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By Suzanne

Interview with Joshua Jackson of "Fringe" on FOX 9/16/09

I'm always happy to do these interviews with TV stars, writers, and producers. FOX has been good to me lately, along with some of the other nets like TNT, SyFy, USA and A&E. I wonder when the other nets will figure out that these conference call interviews with websites and other press are very cheap publicity for them?

I love Joshua Jackson. Honestly, he is gorgeous. So this is not an unbiased article whatsoever.  He was my favorite thing about Dawson's Creek. I didn't really care who Joey or Dawson ended up with. I loved Pacey, and I loved him best with Audrey, although really it didn't matter because I just loved him.  Joshua Jackson has been awesome on Fringe as well, where he plays a much darker character than Pacey. It's just good scifi, too, which I always appreciate. I missed the interview with him last year, so I was doubly-grateful to get to speak with him this year, even if it was for only one question. He was very gracious and kind to all, and he seemed humble.

I hope you enjoy this. I found Jackson to be very funny and informative.

First here is some news about the new episode of Fringe, which will debut tonight.

NEW CASES AND ENDLESS IMPOSSIBILITES EMERGE ON THE SEASON PREMIERE OF "FRINGE" THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, ON FOX

In the stunning first season finale, Olivia traveled to an intriguing parallel universe where she met Massive Dynamic founder William Bell (guest star Leonard Nimoy). Season Two opens with Olivia's shocking return to this reality, and Peter, unknowingly in a race against time with an ominous mobile force, pursues information about Olivia's perplexing visit to the alternate reality. Meanwhile, Walter reenters the lab to cook up a bit of fringe science, and of course, some custard for someone's birthday in the "A New Day in the Old Town" season premiere episode of FRINGE airing Thursday, Sept. 17 (9:00-10:00 PM ET/PT) on FOX.

Here is some information on Joshua Jackson.

Well known as the fast-talking, self-deprecating "Pacey Witter" from "Dawson's Creek," Joshua Jackson has been working in front of the camera for over 15 years, and was just seen starring in the well-received independent Canadian feature film "One Week."

Recently, Jackson enjoyed a successful run on London's West End starring in "A Life in the Theatre" alongside Patrick Stewart. The acclaimed comedy was written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning and Oscar-nominated David Mamet.

Jackson's feature film debut was in Michael Bortman's "Crooked Hearts," which he followed up with the "Mighty Ducks" trilogy, "Digger" and "Andre the Seal." Jackson's additional credits include "Bobby" for director Emilio Estevez, the psychological thriller "Shutter," "The Skulls," Rose Troche's acclaimed drama "The Safety of Objects," the HBO Films version of Moises Kaufman's groundbreaking play "The Laramie Project" and "Aurora Borealis" as a troubled young man opposite Donald Sutherland. He had noted cameos in Steven Soderbergh's "Ocean's 11," "Scream 2," "Urban Legend" and "I Love Your Work." His additional feature film credits include "Cursed," "Gossip," Bryan Singer's "Apt Pupil" and "Cruel Intentions."

A Vancouver, Canada native, Jackson divides his time between his hometown and Los Angeles.

Now, here is the transcript of the conference call/interview.

FBC PUBLICITY: Fringe Conference Call
September 16, 2009/1:30 p.m. EDT

SPEAKERS

Josh Governale
Joshua Jackson

PRESENTATION

Moderator Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Fringe conference call. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode and shortly we will be having a question and answer session, with instructions being given at that time. As a reminder, today’s conference is being recorded and I’ll now hand it over to Josh Governale for any opening remarks.

J. Governale Good morning, everyone; thank you for your time today for Josh Jackson. Just a couple opening remarks. As a reminder, Fringe opens its second season tomorrow on Thursday night at 9:00 p.m. So without further delay, I’ll turn it over to Josh Jackson for questions and answers.

J. Jackson Good morning, everybody.

Moderator We’ll go to the line of David Martindale with Hearst Newspapers. Please go ahead.

