TV Interview – “Lights Out” Star Holt McCallany and Executive Producer Warren Leight Part II
Warren Leight Photo courtesy of www.playbill.com
If you missed the first part of this interview, please check it out here. Now on with the show!
On whether Lights has perpetual bad luck:
H. McCallany “Wow! I suppose that if it’s the debate between determinism and free will, then ‘Lights’ believes that he’s master of his destiny, but at the same time you definitely can get into a place in your life where you no longer are in control of events. Events are in control of you. That’s where I am.”
W. Leight “If I can jump in, we talked early on that ‘Lights’ makes a decision in the pilot to take that job to break that guy’s arm, to break that dentist arm and that sends him on a spiral. It was a bad choice. You’ll see it coming up again in the David Morse episode that follows the one that airs tomorrow, that choice got him down a bad path. Part of this whole season was an effort of recover from that choice, I think. … it’s the trails of ‘Lights’ Leary this year.”
McCallany on working with Leight:
“Well, I suppose I’m in a position where I’ll have to say some very flattering things about my boss in front of him. But the greatest thing that any actor can ever hope for is to have good writing and have very bright, very talented writers who are passionate about the stories that they want to tell. Who are interested enough in you, as an actor, to try to understand what makes you tick and to try to create stories that you’ll really be able to do justice to.
I’m a very, very lucky guy to be working with Warren. He’s definitely the most talented writer that I’ve worked with and also as John Solberg or any of the other guys on this call with me will tell you, he’s also one of the nicest guys in the business. Listen, let’s be candid, there are many times in the television business when the actor is reading a script and thinking, “Oh, my God, what am I going to do with this?” You try to make lemonade out of lemons sometimes. You try to find a way to elevate the material and you try to—and often there’s no kind of— You understand, look, it can be very difficult for writers in TV to continue to deliver great scripts as the seasons go on and on and on and on. Everybody is under a lot of pressure and nobody has enough time. You have to keep working at such a fast pace and sometimes things don’t really come out very well and you’ve got to kind of make the best of it.
I’m not in that situation here. I mean every single script—and we’ve touched upon some of it in this conversation. I mean think about some of these performances from some of these guys: Eamonn Walker and David Morse and Billy Brown. It’s not just great writing for ‘Lights’ Leary. It’s great writing for the entire cast and I include Elizabeth Marvel and Bill Irwin and my children. I mean what an extraordinary job Ryann Shane has done this season. Who knew when we were shooting the pilot that this young woman would shine in the way that she has?
So, we’re very lucky. Warren and his team are very experienced and very, very good at what they do. It makes my job a lot easier. I just have to learn my lines and show up.”
Leight on the presence of New York in the series:
“I think sense of place is very important. Actually, when I took over In Treatment, one of the first things I did in Season 2 of In Treatment was I moved Gabriel Byrne’s practice and his character to Brooklyn because I really didn’t know where Season 1 took place and it bugged me a bit. I need to know—maybe sort of the limits of my—I don’t know—some sort of limit that I have. I need to know where I am before I could start writing. I need to have a sense of place.
I think the original pilot was set in Connecticut and I moved it to Bayonne when we reworked it. Bayonne has history and it’s a tough working class neighborhood and it’s isolated from the rest of the world. It’s cut off from a lot of the culture blessings of the New York/New Jersey area. It’s surrounded by highway and dirty water and people kind of don’t move in and out of Bayonne that often and that easily. I like the tribal quality of that and so that we start in Astoria, Queens at the base of the Triborough Bridge surrounded by dirty water and housing projects and the ribbons of highway. It was a very good—I don’t believe people can shoot Toronto from New York, but you can shoot Astoria for Bayonne and I think we did and we choose every location with extreme care.
To me, you learn a lot about class and culture from a place and just the exterior of dad’s house, from Pops’ house tells us a huge amount that to think that the two big brothers and Elizabeth Marvel’s character grew up in that house with Pops Leary tells you a lot about what their life was like. We just saw that exterior from time to time and it tells us a good deal about who these guys are. To show that exterior of ‘Lights’ house in Far Hills, New Jersey—what we allege to be Far Hills—there’s not much else around there. It’s a lot of land. It’s a big house and ‘Lights’ is—I think Tyson once famously said to somebody about, “Do you ever get lonely in the big house?” He’s talking about himself and you worry what’s that house like for ‘Lights’ when his family isn’t there. What does he do? We don’t have many traces of him in that house? So, I like setting up the world of Bayonne, setting up the world 40 miles away that’s a whole other universe that ‘Lights’ is not as comfortable in.
