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By Christina Radish
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Tim Kring at The NBC Press Tour, July 2006. NBC Photo Chris Haston. |
From creator and writer Tim Kring (NBC’s Crossing Jordan), comes the season’s latest television smash Heroes (NBC), an epic drama that chronicles the lives of ordinary people who discover they possess extraordinary abilities.
As a total eclipse cast its shadow across the globe, a genetics professor (Sendhil Ramamurthy) in India is led by his father’s disappearance to uncover a secret theory -- that there are people with super powers living among us. A young dreamer (Milo Ventimiglia) is convinced that both he and his politician brother (Adrian Pasdar) can fly. A high school cheerleader (Hayden Panettiere) learns that she is totally indestructible. A Las Vegas stripper (Ali Larter), struggling to make ends meet to support her young son (Noah Gray-Cabey), discovers that her mirror image has a secret. A fugitive from justice (Leonard Roberts) continues to baffle authorities who twice have been unable to contain him. A gifted artist (Santiago Cabrera), whose drug addiction is destroying his life and relationships with his girlfriend (Tawny Cypress), can paint the future. A down-on-his luck Los Angeles beat cop (Greg Grunberg) can hear people’s thoughts, which puts him on the trail of an elusive serial killer. In Japan, a young man (Masi Oka) develops a way to stop time through sheer will power. Together, their ultimate destiny is nothing less than saving the world.
“The pilot posited a unique premise, in that these characters are cropping up all over the world,” Kring explains in an exclusive interview with MediaBlvd Magazine. “We have characters in Japan, West Texas, Las Vegas, New York and Los Angeles. The pilot points to the idea that they are connected, in very subtle ways, but one of the fun things about watching the show is to see just how these characters are connected, and how they will actually come together. The characters start to interconnect in very unexpected, strangely coincidental ways.”
{quote_top}“The other thing I would say is that the show is very much about these characters dealing with these abilities and trying to make sense of them and trying to figure out how to incorporate them into their real lives. These are characters that still have jobs, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends and a mortgage to pay or rent to pay, and they have issues that all of us face.”
Viewers of Heroes might be surprised to learn that, admittedly, Kring is not much of a comic book fan. That fact led the USC Film School graduate to create a world that was both real and relatable. “It’s partly why I didn’t cast actors who had had huge parts on other shows. I didn’t want the audience to have the reaction, ‘Oh, that’s that guy from Will & Grace.’ I wanted people to get to know these characters and relate to them like people they would see or know, and think, ‘That’s like the guy I went to high school with,’ or ‘I know that girl, I recognize her from my life,’ not from another TV show. The idea for the show came with me when I thought, ‘What would happen if you or I, or our next door neighbor woke up with powers? How would you handle it?’ In reality, you wouldn’t just don a spandex suit and go out and fight crime. If you woke up and discovered that you thought you could fly, you would probably go to a doctor and get a CAT scan, or you’d go and see a shrink, or you’d go to your priest or rabbi. How does that change your life? To me, that was the fascinating part of it.”
Having written his first episode of television in 1985, Kring says that he’s never really had another job since. As executive producer and creator of Heroes, he is also the show runner and head writer. “Since the engine is driven by the written material, my number one priority is to keep that engine stoked with story. I run a show that’s got close to 200 employees and it’s sort of like being the ringleader of a three-ring circus, at times. There are lots of fires to put out, every single day.”
Involved in everything from costume fittings and casting to being on the actual set or in the editing room, Kring believes a show can succeed or fail at any point in the script, production or editing, so he wants to stay involved with all aspects on Heroes. “The episode you write can change drastically by how it’s shot, and can change even more drastically by how it’s edited. The finished product can, sometimes, have little resemblance to what the initial script was. One of the advantages of coming from a production background is an awareness of how much you can actually squeeze into an 8-day episode. You have to be very clever to be able to figure out how to put that much story into eight days of production. A lot of what you see is slight of hand, where you’ve shot things in very efficient ways and redressed sets to look like other sets. There’s a lot of maneuvering to pull off a show that looks large and like it has a lot of scope. It takes a tremendous amount of showmanship to figure out. You have to treat it like a big illusion, or magic trick.”
