November, 2007

If you had the opportunity go back in time to prevent a terrible accident or alter an event that could change the course of your life, would you? What if you were forced into time travel -- would you embrace it or fight it tooth and nail? NBC's now-canceled series Journeyman posed that very question. The series centered around Dan Vassar, a journalist and family man who is unwittingly forced into traveling back in time.

I had to fortunate opportunity to speak with Kevin McKidd, who is easily one of the nicest actors in the business, about the series, where it's headed and what his plans are for the future. The show may no longer be on the air, but Kevin's excitement about the series is quite evident in this interview....

Q: How did the role of Dan Vassar come to you?

Kevin: "I had done a show on HBO and was looking at my options and what I was going to do next. I didn't even know what a pilot season was, I had never been involved in a pilot season before, so I came over, met quite a few people and read a lot of scripts. Journeyman was the one script I really loved. It was a risky choice, but I am always attracted by taking a chance. I met Kevin Falls and Alex Graves for coffee one day. He is such a talented and gifted man, a beautiful man to be around. That was the thing that really sealed it for me. If I was going to be in bed with a group of people for a long time with a TV show, I couldn't think of anyone else I'd rather be in business with."

Q: Did you do anything special to prepare for the role?

Kevin: "A lot of the writing staff are actually journalists with journalistic backgrounds, so they talked about what that entails -- making deadlines and that sort of thing.

Dan Vassar has to juggle that as well as traveling in the past, so I wanted to have a good handle of what that is about and the pressure these people are under all the time. It's a time sensitive job, which is ironic for time travel."

Q: What can you tell us about upcoming episodes?

Kevin: "The episode that just aired I'm really proud of, where Dan fights himself. There are some amazing revelations that come out. Elliott Langley starts to play a much bigger role in the mystery of why this is happening. Livia starts to reveal where she's living and what her world is, which is a big revelation. We've got two episodes that are dark, as dark as we've gotten. Dan realizes he has to save a child from an abductor. He is eventually caught, but because it happens in the past, Dan actually goes off mission and he tries to save the children.

Because he didn't do what the mission wanted him to do, he basically creates his own mission and he pays for that. When the guy gets out of prison, it gets very nasty and Dan gets shot and almost dies. He has a chance to go back and meet this guy, the abductor, as a child and you get that theoretical question of if you met Hitler as a child, would you kill him? It goes to a very dark place. In the next scripts after that, a lot comes out about how many time travelers there are in the world, the genesis of them and what is causing it comes out by the time we get to episode 12."

Q: Livia's time travel is a bit confusing to me, how is she traveling if she's dead?

Kevin: "She's not dead. When the plane went down, she traveled at that exact moment and went to the place that she now resides, which is a different time than Dan's time. The thing about Livia is that she can only travel forward and Dan can only travel back."

Q: Has the writers' strike affected filming?

Kevin: "It's a really tough situation to be in. Every writer on the show is proud of the show and wants it to live and breathe. They have to respect the wishes of their union. We're one of the lucky ones because Kevin Falls (the creator) has such a functioning writing room and such a talented group of people that managed to get enough scripts out for the full thirteen episode order done."

Q: It's strange to hear you speak in your Scottish accent, is it hard to learn the American dialect?

Kevin: "I enjoy it! Ever since I was a kid, I've been obsessed with mimicking other people's dialect. I used to copy the American accents from the TV and movies, so its been a big hobby of mine for a long, long time and I get a big kick out of it. I've never played a Scottish character, except for this one movie with Patrick Dempsey coming out called Made of Honor. It felt really weird, I felt naked without doing an accent."

Q: Any projects in the works?

Kevin: "Yeah, I've got a few, but I'm very superstitious and don't like to yap on about it until it's actually signed. I'd like to do a musical in a couple years time, it all depends on Journeyman. I want to get back and do some theater, I haven't been on a stage in 7 years."

Q: Anything to say to the fans?

Kevin: "I would like the fans to know how much we appreciate their feedback and support. Keep watching and tell your friends to watch. Hopefully we’ll be on the air for years to come!"