D. Martindale Hello, Joshua, love the show; you’re really wonderful in it. By the way, I think I saw the Observer at my softball game the other night; I was very concerned.

J. Jackson The show’s increasing the paranoia in everybody around America.

D. Martindale What do you enjoy more as an actor or even as a viewer, when you get to do an episode in which there’s lots of action, fighting, racing around or when it’s crazy science elements or when it’s simply doing a scene with the cow?

J. Jackson The cow’s a diva; it’s a little known fact. She’s not very giving. I don’t know that I have a particular favorite. I think if I did any one of those things too much each one would become boring in their way. The hope is to try and balance those things out as much as possible, if not in every episode, in every couple of episodes. I would tell you that the thing I spend the time thinking about is trying to keep the dynamic between Peter and Walter truthful and growing, but the beauty of being on a television show is that you get to do a little bit of everything all the time.

D. Martindale You get to do some good stuff. I’ll play fair and come back with another question.

Moderator Our next question comes from the line of Paige Albiniak of New York Post. Please go ahead.

P. Albiniak What is your reaction when you get the scripts and it’s some new crazy thing that they’re bringing into the story?

J. Jackson That’s the beauty of our show; if we don’t have a new crazy thing, something’s gone horribly wrong so I take it always as a positive thing. Each week it’s a little bit of a science lesson for the class, it’s a little bit of a vocabulary lesson for the class and it always presents you with some other kooky thing.

As a fan, the things that I like most about our show, the genre that our show is in is the bigger story rather than the individual creepy, gooey stuff. What we’ve done pretty well is to make each one of the creepy, gooey things add up into a much bigger story. That’s the thing that I peak out on that I thing is so cool.

P. Albiniak I’m not going to play fair; I’m going to follow-up. Did you see the twist in the finale coming?

J. Jackson Hold on; you’re telling me that The New York Post isn’t playing fair? I don’t get it.

P. Albiniak We try not to as a rule.

J. Jackson Did I see the twist coming in the finale? Which one?

P. Albiniak The twist involving you.

J. Jackson They thankfully gave me a heads-up a couple months before that happened so that I didn’t read it and think that I had been fired. It sounds a little bit like a tag line, but it is the truth. The great thing about our show is that if we can dream it we can do it. I don’t think anybody really saw that twist coming. I was only told about it four or five months in advance, but I think that’s amazing. To put the last frame of the show in the World Trade Center is incredible. I love our show for that. It should keep on pushing boundaries and envelopes like that.

Moderator Our next question comes from the line of Joshua Maloni of Niagara Frontier Publications.

J. Maloni Hello, Josh, thanks for your time today.

J. Jackson No problem. There’s a lot of Josh’s on this call.

J. Maloni I know, it’s a good name, right?

J. Jackson It is a good name.

J. Maloni Going forward now what can you tell us about that particular story line? How much do you know as far as what we can expect towards the first half of season or so of that particular story line, as I said?

J. Jackson The Peter story line or the Olivia story line?

J. Maloni The Peter story line.

J. Jackson The Peter story line, what I love so much about that beyond the “ain’t-it- cool factor is now the audience knows something about Peter that he doesn’t know about himself, something crucial about him that he doesn’t know about himself. We come to find out that this is a large part of the guilt that Walter carries around is that he baby-snatched Peter as a young boy. Inevitably that information had to come out so while I don’t know the particulars much further than the episode that I’m shooting right now I do think eventually that has to come to a head and it will lead to a conflict between the two guys.

The entire first season for Peter and Walter was about this father and son reconnecting through the craziness of their circumstances and actually becoming something of a family, a very dysfunctional family, but something of a family. And Season Two has carried that forth. In the beginning Peter is really invested now in being part of this team and actually belonging to this fringe family, but eventually he’s going to find out that this horrible happened to him as a child and that’s going to blow up his relationship with Walter and probably with Olivia I would imagine. To me, that’s the great thing hanging over Peter the entire season and it gives me something to move toward as they go forward.

J. Maloni Looking forward to it, thanks for your time.

Moderator Next we’ll go to the line of Suzanne Lanoue of the TV MegaSite. Please go ahead.

