Pictured from left to right: Mary-Louise Parker of "Weeds," David Duchovny of "Californication" and Michael C. Hall of "Dexter"
It used to be that the most compelling characters on TV would have a clear categorization: heroes over here, villains over there. But nowadays, actors are getting more praise and recognition for playing "anti-heroes": very flawed characters who do very bad things, but the characters have enough likeability that audiences not only identify with the anti-heroes but they also often root for the anti-heroes to continue to get away with their bad behavior.
The Showtime series that have been the biggest hits for the network feature anti-heroes as their main characters. At Comic-Con International 2010 in San Diego, there was an entire discussion panel (appropriately titled "The Anti-Heroes of Showtime) devoted to this subject. The panelists (held July 22) included Mary-Louise Parker, who plays drug-dealing mother Nancy Botwin on "Weeds"; David Duchovny, who plays writer Hank Moody, a sex addict who often indulges in too much alcohol and drugs on "Californication"; and Michael C. Hall, who plays vigilante serial killer Dexter Morgan, who leads a double life as a forensics expert for the Miami Police Department on "Dexter." Edie Falco, the star of "Nurse Jackie" (in which she plays Jackie Peyton, a married nurse addicted to pain pills and who is having an affair with her pharmacist) couldn’t be on the panel, but Paul Schulze, who plays Jackie’s enabling pharmacist lover, Eddie Walzer, was there to represent "Nurse Jackie." Here is what Parker, Duchovny, Hall and Schulze said when they answered questions from the panel moderator and people in the audience.
David Duchovny in "Californication"
David, can you talk about how you make your "Californication" character, Hank Moody, a sympathetic person, even when he does bad things?
Duchovny: Thankfully, I don’t have to think about that. That’s something for Tom [Kapinos, creator/executive producer of "Californication"] to relate to when he’s creating the stories. I think early on, we decided it would be about truth-telling, and hopefully people would follow him, even when he was telling truths that were ugly or self-serving or whatever. That’s what’s kind of been a keystone for us: Make Hank tells some truth and hopefully that will make him sympathetic.
Paul, what’s the appeal of anti-heroes?
Schulze: I think what appealed to most about Tony Soprano, he was the classic anti-hero. He’s doing things that we never do but we wished we could do. And so we get a vicarious experience through him. I think Jackie [Peyton] is more representative of the shadow we all have. We have secrets, she tells lies, she compartmentalizes, she kills the pain — and that’s something we all do. We identify with her whether we want to or not.
Mary-Louise, how would you describe your "Weeds" character, Nancy Botwin, as an anti-hero?
Parker: I would say she’s not a person who’s overburdened by guilt. I don’t think she feels badly about a lot. I think she also doesn’t feel sorry for herself a lot. She’s like Scarlett O’Hara in a way. I feel like she just keeps going forward, believing that things will ultimately be all right.
Hunter Parrish, Alexander Gould and Mary-Louise Parker in "Weeds"
How do you think Nancy sees her role as a mother?
Parker: I don’t think she thinks about that stuff. I think she’s someone who puts off or procrastinates guilt. I think she feels like she’ll feel bad about that later once she gets through this, or she’ll take care of her child next week, or she’ll do something special with them next month. I think she doesn’t deal with things in the immediate.
Michael, your "Dexter" character, Dexter Morgan, has a code of ethics as serial killer: He will only kill people who commit serious crimes. How does that code shape Dexter as an anti-hero?
Hall: I think the code initially is a way to get to know the character. He adheres to its tenets, and we get to know what they are. Initially, it’s a way in. If Dexter didn’t have a code and was killing people indiscriminately, I think all bets would be off, in terms of the audience allowing themselves to identify with him. He kills, arguably, horrible people, and that’s why part of why we give him a pass for that. But after a certain point, what’s interesting is to watch the ways Dexter starts to lean against the code or even actively defy it. So it sort of works as something to establish him, something he defies against, something that he learns he needs to return to.
Mary-Louise, Nancy had a bunch of different identities in Season 5 of "Weeds": concubine of a drug lord, wife of a politician, mother of a newborn baby. Can you talk about that transformation of the character?
