CERTAIN PREY - AV CLUB: MARK HARMON INTERVIEW
by Will Harris
November 4, 2011
The actor: Although he first found fame as a quarterback for the UCLA Bruins, Mark Harmon has now spent more than three decades as an actor. Although he’s spent a fair amount of time on the silver screen, starring in such films as Summer School, Stealing Home, and The Presidio, it’s the small screen where he’s found the greatest success, playing doctors (St. Elsewhere and Chicago Hope), detectives (Reasonable Doubts and Charlie Grace), and the occasional serial killer (The Deliberate Stranger). Now nine years into playing Special Agent Jethro Gibbs on the absurdly successful CBS series NCIS, Harmon has decided to take on a side gig that, if successful, could result in the next big TV-movie franchise: playing Lucas Davenport in the USA Network’s adaptation of John Sandford’s Certain Prey, premièring Nov. 6.
Certain Prey (2011)—“Lucas Davenport”
Mark Harmon: "I was a fan of the books before anything. I’m a fan of John Sandford’s, and I’d read many of these. So that’s where it started..."
... The A.V. Club: It seems like it could follow the same path as Tom Selleck and the Jesse Stone films, where you could branch out into a franchise.
MH: "Well, potentially, I guess. Tom’s done a nice job with that. I don’t know. I know that it’s exciting to be part of one that started just in the kernel of the development process and moved it to actually getting made. This is at a time when that’s really hard to do. [Laughs.] It’s been two and a half years in that process, and that’s not very long in this business when it comes to things getting made. But it started with the character, the writer, the people that you kind of hitch your cart to and say, “We’re all sharing the same idea here with what we’re trying to do, but can we pull it off?” And to be hooked up with USA—they’re putting their foot in the water in the movie business. They haven’t done this in a while, but if it works, it’s potentially the start of… I mean, there’s 21 of these books right now with this character, and Certain Prey is number 10 in the run of how they were written. I hope it does work, I don’t really know that it will, but if it does, then there’s a potential for a lot of things. I guess if the decks were clear and I wasn’t doing a series, or this series [NCIS] in particular, I think you’d have a different formula where you’d perhaps venture to do four of these a year or something. But right now, to do one of these a year with NCIS is a lot.
It’s a very different character than Gibbs. He’s a different guy. He’s a wealthy guy. Drives a Porsche, the whole thing. He likes being a cop, but the character itself is very different from Gibbs, and that’s obviously part of the attraction for me. To try to expand, to do something different, and, in some ways, to try and reintroduce yourself. I mean, you go off and do a different role with different people, that’s what actors do. You try it, and you see if you can pull it off. It’s a departure..."
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