “Next Generation” cast get a chance to revisit their characters and be together again at least one more time?

    Yeah, that’d be a kick. It’d be a lot of fun. None of them look quite as old as they did in “All Good Things” [the series’ final episode, set in part 25 years in the future] in all fairness. Patrick [Stewart] looks much better than the way we portrayed him in “All Good Things!” So none of them have aged even as far as what we said they would. But it would be a kick to put that group back together and do something. Yeah, that’d be a lot of fun.