(PCM) We certainly hope that everyone tuned in to enjoy the premiere on “Gotham” last night on FOX. When we first heard the news that FOX was putting together a Batman prequel story, our curiosity was peaked as to just how they were going to make it work.
In the series premiere “Gotham” wasted no time getting straight into the action and shedding some light into the seedy underground world of Batman’s beloved Gotham City. The premiere did a fantastic job of putting certain characters into to place and we can already sense that the story-line will follow somewhat closely to that of The Dark Knight.
Recently, we had a chance to catch up with series star Ben McKenzie to discuss his role of detective James Gordon, a character who is desperately trying to clean up some of the violence and corruption that has taken over Gotham City.
McKenzie revealed that it was both the opportunity to work with series creator Bruno Heller and the excitement of being part of a mythology that has been around for 75 years that attracted him to the role.
We were curious as to how McKenzie would compare being a law officer in Gotham City to working on the street’s of L.A. in “Southland” to which McKenzie replied “The overall similarity’s probably in the mentality of law enforcement officers. The sense of wanting to really uphold a sense of morality and make sure that the laws are enforced to the letter, whenever possible.”
“I just got an email from the guy that did some of our tactical training on Southland, he was a cop in LAPD, just congratulating me on Gotham. They captured a serial killer recently who was on the run in LA, blowing people away with shotguns. There’s bad stuff that happens in real life. In Gotham, it’s more, we want to keep the sense of realism, but at the same time it is fantastical and it is meant to be a little bit more approachable in the sense that it’s not so starkly drawn.”
“In Southland it was much more, it was so real, that I think at times it could be quite frightening. We don’t want to acknowledge that people do terrible, terrible things to each other. In Gotham, I think we want to have a little bit more fun with it. We want to feel free to take a certain amount of liberty with tactical stuff and just kind of give it more of a, sort of a, throwback to kind of an old school gumshoe show, noir kind of conceit, with a little bit of cop tactics in it, if that makes any sense.”
McKenzie was also happy to chat about working with his “Gotham” co-star Robin Taylor who plays Penguin in the series. He comments “He’s a phenomenally talented guy and an incredibly nice person.”
“Obviously he’s playing more of a demented guy, but his charming, sort of, I don’t even know how to describe it. His charm comes through on screen, and you end up kind of loving this little weasley henchman and almost rooting for him. I think it’s a brilliant turn and it’s completely unlike, or largely unlike, anything you’ve seen from Penguin before. And that’s exactly what we’d like to do with all of the villains on this, is give them latitude to make it their own and to not feel as though they’re doing some imitation of some other actor who’s played a villain before.”
Prior to the start of the series, when it was first announced that McKenzie would be playing Jim Gordon there was a ton of debate online as to whether or not he would be sporting Gordon’s famous mustache show. McKenzie reveals “We just literally never talked about it. And then I brought it up to him and he goes, “No, that would look ridiculous on you. We’re not doing that.” You know, it’s 20 years before he can grow into the maturity and wisdom that it takes to sport a mustache, and that’s the line we’re sticking to. Maybe 20 years from now the mustache will feel, you know, earned.”
“I can grow it. For the record, I can grow the mustache. If you think that I can’t, you should watch Junebug. So it’s not, I’m not afraid of the mustache, I just don’t feel it’s appropriate for the image.”
Fans may recall that McKenzie did the voice for Bruce/Batman in “Batman: Year One”. We asked McKenzie if that offered any additional insight into these characters that he may have brought over with him to “Gotham”. McKenzie said “I’d like to think so. I’ve always been a fan of Year One, even before I did the voice of Bruce, Batman, for it. And so it was an opportunity to reread it as an adult and look more closely at it in terms of how to interpret it on screen, albeit just my voice, not my body. So I would say it certainly pulled me in a little bit closer, and then when Gotham came about, and Geoff Johns sent me a bunch of literature, including Gotham Central and Long Halloween and the like.”
“I think it certainly helps to understand what this is all coming out of, and what it’s all coming out of is, of course, the comics that have evolved wildly over 75 years. So, I think you pick certain reference points, at least stylistically, and then you need to go out and do what you would do on any other job, which is to work on the script and work with the directors and your fellow actors to breathe those scenes to life, playing your beats and playing your objective. Not really doing anything different than you would do on any other job except that you know that there’s a certain heightened style to it, if that makes any sense.”
Everyone has a favorite Batman villain. McKenzie revealed that his favorite Batman villains are The Riddler and Scarecrow adding “There has been no talk thus far, that I am aware of, and I’m not in the writer’s rooms, obviously, of the non-human Batman villains. I think we’ll start with the humans, and then we’ll branch out from there. But, again, it’s early days. We’re only eight episodes into shooting, so we’ve hopefully, knock on wood, got a long way to go and we can bring those people in, if need be, or non-people in, if need be.”
