Tonight is the season finale of Heroes on NBC at 9p and I spoke to the guy who made this season of Heroes the best one since the first. Robert Knepper plays Samuel Sullivan and he told me how the way he portrays the character came about.
For those of you who don’t watch the show, you are really missing out, but here is a little info about Samuel Sullivan who has come onto the show to wreak havoc in the Heroes lives. Samuel is the head of the carnival full of specials with his brother Joseph, who has recently died because Samuel killed him. Unlike the Heroes who we have known from past seasons that are slowly finding each other, Samuel and his brother have formed a family of people with abilities and have protected each other within their carnival. Slowly throughout the season we have seen as different Heroes have joined the carnival, some stayed and some left. Tonight it all comes to a forefront between good and bad and hopefully we will have enough of a cliffhanger that NBC will bring back for another season.
Now back to Robert Kneeper, he is fresh off of his success from Prison Break and he knows that role helped him to land this role and he is not taking his time on the Fox show for granted.
If you watch the show like I do, you would think that Robert is Irish like his character but I was shocked to hear him talk in his native Ohio accent when I interviewed him. So I had to ask him where that accent came from and he told me when he was auditioning for the role they told him that it was between him and another guy and that guy was Irish so that he is how the accent came about. He also told me when he went in for the audition, he saw a guy when he got there and he was convinced that was the other guy he was up against for the role and he wound up being wrong. He told me exclusively the other guy was Andrew Connolly, who plays his brother Joseph. After he got the role and the two worked together for the first time, Andrew said to him, “I just want you to know, I’m glad you got the part. You were great and your Irish is great.” Now that is class act.
Now how did Robert envision his character Samuel and here is what he told me, “I had a sense about the character that he was old world. That you and I have a job that we do every day and we love it and we go home. This guy not only has a job, but he also has an extraordinary power being able to move earth. And that’s I all knew from the beginning, that’s all I knew, I didn’t want to know anymore. I knew he could move earth. So he goes like this and he could cover the dirt over his brother’s grave. So there was something mortal but something immortal about him as well. Or I thought immortal. And because of that, I thought he is from another era, another world…We decided that he was not going to be a typical carnival worker. There was something different about him like a charismatic rock star, like a Keith Richards type of thing. It had to be someone iconic like that. It couldn’t be like the front man like Mick. It would be like the guy right behind Mick. That was the feeling, the rock star, the makeup, the nails and all of that stuff. It was really about that rock star image. And that kind of flavor kind of descended into it.” Once he told me that he was going for a Keith Richards, it totally made sense to me! He really captured that feel.
Now I have to admit to you and I admitted to him, that I hated when he character hid Charlie in time so that Hiro couldn’t find her and I had to tell him I didn’t like that his character did that. I then asked him had anyone else complained about that to him and he told me I was the first. But one thing I was not the first person to tell him is that he has really made this season of Heroes ever so much better! He also told me that tonight’s episode is going to be really good and I can’t wait to see just how good it is going to be on NBC at 9p!
