ew actors could say they've played Romeo on both Broadway and in the television series The Man from Atlantis. However, for actor John Shea, going from Shakespeare to science fiction was just the beginning of a long and diverse career that has led him to play Adam in this season's highest-rated first-run syndicated action hour, Mutant X.
Equally at home on stage, the big screen and television, Shea has played in everything on stage from Ibsen to O'Neill. The versatile actor has been in 40 feature films and several television movies, including the Academy Award-winning Missing and the TV film Baby M, for which he received an Emmy Award. Most recently he co-wrote, directed and acted in the independent film Southie. However, for sci-fi fans, he is most notable for his complex performance as Lex Luthor in the ABC series Lois and Clark.
Shea chatted with Science Fiction Weekly about stupid science fiction, Lex Luthor and playing the good guy.
How did you get started working in science-fiction television?
Shea: I've kind of worked in and out of this genre over the last 20 years, I guess, from The Man from Atlantis, where I was a guest star many, many, many years ago. But it was fun to do because I had just played Romeo on Broadway in New York City and I went out to L.A. in my first trip ever. I was a guest star in a couple of other things. Then they asked me if I would guest-star in Man From Atlantis. It was an episode where he went to Verona in like 1400 and he came up in a well in the middle of downtown Verona and there was a sword fight going on. So that was my first dabbling in science fiction. By the way, that particular episode, while it was well-meaning, it was really stupid. It had a stupid quotient. It taught me also the pitfalls of science fiction, which is that it can fall really easily into that stupid zone that you don't even want to be associated with. So then years went by and I think I did a couple other kind of guest-starring things in things like Tales from the Crypt, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Hitchhicker. For many years I was just doing serious dramas and then after that Lois and Clark brought me back into that world.
And you played Lex Luthor.
Shea: It was a great character. But what was great about Lois and Clark and the reason why I went after that character and ended up doing the job was because they had an interesting take on the science fiction. Which is that it was treated seriously, first of all. It was treated as a drama, but with almost romantic comedy overtones. In the sense that there was this kind of comic roundelay between Lois and Clark and Luthor, that I really loved playing. And there was a wit to the writing.
There was some romance between Lex and Lois.
Shea: As well there might be, because the truth about bad guys is that you don't know that they're bad until they sting you. Most bad guys in your life are guys that seem to be good guys. The thing about villains is that they never look to be villains. So I thought in the modern villain, from
what I've seen in politics in Washington and what we know about corporate America and Wall Street, is that the villains of the world are guys who are really well dressed and usually power brokers. They're guys who have a kind of rapacious appetite for whatever it might be that satisfies them, but they also
border on psychopathology or sociopathology. That is that they have no conscience about the little guy. They simply go after what they go after without any of the conventional restraints of common morality, which constrains somebody like Clark Kent and well-meaning human beings. Lex Luthor didn't have those restraints, and that's what made him very dangerous. And we've certainly seen this in the fall of Enron, where those guys were Luthor-like characters, captains of industry in powerful soaring glass towers
looking down on the plebeians who work for them down below. Masters of the universe who, in the end, were robber barons and ended up stealing from the poor to feed the rich. And that's the kind of guy that Luthor was.
Why did you start out as a regular on the series, but eventually became a recurring character?
Shea: I did every single episode the first season. I was living in New York when I shot Lois and Clark and I was commuting to Los Angeles every week to shoot. It was very difficult on me and my family. So I asked them if I could get out of my contract at the end of the first season, and
they wouldn't let me out altogether, but they let me diminish my participation so that I only did certain episodes that were called Lex Luthor episodes and were usually three-part things that were during sweeps and they were kind of special things. But then suddenly it allowed them to write all these other new villains and made it much more interesting. And gave me a break and I was able
to then create Southie.
How long did the series last?
Shea: I did it on and off three seasons. But while I was doing Lois and Clark, I wrote a couple screenplays, but in particular Southie, which I ended up directing. I spent the next three years putting Southie together. So I went far away from the world of mainstream television into the world of American independent film, which is a world I had come from.
Raising the money, putting it all together, directing the thing, writing 12 drafts of it, casting it, shooting it in south Boston, and spending nine months doing the post-production, editing it, helping produce the soundtrack, and then taking that to the film festivals, obtaining distribution, going to the premiere. I used the money I had made during Lois and Clark to kind of finance that whole experience, because I wasn't paid for anything for Southie during its development. And then I was only paid scale minimum for directing it and acting in it. After Southie, I then stayed in New York for the next two years and did a series of independent films. I mean acting in them. I think I made about six of them during that time. They were all short, intense experiences. Completely different kinds of characters, and then I would be done and have some time off and then do another one. So there was the variety, which is missing when you do a long series. It took me in and out of various skins and taking on and off these various masks, which makes life more interesting. But then I stayed in New York, for the last two seasons I've been on stage working Off Broadway. I did two successful runs of two great plays. A play called The Director, which I starred in and then another play with Eli Wallach and Ann Jackson, that Anne Meara wrote, you know, Ben Stiller's mother. She's a wonderful playwright. She wrote a play called "Down the Garden Path." And that was a great experience. Then I got a phone call asking me if I wanted to do Mutant X, just out of the
blue.
