What do you do to follow up a successful run on The Office?
If you’re Rainn Wilson, you take on a big role like that of Everett Backstrom, lead character of FOX’s Backstrom, which premieres tonight at 9PM. It comes from Bones’ Hart Hanson and features Wilson as a surly and peculiar detective.
“I was finishing The Office and my agents called and they were like ‘we want you to read a TV script for a pilot, one-hour’. And I was like ‘are you high? What are you, crazy? Are you drunk with power? What are you thinking? I just did 202 episodes of a TV show, I’m not going to do another TV show.’ And they’re like ‘we would never ask you this. Just trust us, just spend half an hour and read this script’,” Wilson said when recalling how he became involved with the project. “I read the script and I was really moved by it. I was instantly captivated by it. Taking this role was not like ‘I’m going to show the world that I’m not just Dwight’, you know, but I was definitely looking for roles to play that had different colors in the palette,” he explained.
“Backstrom is just a magnificent role. I hadn’t read anything like it in a TV show before. He’s very cantankerous and self-hating and racist and sexist and addictive, but he’s got a lot of heart and humanity and humor and a lot of different dimensions. That’s just really rare — especially someone at the center of a show, driving a show that has all those different colors. It’s very complex and challenging. And I was a little bit afraid of it, so I knew that that was a good thing. That’s when I signed on,” he said.
“I met with Hart Hanson and the director Mark Mylod, [who is] a really good director, and I had a great meeting with them,” Wilson continued. “I talked with them about the character. My questions, my concerns. How are we going to take him through an arc of a season? What are his priorities? I really liked what they had to say. Then we did it for CBS and all I could say is thank God we’re at FOX, because we get to have a lot more fun with the character and the show at Fox than we would have at CBS,” he said thankfully. “You could push the envelope a little bit more with smoking and profanity and nudity and stuff like that. Not that [it’s] an HBO show, but it’s mostly a sensibility thing. CBS is looking for a sensibility of a show that fits in with Criminal Minds and Hawaii Five-0 and stuff like that. It’s a procedural. Whereas FOX has been known for crazy, out there characters. They’re much more open to just letting characters lives and breathe in really weird ways.”
How does Backstrom turn out? That will be up to the viewers, who can tune in to FOX at 9PM (ET) tonight to see more. You can find images from the pilot episode below:
BACKSTROM
BACKSTROM: Backstrom (Rainn Wilson, R) asks for Officer Frank Moto's (Page Kennedy, L) help after he is shot while confronting a suspect in the "Dragon Slayer" series premiere episode of BACKSTROM airing Thursday, Jan. 22 (9:00-10:00 PM ET/PT) on FOX. ©2014 Fox Broadcasting Co. Cr: Liane Hentscher/FOX
