One Harvey was not enough for FOX’s Gotham, as Nicholas D’Agosto joins the show on Monday’s new episode as Harvey Dent enters the picture. Fans of comic books and Batman films know Harvey has another destiny as well – that of the villainous Two-Face.
But that’s getting ahead of ourselves.
D’Agosto participated yesterday in a press conference call about what we can expect from Harvey when he comes to Gotham in the episode appropriately called “Harvey Dent.”
For starters, D’Agosto spoke of the tendency to want to show Harvey’s capacity for being Two-Face as a challenge that has to be fought. “I think the most important thing I had to do, and I did this with the help of the directors and producers and everybody around as we, at the 11th hour, sculpted the beginning of this guy. I think it was really important for me to just be smooth and easy and likeable and things roll off my back,” he said of how Harvey will be when we meet him.
“He gets himself involved in some pretty intense, high-stakes situations. You know, he kind of walks right in with, like, a loaded gun – not literally – but he presents this to Gordon, and they go off on this attempt together. I like how vague I’m being. I would say that the most important thing for me to do in that is to show his confidence and his ease in these situations. I think it’s tempting to want to show and to play the kind of bolder emotions, and those are definitely there, but they’re more fun if they’re a surprise,” Nicholas teased.
Did he look to previous takes on the role for inspiration? “Yes,” he said, before clarifying that he does not mean the theatrical versions of Harvey Dent. “I would say that I didn’t go watch a lot of the movies because I don’t find, in my past experience, I haven’t found watching other actors do the role to have been really valuable, because part of the problem with that is is that you start to think that that version of the character is in the version that’s in front of you, and it’s not,” he admitted. “They’ve written a new character, and he has new stakes and ambitions and things driving him, so I try not to go just watch other people. But what I did do was just kind of do as much Google searching of different comic sites and history sites and go through the arc of, the condensed, essentially Cliffs Notes versions of all the things that Harvey Dent has done and all the different iterations of Batman,” he explained.
“One of the things that really kept standing out to me is that they talk about him being abused as a child and that he he had these, maybe, psychotic episodes as a child that kind of foreshadow his capacity to become someone like Two-Face later. What I think was really good about that was that drives him to want to eradicate this type of behavior, and also why he has the potential to have such a visceral response to when he’s threatened or when he sees someone that he thinks is also abusive, and it’s because that relationship that we have to our parents is so irrational, and I think it’s important that this character has this capability, this capacity to be really rational. And although he’s mostly Harvey Dent right now, he has under the surface these things. That’s the thing that I was able to pull, and that was really valuable for me,” he said.
What’s next for Harvey Dent on Gotham? D’Agosto told us that he has a “great mini arc” in the middle of Season 1, but that the Penguin/Fish story is at the forefront. “I think that right now my story’s kind of contained, but come second season, I become a regular on the show, and that’s when I think you’ll mostly see a lot more of me branching out,” he said.
Gotham “Harvey Dent” airs Monday, November 17 on FOX. Take a look at some preview images here!
