Interview: Timothy Hutton’s Leverage

When times are tough, where do people turn? To revenge-fantasy TV shows, of course, like TNT’s Leverage, starring Timothy Hutton. As Nate Ford, Hutton plays an ex-grabman who used to recover stolen property, now gone freelance in service of the everyman/underdog. In other words, if you wanted to, say, clear up a beef of any kind from knee-capping an ex-spouse to taking on the gangbankers out to repo your house, these guys would give you ‘leverage.’

Hutton, yes the Oscar winner of Ordinary People fame, is flanked by a sturdy support ‘staff’ on the show. New Zealander Gina Bellman plays his dark-haired upscale-scam hottie Sophie Devereaux; Beth Reisgraf is Parker, the one-named, sweet-faced grifter (who can also jump off buildings, ps); Christian Kane is Eliot Spencer, the pony-tailed muscle-for-hire; and Aldis Hodge (Friday Night Lights) does the digital dirty-work as Alec Hardison.

Naturally Leverage Consulting Inc. takes all jobs large and small, from the Reservist who couldn’t get health care when his hitch was up, to the horse trainer whose Wall Street broker investor torched an insured stable of thoroughbreds for cash. In the season grand finale coming up on Feb. 24, Ford’s ex-wife Maggie gets in on the act because she’s an art expert conveniently and the big show stopper is a museum heist of sorts. (Think Thomas Crown Affair without the affair.)

Meanwhile, Hutton as helmer is a far cry from his typical metrosexual self as the staccato macho hard-drinking headbanger and leader of this pack. He’s kinda cool even, which, for a guy who usually plays elites on screen is a nice change. Next year the new and improved Timothy Hutton will be in The Ghost with Ewan MacGregor; and this year in Multiple Sarcasms with Mira Sorvino and Stockard Channing plus Serious Moonlight with Justin Long, Kristen Bell and Meg Ryan… but all the guy wants to talk about is the season finale of LEVERAGE!

Can you blame him? Nice to have a TV show where you get to be the title character, and here’s what Timothy Hutton shared with us at Fancast:

What are you watching when you’re not on TV?

I’ve enjoyed watching Lost. I’m a big fan of Mad Men. And I didn’t watch The Wire when it was on, but just in this past 6 months I’ve watched every season of “The Wire,” and I think that is one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. That show is just incredible.

Anything else out there?

I like Tim Roth’s new show Lie to Me.

There are a lot of Oscar-winners working in TV, you being one of them, what’s the draw? Is it just that you get to develop this character over time?

I think you just touched on it. You know you get to develop a character over time. You don’t wrap up a character in 2 hours or 3 hours. But you know you have these different storylines where the character can kind of go to different places over the course of a season, hopefully more than a season.

So it’s the writing that’s drawing you, to it then? It’s – like you have a “Serbian Adoption Agency” (storyline); you have “Iraqi Mercenaries.”

I don’t think that the show should become a mirror (of current events) you know exclusively. There has to be a difference between the depressing headlines that you see when you pick up the newspaper versus the storyline when you turn on Leverage.

I think you just signed on to Roman Polanski’s “Ghost,” but in terms of acting –

You don’t think this is TV, I wish this was a movie. Or when you’re doing a movie you think this would be better if it was TV. You know you don’t really think that way. You just kind of go where the writing is. And there’s great writing in movies obviously right now and there’s – I don’t think there’s ever been a better time for writing in television and I think that’s what’s attracting so many people. And not just people that are doing the shows but people that are watching the shows.

And you now have a second season to work with?

We’re very fortunate we got picked up for a second one. And you know I think that the writing for cable shows it’s just really quite incredible. And you know you look at shows like everything from Monk to Burn Notice to Mad Men to — I’m forgetting the name of the show that’s on after Mad Men on AMC.

What’s your perspective, you know like in an acting sense, of being this guy, this kind of broken down guy?

