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Peter Wingfield is no stranger to science
fiction and fantasy buffs, having played in many a genre television show and
movie over the years, his most memorable roles being Methos, the world’s oldest
living Immortal on Highlander (both in the TV series and in Highlander:
Endgame on the big screen) and Tanith, the nasty, smooth-talking
Goa’uld on Stargate. Last year he appeared playing a pivotal role
in X-Men 2 and had numerous notable guest appearances on such
shows as The Dead Zone, Just Cause, and others.
Most recently, he’s been tapped to appear for the second time on the erotic
anthology series, Bliss.
Peter’s episode is called “Tying Up Gerald”
and involves a woman who comes home one day to find her husband (Wingfield) at
the mercy of a dominatrix.
In the wake of Clear Channel Communications
dumping Howard Stern from their radio stations across the country, apparently
they were reticent to talk about the Bliss series on the air,
even though they had interviews already lined up. I figured it was as good an
opening as any for the interview …
AW: So, you’re doing another episode of Bliss. I heard that
you were banned in Orlando. You were supposed to do a radio interview here
yesterday …
PW: Oh, that’s right. They decided that the subject material was simply too
racy. Which, you know, I can understand.
AW: What
did you think about that happening?
PW: I think it’s everyone’s right to decide what it is they want to talk
about and broadcast to their listeners. It is edgy territory. I
totally understand people’s nervousness with it. I was nervous about it myself
the first time I did one of the shows—which was two years ago—because it’s
delicate subject matter. They are erotic tales. They are stories about fantasy.
And if you get it wrong, it becomes cheesy and distasteful very quickly. The
danger is that it degenerates into stories about Bogita being surprised in the
kitchen by Sven the burly plumber and his adjustable wrench which is absolutely
not what the show is about. Because the great thing for me about the
series is that they are interesting stories about people who behave like real
people. There is depth to the characters and there is growth in the stories. They
actually—I mean, all of the stories are about people being forced into looking
at something that’s hard for them and really investigating it.
The story that I did that goes out on the
Oxygen Network this Saturday at midnight is about a woman coming home and
finding her husband in their bedroom with their therapist who is a dominatrix.
And her first response is anger and outrage and shame and humiliation. But
instead of running to the divorce courts, she actually looks at what it is he
is saying—which is that he needs this in some way, that it’s a therapeutic
relationship, it’s not an affair. And she starts to investigate her own ideas
of what personal power is. It’s a lovely story because there is awkwardness to
it, there is embarrassment, they try to change their relationship and it
doesn’t work and it feels very real. But at the end of it, they are
strengthened as a couple. The journey that they go on, actually strengthens
them. As with all of the other episodes in this season of Bliss,
they all have happy endings. Although they aren’t classically romances, they
are romantic little tales. I think that the reason that these work, is because
the writers, the directors, the producers are all women and they bring with
them, a different perspective than guys do when they do a story like this.
AW: How do you feel about the fact that Bliss is written and
produced by women?
PW: That again was the appeal for me—I think I’m the only actor to have done
more than one. But when they came back to me and asked if I’d like to do
another, I had such a good time the first episode and, you know, it was a great
experience for me because the acting challenges are enormous to try and make a
story as delicate as this, to make it work, to make it feel real
and to be honest about the sexuality that is involved, to play it in a very
honest and direct manner without stepping over the line. That’s a great acting
challenge. The director of the first one—Adrienne Mitchell, who’s also one of
the producers, with Janic Lundman at Back Alley [Film Productions]—she was
terrific, she was a wonderful director and because of that positive experience,
when they came back to me and said the director of the second one was going to
be Mina Shum, who is another director whose work I love, I was very happy to go
in and do it.
AW: I asked the folks on the Our Stargate forum
if they had any questions for you, and the question we came up with was, was
there anything about filming this episode that you just didn’t think you could
do? Was there a line you couldn’t cross, given the nature of the episode?
PW: The interesting thing that I discovered doing that—the filming of the
episode, there’s a lot of tough stuff in there, there’s things that are just
uncomfortable to play, but there was nothing that I really balked at. But then
when we were doing publicity for the show and they wanted to do a stills shoot,
I found that really, really uncomfortable. And I think that the
reason for that is that when you’re filming a scene, you are into the
character, you are into that story, and you are, in a sense, transported from
inside yourself to beside yourself. It’s kind of somebody else
that’s there doing the story. There’s a certain amount of safety in that;
security. But when you are doing a photo shoot, it really feels like it’s you
there. You’re not playing a scene, not playing a story, you’re being moved
around like a shop window mannequin to make a particular picture that somebody
who is trying to sell the show thinks will be striking, will make people look,
and will try and tell them a sense of the story. But it’s really you
there, not the character. And I found that tremendously
uncomfortable.
AW: So
those are probably the photos that we’ve seen. The production stills. [You can
see all of these photos and read some production information and interviews at
the Our Stargate page, Peter
Wingfield is in Bliss.]
PW: They probably are. Yeah. I was surprised by that myself, I have to say.
It’s not something that I’ve really come across before. It felt much more
uncomfortable having a still photograph taken than any of the
stuff that I was asked to do as part of a scene.
AW: We’ve just seen you in Andromeda this week where you were
reunited with Peter DeLuise from your Stargate days.
