Michael Chiklis is one of those very lucky actors who has had success leading multiple television series over the years. In the 1990’s, he played a young police commissioner on The Commish. Then, in the past decade, he starred in FX’s gritty and critically acclaimed The Shield. He’s starred in two Fantastic Four films and now he might be headed for Hit #3 with ABC’s new super-powered family drama No Ordinary Family.
Following a successful NOF panel at the Comic-Con International in San Diego, Chiklis, Julie Benz, and the show’s producers took the time to do press roundtables, and KSiteTV was one of those outlets that was able to speak with him. The Benz interview can be found here and the Chiklis interview can be found below.
Please do not duplicate this interview onto other websites. Instead, just link to KSiteTV! Thanks! Questions are in bold; answers are not.
Can you talk about what it’s like to be a superhero again?
It’s funny. I’ve gotten that a handful of times now. “A superhero again.” Whereas as an industry, we’re on cop show #557,000. And everybody’s like “oh, another cop show.” But I can only think of one other superhero genre television show in the last 20 years. People are like “Again?” I just that it’s a huge genre. There is so much room for it to grow. Look at Comic-Con. It’s growing like Vegas. People love the genre, and there are so many possibilities, and it’s something that captures peoples’ imaginations. It’s exciting. So I’m really happy to be doing a show that melds genres. It is at its core a family show wrapped in a police procedural, wrapped in a superhero genre.
So it’s not like Vic Mackey with powers?
No. Not at all. This guy’s not Vic Mackey at all. This guy is heroic in spirit, and he’s a good man. There’s no ambivalence about that. He is an ordinary guy. He’s very much an everyman, and something extraordinary happens to him and his family. It’s parents who have superpowers, and that’s a well-made and entertaining show. You add the superpower element to it, and it just heightens all of the different questions we can ask.
Did you want something lighter after playing Vic for so long?
I suppose if the miracle occurred where a script came across my desk that was as brilliantly well-written as The Shield was, in a totally different world, with a character as well-defined as Vic Mackey, I would have jumped on it. But that’s the kind of character you really don’t ever get to play in a lifetime. So, yeah. I’m always on the lookout for something like that, but in the absence of something that good, from a hardcore drama perspective, I really wanted to do something that was decidedly lighter, that had a much broader appeal. Because let’s face it: The Shield wasn’t for everybody. It just wasn’t. My 11 year old was starting to doubt that I was an actor at all. So, the short answer is yes. I wanted to do something that is lighter and more palatable for a larger audience. But at the same time, I feel like my family itself is sort of a microcosm of America, in that you have my wife, myself, my 16 year old, and my 11 year old, and we all go and watch our niche programming, but once in a while something comes along that we can all watch together and all dig on, and that’s what I was looking for. Something that I could sit down with my whole family, and I would enjoy as much as my 11 year old, my 16 year old, and my wife. That’s a rare thing, where it’s universal and everybody can dig on it. Often times I’ll sit with my 11 year old and survive through something she wants to watch, and often she can’t watch what I’m watching, so this is something that really has that broad deal, where everybody will really dig it.
In the pilot it is explained that your character is invulnerable, but then he attempts to fly. Is that a logical thing to assume, that you can fly even though your powers have given no indication of that?
That was my friend [George, played by Romany Malco]. It wasn’t me! I was telling him I couldn’t fly. I told him I couldn’t do it. He was just convinced, saying “If you could do this, you probably could fly. Go ahead. Try it.” And he talked me into it, because he’s a lawyer, and he’s good at talking people into stuff, and I jumped, and it didn’t work.
Would super-strength be your first choice of power if you could really have one?
Yeah, it really always has been. I don’t know why. Sometimes you often feel very vulnerable in the world, and I guess there’s something really appealing about the idea of being invulnerable.
No Ordinary Family premieres Tuesday, September 28 on ABC. You can read more information about the show here on KSiteTV! Thanks to Michael Chiklis for taking the time to participate in this roundtable discussion!