When I first read the script, I thought it was a great character, a great starting point for any actor to read a character like this and say; Wow, he has so much going on, so many demons and so much of a dark place that he’s been living in you know how does all of that shape this guy? How does he interact with other people?”
I mean he is dealing with things and he is very flawed. But I thought there had to be other aspects and if you were going to do a kind of Mission Impossible, Ocean’s Eleven kind of thing where you have five characters that are running a con against really bad con artists that are really harming people and taking advantage of people that you know Nate should sort of be allowed to get outside of himself.
He probably can’t stand to be inside his own head and walk around that skin. I mean he’s so self-loathing that he would be absolutely compelled to and drawn to the idea of being a little bit like Sophie and the others and kind of playing different parts and being an obnoxious poker player in one episode and a slimy chameleon coming up with a scheme called “Glengarry Glen Death” in another episodes things like that.
So that was something that kind of developed between I think the pilot and you know the rest of the shows that all of the characters would be doing different things. You know Hardison isn’t just a computer guy, it turns out he can fight you know.
Christian Kane’s character isn’t just the muscle. It turns out he’s an amazing chef and also can play other characters quite convincingly when he plays the – I think it’s the – yes, it’s the pilot, actually, where we get to see him play you know kind of computer fix-it guy who distracts the assistant.

Do you feel connected to Nate?

Well, I mean in so much as playing the guy. But, no, I mean as far as you know what he’s going through and the specific story points of his life, not really. Which of course makes it interesting to play because it’s not something – fortunately — I’ve lived through or experienced…
One of the things I expressed to Dean Devlin and the writers were – was that it’s very easy to just have this character Nate be kind of the serious guy, the former insurance guy who doesn’t have a sense of humor and you know nobody can really read, mysterious you know morose. And I said I felt the danger with that is you know you just have a sort of a one-dimensional self-involved character, which he has to be on some level.

Which episodes did you dig from last season?

(The) “Bank Shot Job” I really liked — because the team was able to kind of go into plan B, plan C, and then plan D based on unforeseen events that happened. They had no idea that this bank would get held up. They’re in the middle or the end of finishing a con, and how they think on their feet and how they communicate with each other and how they have to quickly come together as a team and each one take a role in kind of diffusing a very difficult situation, diffuse the crisis.
I liked the “Snow Job.” I liked “Two-Horse Job”. I liked very much the episodes where all five of us at different points in the show play other characters as part of the con and assume different roles. And you know you have all five of the characters in different places and they’re all communicating to each other. And thinking on their feet and things don’t always go as they thought they would. And the most fun shows, I thought, were the ones where they had to go plan B. I would always say to everybody let’s do more plan B shows.

Everybody on your ‘team’ is wanted, as in criminally, by somebody, right?

With the exception of Nate — the other four of that team is wanted by you know everyone from Scotland Yard to Interpol to FBI.
I mean there are people all over the world that look at Eliot as a suspect for something that happened some years back, Sophie for something that happened, Parker for something. And this has been alluded to in the first season.
How do they stay underground and operate above ground at the same time? I think that’s something that’s going to be kind of interesting to do. So as far who they might go up against in adversaries I think that a lot of people are going to come out of the woodwork that have been looking for each one of them.

What about the two-part season ender – part one closed with a cliffhanger where the crew took a scatter pattern – any hints on the grand finale?

Well, I think the final episode, Nate is not quite sure he wants to keep the team together. I think that the team also isn’t sure whether they want to continue working with others. But you know over the course of the first season some trust issues come up certainly in the show that happened last night with Sophie, the team sees that maybe she’s working towards her own end and not for the team or for others.
So I think the finale is going to show a real conflict for Nate as to whether or not it’s worth continuing the way it’s been going — that will bring us nicely into a second season.
As far as what Nate might or might not want to do, I think that he’s learned a lot about how deeply satisfying it is to help others and therefore sort of find a way out of his own dark past and guilt and the demons that he has, that the great antidote for him is helping other people. And I think that the second season will kind of go into that and perhaps Nate will find another vice (instead of drinking)…
I’m sure that the writers are going to keep their ear to the ground. But at the same time they’re not going to turn “Leverage” into you know – a documentary based on how terrible the times are right now. I mean it is meant to be an entertaining television show that also exposes things that are going on.
But ultimately, (Nate’s) message is you know revenge is deeply satisfying.

The season finale of Leverage airs Tuesday, February 24 at 10 PM EST on TNT.

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