Interview with Kevin Durand

Thanks to Sara for the heads up.

CTV.ca: I’ve read that before you appeared on the show, that you hadn’t seen much of the show, that you wanted to remain distant. When you finished your original arc, did you go back and watch the entire series?

Well, my fiancé and I, we started watching it, and then they called us, and I was like, “Okay, well now we have to stop again.” My whole thing was that Keamy, to me, was so removed from everyone on the island that I didn’t want to have any emotional kind of attachment to anyone. I kind of reverted back. So we got through the end of the second season. After my episode airs on Tuesday, we’ll dive back into our obsessive ‘Lost’ watching marathons.

CTV.ca: You have a history of appearing in musicals and are very familiar to the stage. On “Lost,” Michael Emerson (who plays “Ben Linus”) also came from a song-and-dance background… do you think there’s something about having a theatrical background that allows an actor to go really dark, in a very convincing and creative way?

Having a background in theatre is probably the strongest kind of structure you can have, it affords the actor a playground where he or she can just have the opportunity to jump in a lot of different kinds of characters that you wouldn’t necessarily have the chance to on TV. In my theatre career, before I started doing some TV, my characters just ran the gamut. It wasn’t as specific for me, because I am 6 foot 6 and 240 pounds, like I said; my first job was playing Pinocchio. So your appearance doesn’t seem to have as much weight, so there’s more room as an actor to explore. When you have that theatre background, you definitely understand your instrument so much more, I think theatre actors tend to be able, in general, go a little deeper just because of the honing of the instrument.

CTV.ca: The repeated performances allow you to zero in on the character’s complexities.

You keep finding new things every night. So when it comes to your film and television work, the obssessiveness doesn’t go to rest. Even now, I have “Robin Hood” coming out in May, and I had to go to Scotland, and I went there for two months to try and find this character and try to find his voice. I did that eight months before I started shooting the movie. I need to find some way of being able to find as many levels as I possibly can, as opposed to playing things right on the head.

CTV.ca: Are there any experiences that stand out in particular when you look back at your time on “Lost”?

“It’s actually kind of funny. I was sitting with Damon Lindelof between takes on the last episode of season four and we’re having this great conversation, then all of a sudden Damon kind of says, ‘You know, I’m pretty surprised you’re just such a nice, mellow, happy guy, that you play such a vicious, hard-core character.’ I just said, ‘Oh, well you know, I’m just a regular small town Thunder Bay boy.’ And then he looks at me and says, ‘And yet, with all this niceness and all this smiling, I feel like you might kill me at any second.’ I thought that was kind of hilarious. The whole thing to me was just a joy ride.

Source: Full Interview @ CTV