 Although he didn’t have anyone specific in mind when he stared casting the roles on Heroes, Kring admits that he did keep an open mind, changing some of the roles to better fit particular actors. “The character of Suresh, the Indian professor, was scripted as a man in his mid to late 50's, who had these wild theories and went off on this goose chase to find these people. The casting director said, ‘There’s an incredibly interesting actor who’s in town for a week from London and I need to you meet him. The problem is, he’s in his late 20's.’ I said, ‘Well, bring him in,’ and in walked Sendhil Ramamurthy. Lightening struck when he walked into the room, and I went back and re-conceived the entire character to be the son of the character that I had created, and actually killed the character that I created off-screen, as part of the backstory.”
“The role that was most difficult to cast was the character of Peter. We literally read every 28-year-old actor in town for it. He’s a character who has a certain amount of yearning and he’s in an existential crisis, and so, it was a very demanding thing to thread the needle between finding someone who wasn’t playing pathetic, and yet infused the character with hopefulness. That character was a very tough character to cast. We lowered the age from early 30's to late 20's because he wasn’t quite sure of his career path and was in the shadow of a more successful brother, and we found that the older the actors were that we read, the more pathetic and unrelatable the character became. Fortunately, Milo Ventimiglia walked into the room, and that was the end of that. He nailed it, and had all of the qualities we were looking for.”
{quote_middle}With such a large ensemble cast, Kring says that it is a challenge to make sure that each of the characters is fully explored. “You do not really see your favorite character in a leading role, every week. Everybody in this cast is being asked to step forward for periods of time, and then step back for periods of time. Because it’s like chapters of a big, long book, in the aggregate, you get the whole meal, but any one episode does not give you an entirely satisfying story for each of these characters. Some will move farther to the forefront, just because they connect better with the audience and the writers. And then, there’s just the needs of the story. Our goal is to have all of these characters serviced, but some will drop out, as we go along, and others will be added. One of the beauties of having a show about people who are developing superpowers is that there’s always room for another character.”
At first, most of the characters are not too happy with the new powers that they have discovered. This will be something that is explored quite a bit, throughout the season, as the characters discover what they can, and are supposed to be, used for. “If you are predisposed to do good in your life, then you will do something good with these powers. If you’re predisposed to do something bad, then they can help you do that. One of the things that we want to keep alive is the ability for characters to change and for these powers to change them, so that they literally go from good to bad, or from bad to good.”
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The cast of Heroes at the San Diego Comic Convention in July 2006. |
Because of the darker tone of the show, Kring felt that some comic relief would be necessary. He developed the character Hiro to do just that. “Hiro was developed very late in the stage. I had written a couple drafts of the script before the character of Hiro and I found that, tonally, I was mired in a tremendous amount of angst and anxiety, as these people try to wrestle, in a very serious way, with these abilities. I felt that I needed one character who embraced it as the best thing that could possibly happen to him, and the answer to all of his prayers. Hiro sees it as a grand purpose and embraces the superhero, comic book aspect of how you would deal with developing some sort of special power.”
This week, the world will become a bit smaller when the heroes start coming together, realizing that they are not alone out there, in their abilities. “These characters will cross paths in unexpected ways. There’s nothing planned for them to form any sort of Justice League group, but characters will come together, get torn apart, be brought back together, and join forces in interesting ways. The show posits the idea that all of them are being driven toward something unique and compelling, and that event becomes the key.”
{quote_bottom}Identifying himself most closely with Peter, primarily because of his yearning and the larger existential questions that he ponders, Kring urges audiences not to tune into Heroes expecting a sci-fi show. The elements are certainly there, but it really is more of a character drama.
“I think if you watch it purely because you’re interested in the sci-fi genre, you’re going to be disappointed. While it has sci-fi elements in it that we want to embrace and never run away from, to lean too hard on it would be disingenuous. At its heart, it is a big, character-based saga with sci-fi elements. Every episode may have a couple of cool little twists and a couple of cool little plot points that lean into that, but it’s so much more than that.”
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