You'd already spent some time doing series work. What did you think?
Shea: I'd done series for at least five years. I'd been working in the independent film, the off-Broadway theater world, and sort of in the rhythm of my life, I thought it was the perfect thing because it was a return to the mainstream; which I knew, sort of career-wise I needed to do, because I
had been laboring in the fringes, non-commercially. So that was one thing, that I would be going back and getting into the mainstream. I knew what that meant in terms in career and exposure, and all those other things. That was one thing in its favor. The second thing in its favor, and more importantly to
me, was the writing. The writing, I thought, was a clever blend of genres. Which is this original blend of action, adventure, sci-fi and drama. And those four genres mixed together in a unique way.
Were you hesitant to get into the rigors of another series?
Shea: I was ready for it, in a funny way. Actually I was welcoming the rigors, only because the opposite of rigors is unemployment [laughs]. Or drifting out there in the independent theater and film world, which is spiritually and creative fulfilling, but financially bankrupting. It was time for me to go back and do something in the mainstream.
And it was a pretty high-profile project.
Shea: And not only that, they were offering me two years on the air, which is unheard of. And you know that coming out of the world of Hollywood, I've spent years in and out of Hollywood. Most television series are pilots, so many thousands of them are written, a few are shot, many fewer are actually picked up. And when they are picked up, it's usually for maybe, if you're lucky, 13 or 16 episodes. Maybe they put three or four on the air. If you don't have the numbers immediately, they yank it. Then you're dead, you see. Then you have to wait another whole year for the next pilot season. You go through the same nonsense. The network system just doesn't work. And so, creatively what they were offering me was the opportunity to create a character who was going to be around for a while and be part of a series that was going to be around for a long time, that was going to grow and change and evolve. If you've been watching us you've seen that it has over the first season. But there are more surprises and other changes, and other steps for growth that are going to be happening in the second season. Then because I was involved with Southie and because the producers had seen my work as a writer and director, they were also open to whatever contributions I might make in those areas as well. So it became a multifaceted artistic collaboration, as well.
Are you going to be doing any writing or directing?
Shea: Well, the writing that I do is sort of inside. I make suggestions and offers. My imagination doesn't work in this genre. It's not the kind of stuff that inspires me to come up with original ideas. It's not my gift to think in this particular way. However, because I studied quite a bit and I went to school as a director and all those things, I understand some story structure. Things like that. One of the great things about working on the series is that we take the stories very seriously. We all sit down as a cast with the producer and director of that particular episode and we do table readings of the script. We do them out loud around the table, around a speakerphone, which is then broadcast to the writers in Los Angeles and the executive producer, Howard Chaykin, and the writer of the week. So, in other words, there are three or four guys in L.A. who are listening to our reading, and then we sit around after we finish the reading and we discuss whatever changes might be desirable. That's a wonderful process. It's something like what we do certainly in feature films, but it's also something that you do in the theater because it means that you bring the focus completely on that which matters most, to me at least, which is, "The play's the thing." Because without good stories, without good writing, I think everything falls apart very quickly. So we've been trying to make all that as good as possible. And certainly make sure there's a consistency of tone for each of the characters and nobody's doing something that would contradict something that they'd done in the past. So that's a great thing for the show.
What was appealing about the character of Adam to you?
Shea: They offered the opposite character from the last mainstream job that I had done. In a way he is [the mutants'] genetic father, you know, medically their father. Only because their mutations or their gifts, their alterations are a direct result of the work he was doing in biogenetics, even though they were applied to them without his knowing, which is where the betrayal comes in by Eckhart and those guys. But at the same time, now that he has gotten this band together with him, they're totally embattled, and he must now go out and fight for self-preservation and for the protection of the
people he feels responsible for, all the other people who've been genetically altered.
Do you see Adam as being a father to these mutants?
Shea: I think of him more as a kind of leader or a coach or a big brother. Rather than think of myself as their father, I think more of myself as an older brother who is maybe a little bit wiser about the ways of the world. Who can inspire them and lead them. A leader, if you will. A director who is directing them into a path.
And he's risking the lives of these young mutants that he's become attached to.
Shea: That's right. So the stakes are high. They're life and death. Which is why he's serious a lot of the time [laughs].
Your character is doing a little more action lately.