Then from a shooting point of view, to get to shoot New York means I can bring in Elizabeth Marvel as his sister, Bill Irwin, Reg Cathey. There’s a guy who plays Bill Irwin’s concierge, Gus. This is a guy named Dan Moran. I’ve worked with him in various theater things for 30 years. I can kind of bring guys in—I have my own reparatory company with the Lights Out cast. It was very comforting for me to—we didn’t really have much time to cast. We had to do it on the fly. We had a great casting director in Alexa Fogel, but I could get on the phone with Alexa and we can cast an episode in about eight minutes just from the actors she knows and the actors that I know and they’re in New York and hit the ground running. In the David Morse episode, one of the toughest scenes anyone had to do all year was his first scene of the shoot. He came in fully prepared and nailed it. I don’t know if you remember, Holt, the way he flicks the dime?”
McCallany’s response:
“I do remember, yes. We had a lot of great actors this year. Alexa did a terrific job and Warren just listed a few of them, but there was nobody, nobody better than David Morse. I mean this guy—I would look in his eyes sometimes when I’m acting with him and he just would break my heart. He is a very experienced, very, very talented actor and it was really a privilege to work with that guy.”
Leight’s response:
“So you get these guys in and they all kind of—in New York, word got out, “Oh, this is a good show to—” Everyone knew the actors we were bringing in and nobody wanted to be the guy who drops the baton in a way. There’s a lot less shooting going on in New York and there’s very little TV writing going on in New York. So to have a whole local production, the writer’s room was here, it’s what I’ve hoped for you don’t get too often.”
McCallany on feedback from professional boxers who have watched the show:
That was one of the most gratifying things to me about this whole experience was that the real fighters have really embraced the show. We had a lot of them over the years, over this course of the season, Paulie Malignaggi and Mark Breland and John Duddy and Peter Manfredo. We did some work for our promotional campaign with Larry Holmes and with Freddy Roach and obviously our technical adviser is Teddy Atlas. So we had a lot of real guys and they really like the show a lot.
When we had our premiere, we had Wladimir Klitschko and Lennox Lewis and Joe Frazier and Larry Holmes and Gerry Cooney and Mickey Ward. Afterwards, I was talking to some of the guys and Lennox Lewis said very, very complimentary things about the show. Larry Holmes was cracking up and he said, “Man, that’s what happens to me when I try to make love to my wife something that bugs me every time, man, every time.” They just loved it. Wladimir Klitschko was very, very complimentary and they all—you know what they say to you? They say, “Listen, if you need me, I’d love to come on. If there’s anything I could do—”
If I had a dollar for every guy—I can tell you who they are. Lennox Lewis wants to come on. Sugar Ray Leonard wants to come on. Gerry Cooney brings it up to me every time I see him. So if that’s any indication of what they think of the show—they not only love the show, they’d love to come work with us and do anything with us. For me, that was one of, as I said, one of the most gratifying things about the whole process.”
Leight’s response:
“I think these guys—a couple of them have said to me and a couple of the journeymen guys have said, “Thanks for telling our story.” Because I think people think we all know boxers from the moment they step into the ring till the end of the fight. I think what we’re trying to do with the show, that’s part of the show, but these guys live full lives and they’re not brutes. They’re complicated guys with gentle sides and tough lives and no union protection, and there in with a den of thieves. We try to tell that story as realistically as we could. A number of guys have said, “Thanks for showing more than what they usually show,” which we take some pride.”
On the effect movies like The Fighter have had on the show’s success:
W. Leight “I would hesitate to say it drove people to us. It’s seems like it’s the two—the movie and the TV show have existed in parallel universes. I remember being very anxious when I saw the promo for the movie in the early fall and I thought, “Well, is this show going to somehow get confused with that or are people going to feel like that satiates their appetite and not realize this show is about more than just boxing?” I think that certainly there was the illusion of oh we’re—we’re part of the …. So there’s a sense that maybe something’s going to pop because of this and there was a couple of boxing documentaries, but I don’t think we benefited from that movie coming out when it did. I think it didn’t make people want to see our show more. Maybe it compartmentalized an audience or satiated some people, but certainly it didn’t give us a bump that we all might have hoped for.”
H. McCallany “I think Warren’s definitely right. Those guys are friends of mine. I know David O. Russell and Mark Wahlberg for a long time. I did a movie called Three Kings with them back in the ‘90s. I know Mickey Ward really well because we’re on the same charity together and we sit next to each other every year at the big annual dinner and I followed his career and stuff. I was really rooting for them. I like those guys very much and I’m happy for their success, but I will confess to you that there were several occasions particularly in the early stages, when the show was first coming up, where people would come up to me in restaurants or airports and stuff and they would say, “Hey, you’re that guy from The Fighter.” And I’d say, “No, I’m Lights Out.” They’d say, “What? No, you’re from the boxing—you’re from the boxing movie.” I say, “No, well I’m from the boxing television show.” They’d be like, “The television show?” “Yes, my show is Lights Out. It’s on FX every Tuesday night at 10.” So I think that there was some confusion. I mean obviously, there’s a sophisticated portion of the audience that does understand, but I think that there was a little bit of that going on.”