S. Lanoue Do you think that Peter and Olivia will have some sort of romantic relationship or do hope that they don’t? What are your feelings about that?

J. Jackson My estimation I just kind of said it a second ago, which is that I feel like this is more of a family dynamic than a romantic dynamic. What’s unique and what’s great about our show is, as opposed to having just a leading man and a leading lady, you have this crazy father in the center of it. That would be a very, very awkward love triangle so I don’t think they’re going to go in that direction. I see Peter and Olivia as more brother and sister rather than lovers on this show. Where they’re going to take it, I have no idea, but for right now I run under the assumption that this is father, son, daughter rather than boyfriend, girlfriend, dad.

Moderator Next we’ll go to the line of Brian Fitzpatrick of Blogcritics.org.

B. Fitzpatrick Peter’s sarcasm is a huge selling point for my wife and me and a lot of other viewers, I’m guessing it got us addicted to the series especially --.

J. Jackson Josh’s sarcasm is not really all that welcomed in my household sometimes. … call my girlfriend.

B. Fitzpatrick I’ll keep that in mind if I get a chance. We really like the interplay between Walter and Peter and the asides that Peter obviously has. How much of the sarcasm is improvised versus scripted and how much is you versus Peter?

J. Jackson I’ll give the writers credit. I’d say most of those lines are written, though there is, particularly in the scenes with John, John and I have a very strong working rapport and he’s a very playful actor. I mean that in a good way that he likes to keep things live and so you keep on testing and trying. Just to toot my own horn, I feel like I’m a bit that way myself. So I think a lot of the humor of those moments comes out of the two of us just playing around until we figure out something that pops out of it, though the scenarios are definitely written. I would say that Peter’s a much more cynical man than Josh is; his sarcasm has a tendency to be a lot darker than my sense of humor.

Moderator Next we’ll go to the line of Tara Bennett at SFX Magazine. Please go ahead.

S. Bennett When we first met you in the first season we got a sense of this kind of dark background that you had, doing arms dealing and such. Will we get back to that and what he was doing in his life away from his father and …life that he’s got now?

J. Jackson Yes. We actually delved right into that very early in the season. We kept on hinting at it last year, but never showing it and it’s not a problem of the format of the show. It’s not called Peter’s Fringe. It’s difficult to put these characters’ back-stories into the show. That’s not true, not their back-stories; it’s difficult to put their outside lives into the show. Does that make sense?

S. Bennett Absolutely.

J. Jackson Each episode has a central focus; however, we immediately understood what it was, what function Walter has as part of this Fringe team and we spent the first season explaining exactly why Olivia Dunham in particular, as opposed to any other FBI agent, had to be the center of this Fringe team. What we never really got into until the final episode, the final frames of the final episode, was why it is specifically that Peter needs to be a part of this. Now that we’ve brought him in, this season we’ve gone a lot deeper into actually showing rather than just talking about this prior life that he had.

S. Bennett Is pulling there an aspect of that …aspect of the character that are inciting you to play?

J. Jackson Absolutely. It’s the thing that drew me into the character in the very beginning, the idea that he has, not even gray, a very black past that he was in a way running from and in another way wants to run back to. Oddly, being an arms dealer and being generally not a very good person is probably simpler for him emotionally than having to deal with his father and to confront all these things from his childhood.

Moderator Our next question will come from the line of Stacy Harrison of Tribune Media Services.

S. Harrison During its first season, Fringe was one of those shows that seemed to sort of steadily gain an audience before it really broke out and became a hit. Was there a particular moment during the season either from watching the show or from seeing the fans where you really knew that it was catching on?

J. Jackson There’s always a lag time for those of us who work on the show between making it and the reaction because, of course, it takes six weeks for it to get on the air. But I think internally, I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in this, but the first big cliffhanger when Dunham gets kidnapped, I think it’s in Episode Eleven, sort of a two-part episode that ends …called safe and I think that’s sort of creatively when the show really hit its stride in the first season.

