Fast chat: Noah Wyle of 'Falling Skies'
Noah Wyle stars as the leader of a group fighting aliens in the second season of "Falling Skies" on TNT. Credit: MCT
There's a basic curiosity about what exists out there, and if it shows up, will it be benevolent or antagonistic. And anytime there's a new piece of threatening technology, it rekindles this notion of will it be good or bad.
I look at this show as more of a war movie, like [the 1945 film] "They Were Expendable." It's about a disparate group of personalities forced to rely on each other and the conflict that brings up, and uses the aliens as a backdrop. And when Stephen Hawking predicted that we'd be asinine to assume there's no other intelligent life, that seems to me to be pretty current.
There were three themes about this character I was interested in exploring, and they had resonance in my life: fatherhood, leadership and loss. If you have something like that, you can find something to hold your hat on.
TV characters usually have wonderful arcs, and the ones I gravitate toward do. And seeing in the pilot this was John Carter's first day on the job, he was going to have the longest learning curve, that kept me more interested throughout. And he got more confident, put himself in more dangerous situations, that was very compelling. There were also compensating aspects -- the money was really nice, and the camaraderie.
When we were making that movie, we were told not to contact him, because they were afraid we were going to be sued. After it aired, he called and told me he hated the movie, but liked my work. He asked me to impersonate him at the Macworld convention, and he wrote this skit out. He was personable, answered a lot of questions. The feeling I got was I was able to have a conversation that was more relaxed than people in his employ, who were scared to death of him.
It was very much his influence. He was VP at Universal, ran their classics division, and from a really early age, I was exposed to great movies and great actors. I was watching Beatles movies, Merchant-Ivory, we got the Z channel , which also showed enough cleavage to keep a teenage boy interested. It was my form of escapism.
I think my mother would be very happy if I was Jimmy Stewart. She would say what would Jimmy do in this situation, and I'd say, I have no idea. I respect actors who have good careers and keep a low profile, like Tommy Lee Jones, who lives on his ranch, and that seems a palatable road for me.
