This past weekend in the Alcatraz press room at the WonderCon convention in Anaheim, we interacted members of the cast and crew in interview roundtables which you will be reading more about here in the days leading into the Alcatraz season finale which airs Monday. One of the most interesting interview opportunities came when we talked to two actors who we usually see in different eras on the show – Jonny Coyne, who plays Warden Edwin James in the 1960 sequences; and Robert Forster, who plays Rebecca’s uncle, Ray Archer, in the present day.
Both actors were gracious to speak about the show, but it was particularly interesting to see Coyne, who puts off an air of authority and angry emotions on the show, yet couldn’t be friendlier in person. Is it the glasses that puts him in the “Warden James” mood? “It doesn’t actually happen until I put the glasses on, that’s for sure,” Coyne says. “They are kind of strange, creepy glasses. Yeah. It does help, actually.” Forster points out that some actors know who they are when they put their shoes on, but for Coyne, it’s glasses. “It can’t be the shoes because they kill me,” he jokes.
Another thing that separates Coyne from his character is his voice. What did inspire the voice he uses for the Warden on Alcatraz? “The accent is peculiar,” he says. “The original writer, Liz Sarnoff, wrote in a very specific kind of way. She wrote a lot on Deadwood, so that’s that richness to the language that they use on Deadwood. When she gave me the character, she said ‘this is the kind of language that he has, but I don’t want it in a Southern accent.’ And I just thought he reads in a Southern accent. It plays in a Southern accent. She said everybody who came into the audition room played it in a Southern accent. And so, my battle is always to say that kind of language and keep pulling back from the elements of Southern that are in there. All of the writers have joined in on Liz Sarnoff’s, trying to make it as rich and complicated as flowery as they possibly can for me. And again, I’m still trying to rein back the Southern in it. That’s kind of fun, really. It allows me to do a No Man’s Land sort of thing,” he explains.
So where is Warden James actually from? “I’d like to say he’s from California,” he laughs. “But obviously not.”
“To be honest, I haven’t asked that question,” Coyne answers seriously. “But I think there is a Southern accent to it, sure. He’s from the South, somewhere. I guess.”
The season finale of Alcatraz airs on Monday, and during the WonderCon Alcatraz panel, Coyne hinted that he would be seeing what was behind the mysterious door in the finale. When asked to expand on that, Coyne said his reaction was “really surprised.”
“It wasn’t at all what I expected,” he says. “I had an idea of what it might be like, and then we used what I thought it was going to be like in a previous scene to the very last scene. So I thought – ‘oh my God! It’s not even what I thought it was going to be! It’s something else!’ So now that I know what it is and what exists in that room, at the surface, you kind of think ‘Okay. That’s kind of interesting.’ Then you start looking at the details of what’s written on things and you go ‘Oh, my God.’ You have to be quite observant about what is written on things,” he teases.
“The fact that we open the door to that room – the Warden’s room, as it were – and saw what’s behind it, that answers a lot of questions. It also opens up a whole lot of other questions, but it certainly answers some of the questions that people have asking, so that it becomes quite fulfilling. No one’s denied anything, really. But we’re not going to give the whole thing away, because we’ve got a show to do,” he adds.
Robert Forster also promises good things from the finale – including what sounds like more interactions between Ray and his brother, Tommy Madsen. “You’ll see an unraveling of the mystery, but just remember that I am dealing with my older brother. This guy was my older brother. I looked up to him. He taught me a lot of stuff. And now, he’s turned bad… at least we believe he has. I threatened to kill him if he gets close to us, so I’m convinced he’s not the guy I knew,” Forster teases.
Could Ray be wrong in what he thinks about his brother? “Could I be wrong? I think I could easily be wrong. Because you never know what the writers are going to do for you,” he says.
Don’t miss the two-hour season finale of Alcatraz Monday, March 26 on FOX! Here’s a gallery of images from the double feature:
