What I've observed is that television in the last decade has increased to something that's almost unrecognizable. They are feature films. That's a huge shift, and it's something the audience expects. They still may want to watch their half-hour sitcom, but when they watch scripted drama, they expect the standard.
I didn't drop into the mannerisms of another version of the character, but I guess I was pretty alert to that.
I'd never done anything that required a five-year commitment. To build a show that seems to have kept the imagination of the world so much was a bit otherworldly.
With science becoming far more accessible to all of us, I've become a pretty avid reader and devourer of it. One of the objectives that I had working with Fringe was to get more people talking about it because it's such fun.
I always loved the challenge. When something new happened, I always used to get quite excited.
I loved playing Walternate because he was completely the same character, version 1985, and then it developed in such a different way, physically and mentally. So, to be able to play that, in the same television series, as playing the other ones was a fantastic gift for me.
I find science really sexy and, at the time that I was a school kid, it certainly wasn't.
We didn't know until really quite late in the piece how Joel [Wyman] would finish it off.
I think main storylines are what always intrigued me, with those that were the relationships between the characters against whatever backdrop, whether it was in an ordinary universe or a universe in the future.
My last two characters have been Denethor and Walter Bishop. Both will be hard acts to follow. That sits in the hands of my managers, at present. I just have no idea what's going to be offered to me.
I love having played Walter because I suppose any actor brings a certain aspect of their own personality to their work, and I had a fairly broad canvas to paint on with the different versions.
Doing animation is great fun. It's like a different world.
You basically go in animation and it's all in the imagination. There aren't even pictures to look at. You usually go in there and work with whoever the director is to create this voice and this character.
I'm truly grateful to the writers of Fringe for giving me that because, over the years, when I've spoken about the character with them, I've always felt that this would be the perfect way to end and complete his journey, and to complete the journey of this series, and they gave it to me.
[on playing Walter] It was wonderful to be able to play a character who had so many colors and who was able to play comedy, to play incredibly vulnerable, which he did a lot of the time, to play the love story, and to play the relationship with the son, which is quite unusual. That's a gift to me, as an actor. It was like everything you could possibly hope for, over five years. So, I was a very lucky actor.
It was wonderful to be able to play a character who had so many colors and who was able to play comedy, to play incredibly vulnerable, which he did a lot of the time, to play the love story, and to play the relationship with the son, which is quite unusual. That's a gift to me, as an actor.
I suppose, when you start up in acting, you hope to be given challenges, and you always have dreams about the things you could do and couldn't do, but normally we get pigeon-holed a little bit, as we go on in our careers.
Particularly in the final season [of Fringe], when we were shooting seven-day episodes with a reduced budget and big special effects, the team was so polished, by then, that we were able to do it and, I think, with incredible results.
You're always working with the relationships. It's pretty demanding, but then again I love that.
Walter is incredibly complex. I do a lot of thinking about the work I do, and try to get the rhythms of scenes.
We've had such a close relationship with the fans. Through social networking and the internet, we have much more contact, and we did go to things like Comic-Con. So, I think people know most of our secrets.
[Fringe] was just about doing the job, or trying to do the job, properly. It was never a job that you could rest on your laurels. It was a very challenging 43 minutes of television that we were shooting, every week.
