Dallas: Jesse Metcalfe On What Season 2 Will Bring For Christopher

Decades ago, many of the Dallas scenes featuring the character Christopher Ewing happened as he was playing in the Ewing pool as a child. Now, in 2013, he’s back to the pool, though he has a lady friend in there with him this time.

Jesse Metcalfe plays the natural-energy supporting Christopher in the upcoming second season of Dallas, which premieres Monday night, January 28 on TNT, and it won’t be all fun and pool games for his character, who will face the wrath of a woman scorned as the woman he married last season, Rebecca, has turned out to be an infiltrator, and, worse… a Barnes.

“She’s dangerous,” Metcalfe said in a conference call last week about Julie Gonzalo’s character, who Christopher knew as “Rebecca Sutter.” “She’s dangerous because she has the backing of her family and of her father. Barnes Global certainly has a lot of money and a lot of power. He’s still emotionally vulnerable to her. After all, she is the mother of his children, and they’re stuck in this bitter custody battle over the unborn twins. It gets pretty ugly,” he teased.

As Rebecca is trying to prove herself to her father, Christopher still is driven by a desire to be part of the family that he was adopted and not born into. “I think it’s obvious from the character that we’ve established in the first season what he’s grappling with. I still get into the character in the same way. I think Christopher is really defined by his need to prove himself as a Ewing, and the baggage of being abandoned by the only mother that he’s ever known. I think that’s the fuel for his ambition. That’s the source of his ambition. Anything can really come out of that,” he said. Since he mentioned his absent mother, might that mean we’ll finally discover what Pam (Victoria Principal) has been up to for the past 20 years? “Yes. Yes we will. Unfortunately I can’t tell you much more than that. I’m sorry,” he hinted.

Most important for everyone is to live up to the legacy of Larry “J.R.” Hagman, who passed away during production of Season 2. “I think the best way to honor Larry would be to make this show a huge success and to keep this show going for at least a few more years to come. Anything less than that I think Larry would see as a failure. This tragedy has really kind of set up another monumental television event, and I think our writers, our producers and obviously us has actors have all come together to try to honor Larry and honor the character of J.R. Ewing in the best way that we know how,” Metcalfe said. “It’s going to make for some very compelling television. There’s no doubt about that. Episode 8 is really the episode where the mystery of J.R.’s death begins to unravel. It’s entitled ‘J.R.’s Masterpiece,’ and a lot of very intriguing storylines have set in motion because of his death. I think they’re really going to fuel the second half of the season and possibly seasons to come,” he said.

Don’t miss the two hour season premiere of Dallas Monday night, January 28 on TNT!