Parker: It ended up being one new identity, ultimately. It was really fun. Victoria [Morrow, "Weeds" writer/co-producer] really wrote I think a lot of the best stuff this year.
Michael C. Hall in "Dexter"
Michael, when viewers first met Dexter, he seemed incapable of feeling real emotions, but now it seems like he has some emotions that are ready to explode out of him. Can you talk about dealing with that range as an actor?
Hall: I don’t think we were ever meant to take Dexter at his word. He’s been thrust into situations that have required him to deal with things that he never anticipated. But even at the beginning, when Dexter claims to be without the capacity for authentic human emotion, I think we’re meant to be skeptical, and I think we’re meant … to discover that’s not entirely true. And I think he’s certainly in the territory now where he’s discovered that.
And yet a fundamental disconnect remains. His ability to justify his behavior to himself is pretty impressive. He has grown, in terms his experiences with himself, in ways that are undeniably human, and yet does maintain some kind of internal conception of things that allows him to continue to kill people. Otherwise, would anyone watch it? The character initially [in] the pilot script was so much fun. There was so much complexity there, and it just continues to get richer.
That’s a testament to, first and foremost, the writing. And then Chip [Johannessen, "Dexter" executive producer] came on board and took it upon himself to take responsibility for the mess that we’d made. It’s like [Barack] Obama stepping in the White House or something. But it all comes down to what we’re given as actors. The writers on the show have been amazing, in terms of finding ways to continue to challenge us actors.
David, why did you choose to do "Twin Peaks"?
Duchovny: Wow. That was at a point in my career where I didn’t have a choice. That was when I was actually trying for any job I could get, and I just happened to get one where I wear panty hose. But it was really just a great lark. I think the actor who was supposed to do it dropped out a week before, and they opened it up to whoever wanted to come in or could come in. And the next thing I knew, I was Nair-ing my legs down [he says jokingly] — which of course I continue to do to this day.
Michael C. Hall at Comic-Con International 2010 in San Diego
Michael, do you watch any of the footage when you’re doing your voiceovers on "Dexter"?
Hall: I record sort of a scratch track in my trailer, which the editors use for the rough cut of the show. And when I go in for a final ADR [automated dialogue replacement] session to clean up any sound issue, [for example] a plane flies over head. In addition, I rerecord all the voiceover to picture. Otherwise, you can’t sync up a change in thought with a cut point or a change in expression. So yeah, it’s a nice chance to polish that part of the performance.
Michael, do you sympathize with what Dexter is doing?
Hall: Do I sympathize? My job is maybe more to identify with what he is doing. I think Dexter’s got a pretty formidable dark side, and he’s taken some sort of responsibility for it. He plays a little bit faster and looser with some of the rules of the code now than he used to, which make it interesting. But yeah, I sympathize with him.
David, after playing Fox Mulder on "The X-Files" for several years, how was it transitioning to the Hank Moody character in "Californication"?
Duchovny: Well, it’s odd because it’d been a while since I’d played Mulder. Well, we did that movie two years ago ["The X-Files: I Want to Believe"], but at the time I started doing "Californication," it had been three or four years for me, maybe five. And it kind of goes through my mind, maybe more than through other people’s minds, that it was something I had left behind in a way.
So I never compare what I do in the present to what I’ve done in the past. I don’t really try to hold one up against the other. So it’s not really a conscious move that I make. It seems like another lifetime, in a way, and one that I treasure, but I don’t know how I’d go about creating that character if I started doing Mulder tomorrow. It all depends on who you are when you start to do something, in a way. That was totally confusing [what I just said]. I have less of an idea of what I mean when what we started.
David Duchovny at Comic-Con International 2010 in San Diego
David, aren’t you going to be doing a play in New York?
Duchovny: I’m going to do a play called "The Break of Noon" in New York that starts October 28.
Michael, how do you personally feel about Dexter’s harsh method of dealing with social injustice?
Hall: I feel it goes a long way to making the character interesting. Just putting up pictures of people and putting big a "x" on their faces, I don’t think it would be as interesting. I think it’s great. I’m getting applause, so I’m getting the sense that you think it’s great, too.