In discussing the pilot episode, McKenzie reveals “What’s nice is that in the pilot, alone, as you’ve seen, we’ve laid the groundwork for an enormous number of characters to kind of spring out, and we’ve hopefully laid a foundation for a world in which you can walk down any alley in Gotham, and encounter some bizarre human being who might become a villain or a hero, or might get killed immediately. And that’s a very exciting maze to walk through, and I think that presents us with, I don’t want to say unlimited opportunities, but bountiful opportunities for characters as we go forward.”
McKenzie also spoke about some of the challenges involved with taking on the role and becoming comfortable with the character. He says “The initial challenge is to not let the mythology, the degree to which Batman and all of its mythology has permeated all aspects of pop culture and society, not let that overwhelm what is, at the end of the day, just an acting gig. It’s great acting gig. It’s a little more public than others, but at the end of the day, its just a part that you play on, in this case, a TV show, and you have to treat it like any other.”
“You have to look at the script. I mean, I believe, my school of acting is there is no character, no such thing as ‘the character.’ There is no Jim Gordon or Bruce Wayne or Batman, for that matter. There is only the script and there’s the actor that’s playing the part. If you cast 1000 different actors as Jim Gordon, you’d get 1000 different Jim Gordons, and as long as I was able to sort of breathe and that, that was helpful.”
“When it comes to understanding him, and playing him, it was conversations with Bruno about, well who is he? You know, there are a lot of plot mechanics in the pilot alone that have to get, sort of, ironed out in order to tell the story and to set up the world that we’re setting up, and it has to happen awfully fast, but if we don’t understand his point of view coming in to it, and we don’t believe his point of view, we’re going to have trouble.”
“So a lot of what I was talking about with Bruno is, he can’t come in completely naive and completely blown away by the corruption in Gotham. He can be idealistic, but he has to understand that people are capable of terrible, terrible things, because he’s a war hero. He served overseas, he’s seen terrible things himself.”
“So as long as he understands how bad people can be to each other, and yet he rejects that and still believes in such a bizarre concept as right and wrong, then his whole, sort of, point of view is framed and it can kind of all proceed from there. And then as we go forward in the season, and in the show in general, he can become more and more surrounded by the powers that be in Gotham, and his own moral compass can be thrown off. He will have to make deals with the devil in order to get along in Gotham and to make progress, and so that journey, I think, is kind of fascinating, but we started with a sense of morality and a real sense of experience.”
One thing we loved about “Gotham” is that it has a lot of female characters in positions of power for example Gordon’s boss Sara and of course Fish Mooney. McKenzie tells us “I think what’s kind of great about Gotham, is that we can portray a society that is similar to ours, perhaps, but in which there is no even understanding of racism or sexism, it’s all just whoever is battling for power in a city that’s completely fallen, and Fish Mooney is really good at it. She’s an enforcer for Carmine and she’s really tough, she’s really smart, she uses her sex appeal to get what she wants, and Jada just kills it. She’s just really, really strong and powerful and interesting and funny, at times.”
“And then Essen, Captain Essen, played by Zabryna, is kind of stuck in a hard place because as captain of the GCPD, she has to answer to a number of different bosses, not just her superiors in the department, but effectively, in some senses, the mob themselves, because they have such deep ties to the police department and to the mayor’s office that sometimes her hands are tied. That being said, she wants to catch whatever criminal we’re chasing in that particular week, and she wants to support her detectives, and so over time, Gordon sort of earns her respect and her trust and her support, and eventually, you’ll see down the line, she’ll put herself out on a limb for him.”
“Some of the first season is Jim figuring out which cops in the department he can trust, and which ones he can’t, and there’s some surprising twists and turns in those relationships. Some people that you would think would be his enemies are actually kindred spirits, and he needs to assemble a team, going forward, that he can actually use to bring justice.”
Over the years there has been a growing trend with comic books taking off with popularity in both TV and film, McKenzie says “I guess I would say, at this point, 75 years into Batman, comics have kind of become American folklore. They’re sort of what we have as a newer country to pass down from generation to generation, and to evolve from generation to generation, to fit the society in which we live. And Batman is a really interesting example of that in the sense that he is a vigilante fighting for justice in an unjust world and I think there’s an awful lot of cynicism around us, and so we can all relate to the idea of having this caped crusader out there fighting for us, and fighting for justice.”
The post Actor Ben McKenzie Discusses FOX’s Gotham appeared first on TV News.