Gilmore Girls alum Scott Patterson plays Harry “Sully” Sullivan on Sullivan’s Crossing, the new series airing Wednesdays on The CW. Sully is the estranged father of Maggie as played by Morgan Kohan, and the two characters reconnect after many years apart after something goes very badly for her in her professional life.
Sully lives at a called “Sullivan’s Crossing” which is a beautiful place where most of the action of the series takes place. With the second episode making its United States broadcast debut tonight (October 11) at 8PM ET/PT, we spoke with Scott Patterson to learn more about his character “Sully” and what makes him tick. You can read the interview below.
KSITETV’S CRAIG BYRNE: What was it that drew you to the role of “Sully” on Sullivan’s Crossing?
SCOTT PATTERSON: I like flawed characters with a past, and that was certainly Sully. He’s a survivor. He’s a guy who is in the throes of attempting to reconnect with his estranged daughter, who’s become a very successful neurosurgeon in Boston. He’s in Nova Scotia, Canada, running the family campground that has been in his family since the late 1800s. He’s pieced his life back together after is his wife left him 20 years prior and took Maggie with her.
It’s all about healing, and reconnecting, and facing your issues, and looking in the mirror… exorcising your own demons; even realizing that you have them to exorcise. There are a lot of layers to this guy. [Sully is] a man who is complex, and flawed, and full of love, and full of angst. He’s real.
In art, you always want to be challenged, and you want to do the thing that scares you the most. That’s how we grow as artists, so it was a chance of growth. That’s the main reason I took it.
What was your reaction when you saw the beautiful locations that you’d be filming exteriors in?
I wanted to know what the home prices were, because I was gonna buy a house! Wow. You can’t afford it anywhere else now! It’s gorgeous here. If you just take a 20 mile drive down the coastline, in either direction, it just gets better and better and better.
It’s just fantastic. The golf courses are amazing. Everything about this place… the food, the people are friendly… it’s quite something. And it’s growing. The traffic has increased in Halifax a lot this last year, because people are moving here now. It’s kind of a hustling, bustling metropolis at this point, but it still has a quaint, folksy charm to it that hasn’t really changed the character of the people.
Imagine being estranged from somebody… I don’t know if you have children, but having children really changes you. And then you lose the love of your life, and there will never be any deeper love in your life than your child. Imagine losing that, and then having a chance of reconciliation and healing, forging a new relationship and a better, healthy relationship.
I mean, the poor guy probably feels like he’s the biggest screw up in the world and is just covering. Now, he’s got a chance to build a new version of himself through her, through this reconciliation. It’s inherently tragic, but it doesn’t have to end up that way.
I think that’s a lot of what’s coming through him in the first season. He’s got to get it out of the system before he’s got any chance of healing, any chance of reconciling? So it’s that struggle between father and daughter, teo people with really big hearts that want to come together. But there’s a ton of complications and a ton of obstacles in their way, and they have to overcome them. The biggest obstacles are themselves. So it’s interesting. It’s an interesting piece.
Can you talk about working with Morgan Kohan as Maggie?
I feel lucky. She’s very, very talented, and she works from a similar emotional lexicon that I do. We’ve never really talked about it; I can just tell. She’s very deep, and there’s a lot inside there.
When we’re working together, I just feel like I’m with — I wouldn’t say a female version of myself, but she’s somebody who I intellectually and emotionally understand instinctively.
We just both feel very comfortable of working together. I know she’s gonna bring it, she knows I’m gonna bring it. She has so many assets that she brings to bear on the set every day. There’s tremendous focus, but she does it with such an ease and grace. I haven’t seen that since Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio who I worked with in the mid 90s. I just marvel at her talent, and I marvel at the ease with which she deals with people, and the ease with which the fluidity of her emotional life in front of a camera. Just an extraordinary thing.
It makes it feel a little more comfortable knowing that I knew somebody, and also, his wife had played my daughter in a show. So I knew Chad, I knew his wife Sarah, and I said, “okay, so I’m gonna have some friends up there. I’m not going to be completely alone and separated from my family.” That was nice to come into that.
It’s great working with Chad. I never had any scenes with him [in the past], so this is going to be the first time I get to work with him, and it’s been great. He’s a guy that gets it. He’s a total pro.
Do you think fans will be surprised by some of the character backstories, especially Sully’s?
I think they will be surprised. I think they’ll be shocked. I think they’ll be they’ll be able to relate to it in some aspects.
These are all pretty much universal themes; familiar stories told in unique ways. I don’t know that they’ve seen a story told this way before, in this setting, with these types of characters. That’s what’s so fresh and original about it. They’ll recognize something familiar, and all the characters in the scenes, but they’ll have never seen anything told on television with such depth, and care, and detail, and intelligence. It’s really quite something. Yeah, I do think they’ll be surprised. I think they’ll be hooked, aand I think there’ll be surprised in every episode because there are 10 episodes and there are 10 really powerful cliffhangers.
Also, it’s fun to watch. That’s another aspect that [showrunner] Roma Roth included: she makes it fun for the viewer. It’s a very unique show, in many respects.
(Permission was granted by the Screen Actors Guild to promote this season and no strike rules have been broken in doing this interview.)
Take a look at preview images for tonight’s episode of Sullivan’s Crossing titled “Homewrecker” below.
