TV GUIDE CANADA: Mystery man
‘Fringe’s Reddick on alternate universes and starring on ‘Glee’
By Greg David
2011-02-11
Lance Reddick would love to appear on Glee. The Baltimore native, who turned heads as Lt. Cedric Daniels, isn’t merely an actor. He’s also a singer and songwriter, which is the reason he was so good tickling the ivories and crooning on the musical “Brown Betty” episode of Fringe last year.
Reddick admits the line to belt it out on Glee is a long one; in the meantime he’s focused on Fringe, which returns with a new episode tonight. We spoke to Reddick on the phone about alternate universes and the death of Alternate Broyles...
... Can you talk a little bit about the differences between The Wire and Fringe? The Wire was based on fact and Fringe … isn’t.
LR: Wow, it really is apples and oranges. It’s not just the writing styles so much. On both shows, it’s not always the same person writing each script. I guess the two biggest differences for me are … network television is such a different animal from cable. On the one hand, because there are so many cooks in the kitchen on a network show, there tend to be a lot of changes with each script.
On the other hand, with each season that becomes less and less because the show has found itself. Once again, with this show the possibilities are changing all the time, anything can happen, whereas The Wire was kind of ultra-realism. David Caruso told me once ‘Your show feels so real it looks like a documentary.’ It really was like a docu-drama. The first season and the characters that went through the seasons were based on real people.
The other thing is that, with The Wire, David Simon knew where he was going from the beginning to the end. He said to me when we were shooting the pilot … he came up to me and sat down with me at lunch one day and he said he was going around and talking to all of the leads about who their characters were based on, what the people were like and where the characters were going. And he described the two people that my character was based on and what they histories were like. And he said ‘You will be moving towards becoming the police commissioner by the end of the fifth season.’ He knew this when we were shooting the pilot, whereas with Fringe I think because it’s much more open-ended, and there is so much more … you know, shape-shifting, alternate realities, two versions of yourself, cold germs the size of your leg (laughs) … but by the same token, the things that are similar they are both socio-political debates.
One of the themes we explored a lot in Season 1 of Fringe is what happens when you have multi-national corporations that are more powerful than a lot of governments. And once we got into this season, we really explored what happens in war when you are so certain that you’re the good people and the others are the enemy … what happens when you confront them and they are literally you?
The other thing that is interesting and intriguing for me with both shows is the relationships and characters are so important...
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