PW: Peter DeLuise was soooo much fun. He’s a great guy. I love Peter. While
I was filming Andromeda, my little boy came out to visit on set. Peter
is like a big kid himself and he was taking my little boy around to all the
different spaceships on set where they shoot, so Edan had a terrific time. He’s
about five years old. [Wingfield was referring to DeLuise, not his own little
boy!]
AW: What can you tell us about what else you have coming up?
PW: Catwoman is coming up. I’m not sure what the release date for
that is. I think it may be July 4th. It’s certainly going to be one
of the summer blockbusters, that’s when they will be releasing it. I play a
Russian scientist on that who has discovered a cosmetic product that makes
people eternally young. It turns out to have terrible side-effects and he has
pangs of conscience. That was a lot of fun shooting that. Halle [Berry, who is
playing Catwoman] is tremendously generous, a very, very sweet lady. The second
day that I was in filming, she came up to me and she was very upset and
apologetic because she hadn’t recognized me from X-Men and we had
worked together before and when I had been in the previous day she hadn’t
recognized me. She and I had no scenes in X-Men 2 and we actually
didn’t meet in the filming of the whole movie in that sense. So there was no
reason for her to have remembered me. But it actually says a lot about the kind
of person that she is that she felt so bad about not having recognized me.
She’s all right to look at, too.
AW: Did you happen to work with Peter Williams (Apophis) on Catwoman?
PW: I did not. Peter I know from Stargate and we have some
mutual friends, so I’ve always kind of kept up-to-date with what he’s doing. I
know he did a lot of work on the Vin Diesel movie, Chronicles of Riddick.
On Catwoman, he was, I think, only working a day or two days, and
it was a completely separate section from what I was doing.
AW: It was amusing seeing that the two Peters from Stargate
were working on Catwoman.
PW: Yeah,
the two Peter W.’s, in fact.
AW: What’s happening with Touching Evil?
PW: Touching Evil is airing on USA Network on March 19th, is
what I’m told. The first week it goes from 9 to 11 pm, so that’s the two hour
pilot and then subsequent episodes are 10-11 pm. So, Friday nights on the USA
Network. And I’ve not seen any of it, but I know they’re very excited about the
way it looks. I’ve seen the pilot, actually, which we shot back in March of
last year.
AW: Are you in any of the episodes other than the pilot?
PW: Oh, yeah, yes I am indeed. I’m in the first four weeks of the show and
it’s a terrific, huge storyline culminating in some really big scenes which I
think are probably the best work I’ve done in my life. I’m very excited about
it. So, yeah, that starts March 19th and plays through to the
summer, but my episodes are the first four.
AW: Anything else you’re working on?
PW: I’m also doing a little bit on a Stephen King mini-series called Kingdom
Hospital. Just a little guest role on one episode, I think it’s episode
eight. It’s a wonderful, gory Stephen King. I’m going in next week to do some
stuff where I’m a corpse having my organs harvested, going in for the
prosthetic mask and I’m probably in from the early hours of Monday morning
getting that stuck on my face.
AW: Do you think we’ll see you in more episodes of Bliss in
the future?
PW: I don’t know. It’s an anthology series so each of the stories is a
separate entity, kind of complete in its own right. I felt slightly
uncomfortable about doing a second one, because it felt like the character
could be the same guy that I was in season one, and I wanted it to be clear
that he wasn’t the same person, this wasn’t just another story
about him later on. Which was why we had this idea to sort of giving him a
transatlantic accent where he wasn’t clearly American—because they didn’t want
to get into that—but that he was clearly somebody who had grown up in Europe
but who had not been there for a long time. So we just kind of tweaked the
accent a little to make him a different person. I think it’s tough to then come
back and do a third one and then again be in the territory of is this the same
character that we’re telling more stories about? If it was clearly a very
different character, then it becomes possible. I played George in the first
season and Gerald in the third and they actually could have been the same
person. The way the character was written—it’s a thirty minute show, so you
don’t get a lot of back story. So, you just get a sense of who this guy is.
He’s clearly a successful, professional guy who is in a marriage—one of them he
had a child, the other one he didn’t—but has been in a relationship a long
time, but he has this secret life that is not part of his other world. They
could have been the same guy. But I think if it was a very different character
then, yes, it’s possible I would go back and do another one.
It’s always—the question is about challenge,
as an actor. Is there something to learn from this experience, from playing
this role, from telling this story? Do I come out of it at the end a better
actor than I went in at the beginning? You know, that’s always the number one
question. In the end, that’s more important than other considerations. Many
things have to be weighed up. But at the end of the day, I believe if you want
to have a long, lasting career as an actor, you have to keep challenging
yourself. You have to keep growing, developing, pushing the boundaries, seeing
what you can make work, seeing whether you succeed or fail.
“Tying Up Gerald” will air on The Movie
Network (http://www.tmn.ca/Mexcess/)
in Canada on February 28th at 11 pm and on Oxygen (http://www.oxygen.com/bliss/) in the US
on February 29th at 12 am (so Saturday into Sunday). Please recheck
your local listings to be certain.
For more information about Peter Wingfield
and his career, past, present and future, check out the Peter Wingfield Fan
Club (PWFC) (http://pwfc.org/). For more candid
photos of Peter Wingfield, check out http://photos.ashtonpress.net/.
Our Stargate thanks and credits the
producers GalaFilm (http://www.galafilm.com)
and Back Alley Film Productions (http://www.backalleyfilms.ca),
for the information, interviews and photos.
© Ann Wortham, All Rights Reserved
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