McCallany on his vision of Lights throughout development of the character and series:
“You very rarely as an actor have the experience of picking up a script and getting a few pages into it and realizing that what you’re holding in your hands is not just a role on a TV show. But it’s one of those special parts that comes along once or twice in a career, if you’re lucky, an opportunity to do something, something really memorable and to be part of one of those rare shows that kind of passes into that special category. I understood right away that this was something that I had been waiting for and hoping for many, many years and it’s proven to be that and more.
As time has gone on and I’ve had the opportunity to work with Warren and with the other writers and the other great actors and directors, the experience has just gotten better all the way along. Somebody, a moment ago, made the observation that they felt like the episodes have continued to improved. Well, my experience on the show continued to improve and my desire to play this part and to work with these people just continued to grow throughout that whole time too.”
Leight on the knowledge he’s seen over the years to help make Lights Out such a success:
“It’s funny, part of it is understanding that—a lot of it has to do with writing for your actors is one of the things I’ve learned that I try to impress upon with the rest of the writing team. If you have a good scene and it’s not right for your actors, you don’t have a good scene. That’s just it. So when Stacy came onboard, when Billy Brown came onboard, when I saw what Holt to do it made my job much easier than other jobs I’ve had because there was no limit to what these guys could do. I never wanted to turn in a bad scene. The thought of getting Stacy at this point in his career a bad scene was just disturbing to me. I just didn’t want to do it.
I guess the biggest thing I’ve learned, overtime, is your actors after a while know their characters. What they’re bringing to you and what they know about their characters is at least equal to what you know about their characters. It’s your job to see the whole story line but write for your guys. I think it’s what Ellington did for his musicians. Score for the guys you have and that frees them up. They’re not fighting it, try to give them as much back story as much possible so they don’t have to manufacture stuff. You can always see when actors are kind of pushing because they’re not on a firm foundation. They don’t really know who—their character hasn’t been thought out well enough.
So I just try to make the characters as three-dimensional as possible and then I try to listen to the actors, the read-throughs we had were thrilling for me and also very informative. I sometimes have to chase somebody down and say, “What was bugging you?” because this is not a cast that complains, and try to illicit— Stacy or Holt would say, “No, no, I can make it work.” I have to pressure them to tell me what was bugging them and of course, they were most of the time right.
So that’s something you learn I think overtime is to don’t stand for your material. When you get into the editing room that’s another re-write and it doesn’t matter what a brilliant scene you wrote or someone else wrote if for some reason it didn’t come together, move it, chuck it, reorder it. So, I don’t think I could have done this job— I’ve had a strange career because I was in theater for a long time. I wrote movies that didn’t get made or humiliated me when they did get made and then moved into TV. You learn a lot in the … organization, but you’re part of a machine there. So getting to find my own voice overtime and getting to spend time in the editing room and then to finally for the first time in my TV career get to choose music with a good music supervisor and that I think is a big part of the show too. Anthony Roman did a great job there.
I just felt like I had enough of the skill set when I got to the show that very little surprised me while we were going on. I didn’t get … I never got to the scene and thought, “Oh, God, I don’t know how to write this,” or “Oh, God, I don’t know how we’re going to shoot this.” There’s some value to hanging around long enough that you have some experience and then to be blessed with these actors and also a world that’s inherently dramatic. Boxers just get screwed and they just have a tough time with it. I’m always more interested in guys on the margins than even a heavyweight champion and this is one of those few fields where you can be at the top of your game and be penniless three years later and left for broke and nobody cares about you. I find the stories of these guys more interesting than the story of hedge fund managers, so.”
McCallany on his inspiration for playing such a multi-faceted character:
“I looked at the lives of certain boxers that it seemed to me have been unable to reconcile themselves with certain losses that they had that kind of haunted them and I think made them bitter because I didn’t want to make that choice. I thought, listen, we’re going to follow this guy around and really get to know this character well. I think it’s a more interesting choice for me as an actor and for the audience as well if he’s fun to be around. If this is a guy that we’re going to really like, if he’s able to put behind him the bitterness about the loss.