Moderator Next we’ll go to the line of Charlotte Cowles with Sling.com.

(Heavy echo on audio)
C. Cowles I know that J.J. Abrams said that he was trying to keep the series accessible to new viewers so that if…new viewers. Do you think that you can continue?

J. Jackson Yes. We’re just starting the eighth episode this year and I would say that we are, I guess the eighth episode is a mythology-heavy episode. I’d say we’re about 50/50 for episodes that are heavy into the big back-stories and stories that are just sort of one-off investigations. The idea is also that regardless of whether it’s a mythology episode or part of the larger story or not, each one of these investigations in every episode will always have a beginning, middle and end. Even it is a heavy mythology episode you can still tune in and get a satisfying story as opposed to tuning in to the story halfway through.

Everybody uses Lost as an example and let’s use it again because it’s J. J.’s show. Lost is a fantastic show, but each one of those episodes doesn’t really have a beginning, middle and end, it’s part of a continuing story. So if you don’t know the things that have come before it’s incredibly difficult to just drop in, which is just what Lost is. We should be so lucky to be as good as Lost on our show. The difference being that the format of our show lends itself to simpler storytelling, which is that every week there’ll be something that this group of people has to investigate. Sometimes it’s going to lead them to learn something about the larger story that they’re investigating that if you don’t know anything about that, you probably won’t be engaged by that. But regardless it will still come to an end that episode. Does that make sense?

That’s one of the conceits of Fringe that if you want to pay attention every week and please do, right, Josh Governale; if you want to pay attention every week there’s a lot of story being told all the time, but if you just want to tune in, drop in for a fun hour away where you get to cringe at the bad stuff and root for the good guys and hiss at the bad guys, there’s that aspect, too. It doesn’t turn you away at the door.

Moderator Next we’ll go to the line of Allan Dart at Starlog.

A. Dart Like any new show, Fringe had its share of ups-and-downs during the year, but then I think it had a really strong second half. When do you think the show really found its own voice, its own style and what kind of show it wanted and should be?

J. Jackson Like I said earlier, I think right around the midway point of last season the show sort of decided what it wanted to be. From about the midway point it got on a pretty good streak of episodes there from, I think, either Ten and Eleven or Eleven and Twelve or Twelve and Thirteen, I can’t remember the exact number, but the two-part episode where Dunham gets kidnapped. After that it was pretty clear; we introduced the bad guys for the season and there was a much clearer narrative drive through the rest of the season.

I would say, though, that I don’t think the look of the show changed. I think visually the show always knew what it wanted to be. I think that what we were trying to figure out was the alchemy, what proportion was going to be a serialized show, what proportion was going to be one-off. We were still discovering who the character was. I think it was much more about the storytelling than it was about the look of the show in the first season, like every show, frankly, has to figure out.

A. Dart Nice reply, thank you very much for your time.

Moderator Next we’ll go to the line of Lena Lamoray of Lenalamoray.com.

L. Lamoray Has working on Fringe altered your perception of public transportation and pretty much everything else?

J. Jackson Strangely, I still fly which you would image that you would be a little nervous as you worked on the show. No it hasn’t really altered my perception of public transportation too much. In fact, I still take public transit to work; I guess Fringe has inoculated me.

Moderator Next we’ll go to the line of Simon Bacal of Entaction.com. Please go ahead.

S. Bacal I’ve got a couple of questions, the first one has kind of a humorous thing towards it. Obviously the show deals with parallel universes. Has this opened up your mind to the idea of parallel universes and what do you think about the probability that there might be a parallel version of yourself in some universe?

J. Jackson I do think this idea is part of the zeitgeist right now. Maybe it’s my West Coast, liberal upbringing, but the idea of parallel universes doesn’t really strike me as being too far out there. After the 60s and after all the psychedelia and the doors of perception and what-have-you, I don’t think it’s really all that far out.

