BEING HUMAN - SCIFI AND TV TALK: Being Human's Mark Pellegrino - Paternal Instinct
Vampires in feature films and TV have certainly changed since the days of hanging out in drafty old European castles, avoiding sunlight and mesmerizing beautiful young women before putting the bite on them. In fact, nowadays some small screen bloodsuckers even fight crime and the forces of evil, or at least look like they are. On Syfy’s popular supernatural series Being Human, James Bishop is a Boston police officer. He is also a centuries’-old vampire and besides trying to protect his own kind, Bishop is also working to bring an old friend and fellow vamp, Aidan McCollin, back under his wing. It is a tricky balancing act, and actor Mark Pellegrino, who plays Bishop, enjoys portraying the challenges of leading such a double life.
“We find out during the course of the show that vampire families arrange themselves in kind of a hierarchy, very similar to the mob or the Mafia where families organize and cover entire regions,” explains Pellegrino, "‘and Bishop happens to be the vampire boss of Boston. He has ingratiated himself into ‘normal’ parts of society – Bishop is a lieutenant in the police force – and uses his position as a means of recruiting new vampires as well as covering their tracks.
“I think the biggest challenge with this particular role is to take your antagonist and make him sympathetic. I’ve tried to do that by finding the human problem in the script and then attacking it from that point of view. Bishop’s problem to me is akin to the prodigal son story, where a son has abandoned the family in order to pursue values that are dangerous to him and even harmful to the family. As the ‘father,’ Bishop is trying to bring him back into the fold and the right way of doing things. So that’s how I look at it; I’m trying to bring a sense of empathy and sympathy to the character...”
i love Being Human. my new favorite show!
ReplyDelete