In "Extant," Halle Berry stars as Molly Woods, an astronaut returning home after a year on a space station.
Goran Visnjic may co-star in CBS’ new “Extant,” but when it comes to the appeal of the show, he sounds eerily close to the average guy on the average couch holding the average remote.
“Hmmm,” he says, “Steven Spielberg is producing. ... Halle Berry plays my wife.
“This is pretty good.”
Not to mention that it films in L.A., where Visnjic lives when he’s not in his native Croatia. So yeah, he says, he’s a happy guy.
“We’re filming the (season) finale now,” he said last weekend. “And I feel like we started two days ago. The whole thing has just flown by.”
By coincidence, flying is what launches the whole show, which premieres Wednesday at 9 p.m. and which CBS fervently hopes will replicate the success of last summer’s “Under the Dome.”
In “Extant,” Berry plays Molly Woods, an astronaut who has just returned from a 13-month solo stint on a space station.
Halle Berry proved to be an old pro at weightlessness due to her work in "X-Men."
Nothing to see here, folks, except, wait, Molly’s pregnant.
So that’s a little weird, which we should probably expect with Spielberg as executive producer.
In this case, though, the idea wasn’t Spielberg’s. It came from Mickey Fisher. Spielberg just ran with it, putting his Amblin Entertainment behind it.
“It was an idea I carried around for a few years,” says Fisher, who is also an executive producer. “It started as a one-person play about an astronaut aboard a space station who is kind of confronted by the ghosts of the past.
“And then I got to that point where I wanted to write more complex female characters, to really challenge myself. And this idea came back to my mind as a way to explore that.
“I had the idea of her seeing this guy she loved in her past. Then the idea of, ‘What happens if she doesn’t come home alone,’ was the spark that set me off. I wrote for a month straight until I figured it out.”
It started as a one-person play about an astronaut aboard a space station who is kind of confronted by the ghosts of the past.
Not surprisingly, that one-person play has had a population explosion.
Visnjic plays John Woods, Molly’s husband, and he is not just there to be shocked and baffled by Molly’s homecoming news.
He’s also a scientist who, in the future world where “Extant” is set, develops robots.
That notably includes Ethan (Pierce Gagnon), whom he and Molly are raising as their son — since, before her space voyage, she had been unable to conceive.
In one early scene, John speaks to a convention about robot development, and uses his son for illustration.
An audience member asks if he has a plan to terminate robots should their implanted intelligence make them difficult to control. He snaps back, “No, of course not. This is my son. Do you have a son? Do you have plans to kill him?”
Goran Visnjic (r., with Grace Gummer) plays a scientist who develops robots, one of which he and Halle Berry raise as their son.
Visnjic says that scene was one of the story line moments that drew him to “Extant.”
“I liked that this character has a lot going on,” he says. “He and his wife were not able to have children, so he created this robot that he loves as a son.
“But his work puts him under a lot of pressure. So you see that when he’s questioned about this son he has created, he goes berserk. I read that and I was thinking, hey, this guy has a spark.”
Visnjic says he also likes that John Woods is different from his past characters, who have ranged from Hamlet to Christopher Plummer’s gay lover, but most noably included Dr. Luka Kovac on NBC’s long-running hit “ER.”
“What I liked about Luka is that you never knew what would happen with him,” says Visnjic. “I’d get a script and he’d be going to Africa or he’d have to chop off a child’s hand without anesthesia.
“Sometimes I’d go, ‘Oh, c’mon, guys,’ but it was a great role. When somebody is all happy and his life is great, it’s boring to play. The worse it gets for the character, the better for the actor.”
Astronaut Halle Berry returns to terra firma after a year alone at a space station, and gets close again to her son (Pierce Gagnon).
Things also get intense for John Woods, but in a different way. For one thing, even though he’s married to Halle Berry, physical attractiveness isn’t built into this role the way it was into Luka’s.
“This guy is less of a hunk,” says Visnjic. “And that’s fine. I look for the script and the character.”
He also likes the futuristic aspect of “Extant.”
“I grew up on science fiction,” he says. “I started with fairy tales and it was natural to move into sci-fi, books and shows. But until now I never got to act in one.”
Fisher had the same love for science fiction. He was such a big fan of the British series “Doctor Who,” he says, that “When I was writing, I had a Post-it note on the corner of my monitor that said, ‘WWSMD,’ which was ‘What would ("Doctor Who" writer) Steven Moffat do?’ ”
The answer, adds Fisher, “was always, ‘He would just write it better.’ ”
After a year in space, Molly Woods (Halle Berry) tries to return to normal family life with husband John (Goran Visnjic) and son Ethan (Pierce Gagnon).
But Fisher also says he conceived “Extant” as a hybrid — part science fiction, part just an interesting story about people.
“It’s a real mix of genres,” says showrunner Greg Walker. “What I love about Mickey’s pilot is that it was at times a ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ style page-turner, and then at other times it was this family drama like ‘Close Encounters.’ ”
“That shift of genres sometimes can be really confusing,” admits Fisher. “But I think we were able to traffic in political conspiracy, horror mystery, ‘X-Files’ moments and family moments.
“It’s not a dystopian world. We want it to be something people could relate to.”
Visnjic says the futuristic elements won’t require any big adjustment for 2014 viewers.
“I think we just accept the way things change around us,” he says. “It’s like when I tell my son, who is 7, that when I was his age there were no cell phones. I couldn’t walk around the room during a phone call.
Goran Visnjic plays scientist John Woods in CBS' "Extant."
“When you watch an old ‘Star Trek’ and you see their communications devices. ... Our cell phones today are way beyond that. So I don’t think we have any trouble with the technology in this show.”
That extends to Berry, for whom weightless floating in a space station is old news.
“She had a lot of wire experience from her work on ‘X-Men,’ ” Walker points out. “I’d kind of forgotten about that. ... Then we were shooting late one night and I said, ‘Oh my God, are you okay? This must be exhausting.’
“And she was like, ‘I’ve been doing this for a while.’ ”
The producers are promising “satisfactory” answers to the questions raised in these first 13 episodes, though they make no secret that they’d love to extend into multiple seasons, perhaps exploring other space-related areas.
“For me, ultimately, it’s about what it means to be human,” says Fisher. “Molly’s story in space, the story about Ethan, the way those two stories intersect, it becomes a story about how we’re connected to each other — that we’re in existence, that we’re surviving.”
Comments
Post a Comment