Q: What made you decide to become an actor, and not any other career?
Acting was my childhood dream. I did a little play in the kindergarｔen. It was a dinnasour play for school, and I just picked up on a very special relationship between the performer and the audience. Something very intimate about that experience. And it gave you a kind of buzz, a kind of high, and that I hadn’t been able to find anywhere else, so I’d always wanted to be an actor, but in college, I went to very good school. It was very conservative, and I moved away from those dreams, because they suddenly seemed to be unrealistic, because I knew how hard it was to make it in that particular business.But after graduating, I moved out to Los Angeles, to work in Tv and movies, because I still loved entertainment. But I thought I would work behind the scenes, in development, maybe as a producer, and it wasn’t long before I went on my first audition.
Q: At the press conference yesterday, you said you were a well-planned, research-a-lot-kind-of-guy like Mike Schofield, when you sort of get a job, but how did you carry out the research for this part in Prison Break?
It’s funny you asked because I didn’t have time for the research. I didn’t have time for preparation. I got the script on Friday, I did an audition on Monday, I had my call back on Tuesday, and I had my part Tuesday night, and we’re filming on the next week. I was actually the very last person to audition for Micheal Schofield. So, there was really no time to get a hand on the character in the way that I usually like to prepare. Suddenly I was in Chicago, filming in a real prison, in the middle of December, so was zero degree outside.
And it was as though everything had been turning up side down. But that worked my advantage because that’s exactly my character’s experience in the pilot. So my own experience on shooting the show, mirrored my character’s journey, pretty much exactly. So I was able to put everything that I was feeling and thinking into the world.
Source: http://www.aera-net.jp/