Michael and David, how do you transition back and forth from TV and movies?
Duhovny: Let’s trade off, word by word.
Hall: OK. It’s …
Duchovny: Pretty much…
Hall: The same.
Duchovny: Yes!
Madeline Zima and David Duchovny in "Californication"
What do you like better about "Californication": the beautiful women or the Warren Zevon references?
Duchovny: Warren Zevon became kind of a touchstone for Tom and [me] early on. I had never been a fan of his music, and for some reason I started to listen to it, right around the time we were shooting or shortly after. And then I just got really into it. His songs just seemed to fit into our world. The focus is that we’re in California and a certain decadent California lifestyle, a certain jaundiced view of the world … So it just kind of became something we’d go back to again and again. It’s fairly new to both of us.
David, how did you get the Hank Moody role? Did it come to you or did you seek it out?
Duchovny: It came to me. I wasn’t necessarily looking to do a television show at that time in my life, and the script came to me. I just thought it had the kind of humor that I associated with films from the ‘70s that I really liked and a certain kind of humor that I thought I could function in. So I met with Tom.
Michael, you also went from playing a role on a long-running series (as a funeral director on "Six Feet Under") to playing a very different role on "Dexter," another hit TV series. Do you feel that people’s perceptions of you have changed now that you play a serial killer on TV?
Hall: I don’t feel compelled to insist to people that I’m not really a serial killer, or insist that I’m not really a funeral director. Yeah, but I guess the way people will approach [me] now is different than it once was. A little more like, "Keep on doing what you’re doing." That kind of thing. Whereas before [when I was on "Six Feet Under"], it was like, "Oh God, you’ve really got to make a change." People worried about the character on "Six Feet Under" being walked on and taken advantage of a lot than they are the fact that Dexter continues to kill people — which is weird.
Mary-Louise Parker in "Weeds"
What’s been your favorite role so far?
Duchovny: That’s like asking to pick your favorite child, in a way.
Michael, in the movie "Gamer," you played a total villain. Do you prefer to play a total villain or do you prefer to play an anti-hero?
Hall: All of it. I love that Dexter turns things on its head and invites you to root for the person who is usually the ultimate villain in the film: the serial killer. It’s also fun to play a megalomaniacal wack job straight-up. It’s also nice to play good people, normal people to whom crazy things are happening, as opposed to people who are uniquely afflicted. But I don’t know if I have a preference. I just feel you have to keep mixing it up.
Michael, where you completely shocked by the Season 4 finale of "Dexter"? [In the Season 4 finale, Dexter discovered that his wife, Rita (played by Julie Benz), has been brutally murdered in their home.]
Hall: I was shocked. I had some warning. I knew things were headed in that direction. I was glad that we were able to keep it quiet enough that it managed to shock people who were watching it. It was remarkable in a way that we were able to keep that quiet. But as an actor, I was really sad to see Julie go — a person who I worked with for four years— not that she didn’t go on to other things. I think she’s here promoting a new show ["No Ordinary Family"] at Comic-Con, which is pretty cool. Julie Benz! [He raises his right fist in a solidarity gesture.]
But for the [Dexter] character, I was really excited, because it’s like a new origin story, one where now Dexter had blood on his hands, and that whole structure that he had built for himself has been taken away — just in the same way that [in "Weeds" they] burned down a town. The town isn’t burned down, but the fundamental thing [Dexter] held on to, to appear normal and to actually experience himself as normal is, for the most, part gone. So it’s big.
Mary-Louise Parker at Comic-Con International 2010 in San Diego
Mary-Louise, what’s been your favorite nude scene?
Parker: [She says sarcastically] Gosh, there are so many. God, it’s horrifying, there are so many. I don’t know. Do you have a favorite? [She says seriously] I’m kind of undaunted by nudity. There’s something freeing about it. It doesn’t really faze me, honestly, one way or the other. It doesn’t make me feel terribly uncomfortable.
You obviously love the TV shows you’re on now, but if you could be on any other TV show, which would it be?
Parker: I wanted to be on "Flight of the Conchords."
Schulze: I’d love to get killed by Dexter.
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