Second Chance will get its first chance to entertain viewers when it premieres on FOX next Wednesday night, January 13 at 9PM ET/PT. Rob Kazinsky (Pacific Rim, True Blood) stars as the rejuvenated Jimmy Pritchard, once an unhealthy and old “bad cop” who is brought back to life by the “Lookinglass” program.
We spoke with Kazinsky on the Second Chance set in Vancouver late last year to learn more about what we can expect from his role in this new show.
“There’s a lot to like about it, to be honest,” Kazinsky says about playing an older man in a younger body. “I’ve always struggled to fit my face to my persona. I’ve always played older — I’ve looked like this since I was 12. I have a certain cynicism and world-weariness that comes with age, I think. So it’s nice to kind of, when they were casting this kind of thing they said ‘yeah, good luck finding a 30 year old guy that feels 70’ and voila! They found one.”
That wasn’t the only benefit to playing an older character. “Also, you know, Jimmy is the same age as my father, so I get to be my father before my time. I’m putting a lot of him into this, which is kind of…it’s my favorite part,” Rob adds, saying that some of the challenges faced by the now-younger Jimmy are challenges that he has with his own father. “I’ve tried so hard to tell my dad how to turn the television on and the satellite, and how to get my father to operate Skype, and he can’t,” he laughs. “No matter how many times you explain it as simply as it’s possible to do, he just can’t understand. And I don’t think Jimmy will ever understand either, even if he is hyper-intelligent and, you know, super fast and all that stuff. I think he’s still just slightly culture-shocked by this whole experience. A mobile phone is about his limit,” he says.
Jimmy Pritchard in his previous life had different and somewhat turbulent relationships with his own children, to the extent that it seems that his granddaughter is the only person who actually likes him. Might things get better with his “second chance?” Could he become a better father this time around?
“I don’t think he will be,” Kazinsky says. “I think it would be incredibly boring if this experiment made him a decent person and that’s the whole point of this show. I mean, yeah, you got a second chance, but nature versus nurture kind of thing. Seventy-five years being a pretty horrible human being is not going to change just because suddenly you have a young, strong body. There are mistakes you want to make the most of, but nature will out. You’re still going to be, essentially, selfish and spoiled and short-sighted. What these powers and this opportunity presents to him, is against what his natural nature is.”
That said, he will still be using the name “Jimmy Pritchard.” “He’s going around as Jimmy Pritchard. The beautiful thing about working for Facebook…uh, Lookinglass, is that they have access to [and] they can falsify records, they can recreate things, do new amazing…. they can create a whole tax profile, they can create a social security, they can create a whole life for him. Digitally. And that’s the real world that we live in, that somebody can actually do that. He can still be Jimmy Prichard; he can just be a different Jimmy Prichard,” Rob explains.
Finally, will the newly-young Jimmy Pritchard take advantage of now being in a younger body?
“Not as much as you would think he was,” Rob answers. “He’s still kind of finding out who he is again. His major gripe here is that he is tethered to Lookinglass and Mary and Otto and he can’t leave them. He has to come home to them every single time, and he dies without them. He didn’t ask to be brought back. When he was murdered, he was a tired man. He was ready for the end. He didn’t fight too hard, he was just ready to go, he had had a pretty torrid last 20 years of his life. He didn’t ask to be brought back and yet, he has and he doesn’t have a choice in it, and I think there is an enormous amount of anger there,” he explains.
That anger manifests, not so much as a bad attitude, but as a goal for Jimmy Pritchard moving forward. “I’m going to go and do what I feel I should be doing [and] what the right thing to do is,” Rob says. “I’m going to go and help my kids I am going to go spend time with my grandchild and I am going to go and solve some damn crimes, because I am, I am justice!”
Second Chance premieres January 13 on FOX. You can see a trailer below:
