Sam Witwer Interview
Here’s an excerpt of ASSIGNMENT X‘S exclusive interview with Sam Witwer where he revealed the early scoop on BEING HUMAN Season 2.:
So now you’re the leader of the vampires …
Whether he likes it or not, Aidan’s in charge of trying to straighten out a bunch of homeless junkies I guess. We start out [Season 2] about a month later in the middle of that kind of crisis and on top of the fact we don’t know what’s going on with Nora [Kristen Hager] and the result of her situation. There are a lot of cool things that we jump right into.
One of the criticisms early on with the show was how closely to stayed to the original BBC series, but as the season went on, it slowly found its own voice and direction.
It was always the plan to start very similar and diverge as we went on. The other actors and I didn’t watch the British series, because we didn’t want that to unintentionally affect our performance. After we established all this, I’ve now seen the entire BBC series and I’m a huge, huge fan of what they do. By that same token, our writers have not seen the second season, we couldn’t follow what they did if we tried. Of course there will be overlap. There are inevitable conclusions we arrive that are going to be similar, but they have not seen it and it will be totally different.
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA is one of the best sci-fi TV series ever made. Let me take “sci-fi” away – it’s one of the best TV series ever made. Everyone sort of agrees on that. No one really talks about it anymore how everyone hated it when it first came out. “Oh, Starbucks is a girl, how dare they. Boomer is supposed to be this black chick?” So, you know I remember that. I joined the cast of BATTLESTAR the first season and I was very frustrated with how finicky fans were. I prepared our entire cast on BEING HUMAN. “Look, we’re going to get crapped on. Fans of the British series are all sharpening their fangs. They’re ready to go. They’re going to kill us.” And they were. As soon as we started airing though, they backed off. That backlash never happened. I was shocked. I didn’t know what to think about it. “Thank you for giving us a shot and thank you for being so great” – that’s what I would like to say to them. The BBC series is wonderful, I’ve now seen the whole thing and I’m a huge fan of it. They were correct to be concerned, but I’m happy they gave us a chance.
For most of Season 1, Aidan was a loner, but now he’s become a leader – how is it shifting your character into this more dominant role?
It’s interesting because I assumed something was going to happen to these poor people Bishop was recruiting, but I didn’t know if I had any specific ideas where that was going. Now I have a whole bunch of them, as fed by the British series and seeing what they did. What’s the most fun is we’re going to be blazing our own trail. We couldn’t follow what we did if we wanted. Our writers have some heresy knowledge, but they haven’t seen that season and they have every intention of seeing it after we do ours.
Any scoops on Josh and Nora?
There’s going to be some crazy stuff with Josh and Nora. We have her [Kristen Hager] for a good amount of time. I don’t think I’m spoiling anything. And if you’re ever doing a flashback with Aidan, Mark Pellegrino can’t be that far away.
The entire cast grew extremely close throughout the shooting of the season. We went to Hawaii together. Myself, Sarah Allen, Sammy and Meaghan and Mark. We all got together and really bonded in a big way. It’s great to see everyone. We got our entire crew back, we got more writers, a slightly better budget and it’s going to be really exciting.”
To read the interview in its entirety, visit ASSIGNMENT X.
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