SCIFI AND TV TALK: The Cape's James Frain - Double Trouble
by Steve Eramo
2/16/2011
Superman had Lex Luthor, Batman and Robin had The Joker (among others), The Fantastic Four had Doctor Doom – throughout comic book history, all superheroes have had their arch enemies, and The Cape is no exception. In the NBC superhero drama series, our protagonist, Vince Faraday, whose alter ego is the comic book superhero The Cape, is pitted against Peter Fleming, also known as Chess. Good-looking, rich, powerful and resourceful, this antagonist knows how to work a crowd. No one has any idea of the twisted mind lurking behind Fleming’s entrepreneurial façade, which makes portraying the two-faced character a challenge for actor James Frain, but one he thoroughly relishes.
“It’s partly the nature of the beast that there is so much going on in The Cape in terms of setting up these characters and our story, that it has taken us a while to get into the flow of things and, for me, to find out who my character is and where the writers want to take him,” says Frain.
“The direction we’re been going in is that Peter Fleming’s grasp on the Chess character is not as solid as it first seemed. In fact, it seems to be rooted in some kind of traumatic event and that once upon a time he may have created the Chess persona as a way of handling that [trauma]. Over time, though, it’s become a bigger problem for him than he first imagined, and I think that’s a really fascinating direction in which to take that idea.
“Chess is completely amoral and psychotic, but in a way that is quite cold and clinical. Just imagine if you had dark and difficult parts of yourself that you didn’t know how to deal with, so you put them in one place and then chose to go that place and become that person without any of your good qualities or range of emotions. What if you adopted that ‘mask’ and told yourself, ‘I have permission to be totally without consequence or morality,’ which is what Chess seems to be..."
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