Shea: I have gotten to do more action. It's been really great. I have never had a chance to do any action before in any other movie or film. The last time I did action was in Romeo and Juliet, when I was fencing onstage in Broadway. I studied it when I was younger when I was in school. I studied martial arts with a friend of mine, who was a black belt, particularly this form of kung fu over a period of a couple years. I was his sparring partner, and anyway, he taught me quite a bit, this friend of mine who is now dead. But strangely enough, these many years later, part of his legacy is that I have a chance to use those skills, and I hope to do more so in the future.
Have you done any wirework yet?
Shea: I have done one wirework. Not as much as they [the actors who play the mutants] do, and thank God [laughs]. It's fun and I would do more in a second. Except it's really time-consuming and physically taxing. And it's not really what my role is so much. That's probably a good thing. However, I do know how to do it, and I could do and I have done it, and I hope to do it again, but just not as often.
And you get to wear really cool clothes.
Shea: I get to wear really cool clothes. The character is self-made. That's one of the things about Luthor, as well, is that he was self-made. I always think of superheroes, like Superman and those characters, as trust-fund babies, you know. Which is that they inherited their powers. Adam's self-made
and I like that about him.
He's brilliant and built his own world. What's your backstory for Adam?
Shea: He made his money through clever investing through the '90s. It'd be tough for him to do what he did through the '90s now, because the markets are so bad. But I think while he was working at Genomex he was investing his money wisely in technology stocks during the '90s boom and he made a lot of money. I think that he sold systems, just would invent things and sell them to companies and be bought out and make dummy corporations and sell those things, you know, patented things. And I think he made a lot of money that way.
The backstory is that he was a child prodigy at Stanford University working in genetics. And then he was hired away by what he thought was a private company, which is Genomex, to work in genetics. What he thought was to help to improve agricultural output and animal husbandry, working with animals and crops and things like that. This cutting-edge world of genetics. He had invented ways of cross-pollinating various genetic strains, and these inventions were used secretly by Eckhart and the other chiefs at Genomex on human embryos. And then what was happening is that these kinds of mutated embryos were being fostered. Then they would end up being operated on against their knowledge by other teams at Genomex. What happened was that Adam found out about this, and that's when he was outraged and considered what Eckhart had done. It'd been a total betrayal of his trust and ethics and all the other
stuff. And he downloaded the list of all names of people who'd been worked upon and experimented with, and destroyed whatever he could and then went into hiding, went underground and built his world, and now at the beginning of this season has begun to build the Mutant X team.
There are points when Adam and Eckhart could have killed each other, but didn't? The world would be a better place without Eckhart.
Shea: Yeah, but you know there's going to be another Eckhart, and that's the problem with murder that way. You notice in the violence that we do, it's a very stylized kind of violence in that nobody dies. Have you noticed that? That Genomex kills people fairly ruthlessly and fairly often, fairly consistently. It seems to be their answer to a given problem.
It's certainly Eckhart's answer.
Shea: Yes, Eckhart's answer is murder. It's a big world out there and he has lots of money, and people don't know what he's up to. He's working secretly, I'm sure, with quite a bit of power that way. From Adam's standpoint, murder is a failure of imagination, and violence should be used only in self-defense. He's not really a pacifist. But he has learned, and what he teaches in martial arts or the physical work that they do is usually about self-defense or about the protection of other people. It is not an aggressive posture, it's a defensive posture. And he knows another [Eckhart] will pop up,
and another one will pop up, and another one will pop up.
But they might not be as good.
Shea: They might not be as good, and that's the chance that you take. It also goes back to my own personal philosophy, which seems to dovetail with Adam's, which is that violence is not the answer. And that violence begets violence.
So what is the answer? What does Adam really want to happen?
Shea: Well, the long-term goal, I think, is certainly the protection of all the other people who have been genetically altered. Gather them together, if not in the Mutant X team, then into safe houses just to protect them and advise them and to be there in one way or another. To make sure they're not either killed or exploited.
Do you think Adam is looking for redemption?
Shea: You know, I don't know if Adam did anything wrong, so I don't know that he did anything that he needs redeeming for. What Adam did was, I think, relatively innocent in the sense that he was experimenting with genetics in a relative innocent way, and I think that he was betrayed by evil, if you will, by competitors. Let's not call it evil. By competitors who were jealous of him, and they took what he had experimented with and then perverted it and subverted it and exploited it to their own ends. And I'm not so sure that the theme for Adam is one of redemption as much as it is vengeance. But it's vengeance with a code of ethics and a code of honor that he has for himself within that framework, that violence is not the answer. That only in self-defense do you become unfettered in your defense of that which you believe to be right. You can be savage in his belief of what is right and what is wrong and his defense of the freedom and the liberty of others.
Does he want to bring down Genomex?