Look, I’m a big fan of Smokin’ Joe Frazier and I have been for 30 years. He came to my premiere the other night, back in January and we got to hang out and fool around. I just think that he’s one of the most nicest guys that you’ll ever meet, but there’s no question that Joe is still haunted, still haunted by all of the controversy that surrounded his fights with Mohammad Ali. He said to me one time—because we were talking about the show, when the dementia and all this stuff—and he goes, “They say Ali got Parkinson’s, but he got a left hook-itis. He got Smokin’ Joe left hook-itis.” I thought to myself, “Wow, man!” I mean these fights were 40 years ago. Do you know what I’m trying to say? Or Marvin Hagler when he lost that very controversial decision to Sugar Ray Leonard and then put himself in kind of self-imposed exile in Italy and seemed unable on a certain level to get passed it.
I didn’t want to play that. Don’t get me wrong, nobody wants to go out on a loss especially when you feel like you won the fight. It’s not how I wanted to finish my career, but there was something else in my life that was more important to me than boxing and that was my family. Once I decided that I was going to play a character for whom his family was the most important thing in the world, then it was possible for me to move on in my life and to try to get over those feelings I just described. Also to get passed the need for the adulation and the spotlight and all the things that I think fighters sometimes miss when they go into retirement.”
Leight on Bill Irwin’s involvement in Lights Out:
“I just called him up. Bill is—in New York, he’s done a lot of great stage work. I had a play called Side Man years ago and he did a cold reading of it at a festival once and was just ridiculously good. I’ve known him a bit socially. I’ve known him a long time and I always liked—it’s interesting when you get a guy to go against type. I know he’s got great acting chops and he’s very good about playing secrets. If you saw him doing any of these Virginia Wolf, he plays secrets very well and so that’s what Brennan has. Bill and I have talked a lot about Brennan’s back story. Bill wanted to know everything I had on it, but what you get from Brennan is one of these guys— There’s a line on this week’s episode because ‘Lights’ took a stab wound last week and there’s a line about, “You’ve got to be careful with those knife injuries into the stomach. They can really cause a lot of internal bleeding.” Now, why does he know that? He just knows a lot of stuff and I wanted a guy who could—he’s very attractive, handsome looking guy, but there’s something interesting about Bill. There’s something always going on.
Part of what we’re trying to do on the show is not hit the cliché on the head. So we’ve got a show that’s set in New Jersey and there’s a mobster. That’s treacherous for me. That’s bad terrain because that’s been done really well by other guys. So I thought well Bill Irwin, I haven’t seen that kind of mobster. There were guys we researched—there’s a guy that sits on a stool—I think he’s still there—on First Avenue in Second Street who’s one of the biggest sport bookies in America. He’s now like 85 year old guy and he’s been on the same stool at a coffee shop down there and nobody lays a glove on him. He runs a lot of the book out of New York and he’s a legend and he’s scary as all hell. If you didn’t know who he was when you walked by him, you’d think there’s just another old guy—was that Stanley Elkin who used to write about the dignity of men seen eating alone on national holidays? This is like an old guy with a cap on who controls a quarter billion dollars of book a week out of New York and nobody touches him and everybody fears him or at least respects him enormously. Those were the guys we were looking at, the less flashing mobsters. The flashing guys have been done and done to perfection, so I just had to go the other way.”
Just as the call was ending, Warren Leight spoke a few heartfelt words that I think touch on just how much fans are appreciated.
“The one thing I want to say is we’ve been really grateful to all of you guys. It was obviously disheartening to open with the numbers we opened with and it felt to me like—it was a real opportunity for the critical and blogging community and press community to sort of dance on our grave. Everyone seemed to appreciate that the show had good intentions and we’d worked hard on it and you stuck by it. I think things are beginning—it’s obviously—it took a while. It stabilized.
We were in, and remain in, a very difficult time slot, I would take, basically, any other time slot day or night over the one we ended up in and nobody anticipated that slot being that way. But what we’re beginning to hope—we’re seeing are just a lot of signs that it’s beginning to turn around. I also think that the schedule have the potential to slightly ease up for us over the next few weeks. There are a lot of good dramas that have either played out their runs or are coming to the end of their runs and we’re still going. These last four episodes—I think, most of you on the phone call have seen them or have them—they’re pretty strong and we need to go out. We took the series—we went out as strong as we could with the series and if audiences come, we think they’ll stay. We think that we may get a little bit more of a window than we’ve had. So we appreciate you taking the time out of your day to still stick by us. We believe in comebacks at Lights Out.”
And Holt’s funny response: “Everybody loves a comeback.”
As the show is rounding the end of the season, we fans hope to see a second season on the horizon because it will only mean great things for this wonderful cast and crew. Tune in to Lights Out every Tuesday night at 10PM on FX.
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