What defies my imagination is that there would be nothing out there that would defy my imagination and maybe it’s because I’m a sci-fi fan. It just seems like the only justifiable position that a human can have in 2009 is humility in the face of the universe. We’re learning so much and everything that we learn, it’s like that Carl Sagan thing, the candle in the dark. Every time the candle gets a little bit brighter it only serves to illuminate how much we still don’t know.

S. Bacal The show’s being called a cross between, I guess, The X Files and Dark Angel and a couple other sci-fi shows. What’s your opinion about that?

J. Jackson What’s the Dark Angel aspect?

S. Bacal That’s what I read actually, somewhere.

J. Jackson I don’t really get what the Dark Angel reference would be, oh, maybe because Dunham was experimented on when she was a kid perhaps. I don’t know. I think The X Files is a more fair comparison, but even in the opening credits, The X Files, by design, dealt with things that were supposed to be part of the paranormal, what Fringe is trying to say is that these things that we would normally classify as fantastical are actually part of the normal. They all have legitimate explanations in the scientific world; they can’t be chalked up to alien possession or fairies or Dracula.

Moderator Next we’ll go to the line of Lauren Davis of IO9. Please go ahead.

L. Davis You’re a big science fiction fan. I was wondering if Fringe satisfies all of your science fiction needs or is there some science fiction plotline out there that you’re really just dying to do.

J. Jackson Dying to do, did you say, or dying to watch?

L. Davis Dying to do.

J. Jackson Of course, Fringe doesn’t fill up the science fiction quotient of my acting life. I don’t know if there’s any particular; it’s hard to say that you’d be dying to do something because it’s probably already been done, but there’s an infinite number of stories out there. There are plenty of books that I read as a young man that I would love to turn into movies, some of which have already been turned into movies.

It is a ton of fun for a guy who loves science fiction to be working on a science fiction show. Like I said to the guy before you, none of the concepts that are raised on this show are entirely foreign to me or do they seem that far out there, but I’ve never worked on a show before where we get to actually explore those ideas.

L. Davis Is there anything in particular that you would be interested in doing?

J. Jackson Any particular --?

L. Davis Work of science fiction or type of story.

J. Jackson You’d have to be more specific. It’s such a gigantic genre.

L. Davis I guess any book in particular?

J. Jackson Any singular book? I would have loved to be part of Lord of the Rings and now they’re making a Hobbit. I’m not in that either. I guess I’ll have to wait for The Silmarillian.

Moderator We have time for one more question and that will come from the line of Troy Rogers of deadbolt.com; please go ahead.

T. Rogers I’m actually sitting up here in Vancouver and I just wanted to know how it feels to back in your neighborhood filming again.

J. Jackson My hometown, where are you?

T. Rogers In the West End; I’m on Barclay Street.

J. Jackson Enjoying what is probably what is the second or third gray day of the entire summer. It feels pretty damn good; it’s a guilty pleasure to be able to come home after all these years. There’s really not a more beautiful place on earth than Vancouver in the summer.

T. Rogers What does the city actually add to the show, do you think?

J. Jackson We’re just getting into the time of year where I think the city will add a lot. The gray rainy-ness of it all actually seemed to add to sort of the natural moodiness of a show like Fringe; I think that’s a positive. Then whereas last year we were in New York, which has all of the obvious things that New York and that backdrop add, it’s difficult to shoot there because there are the other 14 million people that you have to deal with. It makes our production life, I think, a lot easier being up here, just the things that you’re allowed and capable of doing on the streets of Vancouver.

T. Rogers One more quick thing; you mentioned that you’re a big sci-fi fan. I just want to know what it’s like working with Leonard Nimoy.

J. Jackson I’ve been shafted so far; in fact I’m going to lodge a formal complaint through this conference call. Leonard’s been up here twice and while I did get to meet him and that’s cool, I have yet to be able to do a scene with him and I think that’s un-cool. That’s something that needs to be added to the Peter and Walter Bishop, I mean William …, scene tout de suite.

Moderator Any closing remarks, Mr. Jackson?

J. Jackson Thanks, all of you, for taking a half hour out of your day today. Tell everybody you know to tell everybody that they know to watch the show tomorrow night.

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