Shea: It's like thinking about bringing down the CIA or the FBI. It's like a big government thing. I don't know that you can bring it down. He's an outlaw, don't forget. It's like trying to bring down the establishment. He's wiser than thinking that he can actually accomplish something like that. Because the other thing that you learn when you battle evil is that evil never thinks of itself as evil. Evil always thinks of itself as good. And we've experienced this now with al Qaeda and with Osama bin Laden, whose methods we certainly would consider evil. Right. But from Osama bin Laden's point of view he is a messenger of God, and he's doing the right thing, and it's divine intervention that these people died in the World Trade Center, you see. He was simply an instrument of Allah. And I think if you were to question Eckhart you'd probably find a similar philosophy. And this is the most mysterious element of all, which is that evil never thinks of itself as evil. It thinks of itself as good. And it looks at the world with equal amounts of self-justification. It's not like some sniveling villain who's
twisting his hands while he's tying the maiden to the railroad tracks. It's a very, very modern concept of evil.
And Tom McCamus has done a great job with Eckhart.
Shea: And he's done a wonderful job as well. It's one of the things that makes this series so timely.
What do you see as the reoccurring themes on the show?
Shea: Well, certainly there's an overarching theme of the battle over light and dark and good and evil. Which is one of the things that explains our residence into the collective unconscious that's watching the show. There's also the kind of allegorical level where each of these episodes stands alone as a morality play.
What's your favorite episode so far?
Shea: The favorite one I've had to play? I've had a couple favorite ones. I loved the one when everybody was just dying. And they set up this nasty mutant killing disease that was wiping through the ranks, and we had set up this kind of M*A*S*H-like hospital unit in a big airplane hangar and I had to fight to save them. I had this great guest villain that week. It was a really interesting the way that that story evolved. But then there's another one with this woman who is capable of changing someone's moral polarity. This woman changes me. She touches me and changes me, so good people turn bad and bad people turn good, and I turn completely into a monster. Oh, it's very cool. The stuff I got to do was so much fun. Those are really fun.
You're in the middle of an amazing career. There aren't many actors who have the ability to move from something like Missing to Mutant X. And to play the villain or to play the good guy in equal quantities.
Shea: Well, it's been fun that way. There's a great American poet named Wallace Stevens from Hartford, Connecticut, who wrote that we climb to heaven on the stairway of surprise, and it's this element of surprise in constantly being challenged by something completely different from what you've
done before that I think makes life interesting for me. That's like going from directing Southie to working off-Broadway, to doing something on television mainstream, and after this God knows what I'll do, but I'm sure it will not be on television. It makes life much more interesting and stretches
you and in the end you look back on your career and you've had a lot of fun. It's really exciting when you go skiing and you look at the map of the mountain and you see all these runs, there might be 40 or 50 different runs. And some of them are simple runs and some of them are intermediate runs and some of them are really tricky, and really hard. But also if you look at a mountain they're carved out, there might be 40 different runs. So if you look at a career that way too, the beauty of being a modern actor in the 21st century is that we go with equal facility between the stage and film and television, between acting and directing and writing. And in the course of a long career you want to do all the runs down that mountain. So you say, "Well, I did whatever could be done and that's a great thing." I've talked to the current producer about directing an episode, maybe at the end of next season. That would be a great challenge for me, because of the astonishing technical complexity that the show demands of a director and its crew. The digital effects, working with CGI, working with computer stuff and planning those effects and shooting them are very, very tricky and they are unlike anything I've directed before. The stunt work is state of the art, and demands directors know how to shoot action. Between the wirework, you know, working with the stunt coordinators and the fight coordinators would be a real challenge because there's a good way to do it and there's a bad way to do it, and I'd want to do it really well. And also if I was going to direct an episode, I'd have to act in it as well as be the director and that would be a great challenge. That's something that I look forward to somewhere down the line.
I hear big changes are in store for the end of the season.
Shea: That's right. It's going to be really exciting. It will be great for the audience, because it allows us to take them places where they didn't anticipate we were going to go. We can climb to that heaven.
What do we have to look forward to in the future from John Shea?
Shea: I don't know [laughs]. I am so rooted in the moment, I can't even begin to tell you what lies ahead. I know that I will be back and doing all the episodes next year. But I don't know what those episodes entail, nor do the writers [laughs], because they're so exhausted after producing all of
this. We've talked about ideas, but I don't even want to say what they might be. I know that there are surprises in store, and I know that things are going to change. And I know that this last episode we're shooting is going to set up an entire new dimension to the show, and that's going to be really exciting. But I don't even want to know too much about it. I want to just go in and just do it and be taken someplace as an actor. Only because I just like surprises. I don't read reviews. I don't watch previews. If somebody is talking about a movie that they love, I just walk away from them. I put my fingers in my ears and hum to myself. Only because I like blind dates. And for me what is about to happen to Adam and Mutant X is going to be a blind date.
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Also in this issue: Paul W.S. Anderson of Resident Evil
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