Michael Weatherly is the guiding light that illuminates Ian Spelling’s journey through the world of the Dark Angel…

It all goes back to Joe Versus the Volcano. That Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan pairing, via a decidedly circuitous route, ultimately brought Michael Weatherly to his breakout role as Logan Cale, the handsome hero of the newly minted SF hit, Dark Angel. We kid you not.

‘I was going to university in Washington, DC, and I went to see Joe Versus the Volcano at the local theatre,’ Weatherly recalls. ‘I sat through the Matinee show and after it was over, I walked outside and looked up at the sky.

Then, I walked back in and I watched the 2:30 show. I walked out after the second showing and gleaned from the movie that if you are unhappy with where you are and what you’re doing, nobody is going to help you change it. At that point, I was studying political science. I was afraid of my own shadow in terms of choosing a vocation. I was all over the place. I hated school. I hated pretty much everything. I was extremely negative. I slept 15 hours a day. I hated life.’

Cale’s Fibre

But that was before he saw Joe Versus the Volcano, and he understood the curious message it left with him. ‘I had read some of John Patrick Shanley’s plays, and I saw in this mess of a movie the idea that he came up with. I thought, “I get it. I understand what my life is now, and what I’m doing to my life is that I’m buying time every year I go to college. Eventually, I’m going to get out into the workforce and then I’ll be letting someone else buy my time. I’m just going to sell my life to somebody for $400 or $500 a week if I’m lucky.” My attitude was, “I’ll do what they tell me to do because I’m too afraid to make any decisions about what I should be doing for myself.” That’s what I got from Joe Versus the Volcano, and I asked myself, “What’s the thing I’m most afraid of?”

‘I dropped out of college and told all my teachers I was moving to New York to become an actor because that’s the thing that scared me the most. It was about three weeks later that I was auditioning for a role on The Guiding Light with Sherry Stringfield. I was terrified, but that was the beginning. So I followed this crazy, bad movie-inspired whim.’

Weatherly didn’t win that Guiding Light role, but he landed a different part on the soap opera, and that paved the way to another soap (Loving), assorted commercials, TV guest spots, cable movies and features. Among his credits are episodes of The Cosby Show, The Crow: Stairway to Heaven, Charmed and Jesse, roles in the SF-oriented telemovies Asteroid and The Colony and such features as The Last Days of Disco, Gun Shy and The Specials.

Well over a year ago, Weatherly auditioned for the Logan Cale role in Dark Angel opposite star Jessica Alba, for whom co-creators James Cameron and Charles Eglee had fashioned the series and the character Max. Weatherly beat out a batch of actors, several of them far better known than he, for the coveted part of the cyberjournalist known as ‘Eyes Only,’ who’s out to expose corrupt individuals and organizations in post-apocalyptic America circa 2019. The two-hour pilot set-up the series’ basic tenets, producing sparks between Cale and Max - sparks that still burn despite the fact that Cale wound up paralysed and in a wheelchair before that first nights’ end credits.

By the time Dark Angel finally debuted, the hype machine had gone into overdrive. Audiences expected titanic things from the Cameron-conceived series, and some doubted that Dark Angel could stand tall in the face of such pressure. Ratings for the opener, however, were huge, and despite the ensuing and expected post-pilot drop, the ratings remain strong. ‘We produced a big two-hour pilot, and we were shooting it kind of as a movie of the week with the open-minded possibility of doing it as a series,’ Weatherly explains. ‘That was how everybody approached it psychologically. When we found out that we got picked up for the first 13 episodes, we were thrilled. We all just ran up here so excited to do more of it. And today we just found out we’ve been picked up for the last nine. That’s where we live, with the sense of, “Great, we get to make more. We get to tell more stories.” It’s by no means a sense of entitlement or, “Give us the full-season order for 2001.” It’s television, and at best it’s a very iffy game.

‘I knew going into the premiere that there was much hype, that there were big expectations, but we really weren’t aware of the hype. We were aware of the expectations from within. Jim has very high standards, as does Chic[Eglee]. Especially on the pilot, you’re just trying to match the actors you’re working with and the script given to you and the director’s [David Nutter] expectations. As we go, those are still the goals we set for ourselves and the hurdles that we jump over every day. In terms of media hype, we truly are not as aware of it as you might think, especially because we’re up here in Canada. We’re insulated from all of that, and that’s probably for the best.’

The pilot has been followed to date by episodes - among them, Heat, Flushed, C.R.E.A.M., 411 on the DL, Prodigy and Cold Snap - which are filling in the blanks about the world of Seattle in the near future, Cale’s clandestine efforts, Max’s convoluted past and the symbiotic relationship between the two. Just as she serves as his arms and legs, he helps her piece together the jigsaw puzzle that is her life, with its genetically engineered siblings, the lurking presence of government baddie Lydecker (John Savage) and so on. ‘I really enjoyed the first episode after the pilot [Heat],’ notes Weatherly. ‘I don’t even quite remember why. I just loved the mystery. I love Max’s world. I love Manticore, her genetically engineered brothers and sisters and finding the woman who helped her escape. That’s the part of the show that’s fascinating to me.

‘As far as Logan goes, I couldn’t be happier. I still think he’s a mystery. As long as I’m curious about him, hopefully the writers and the audience will be, too. In terms of Logan and Max, he is reminded only periodically that his physical impairment might impede his ability to actually be with this woman. For the most part, she is the spark in his otherwise very grey, very bland and dull life. His life is exciting, but he has made it about everything but himself. It’s all about society and all these external things. His interior life is just a wasteland. It’s a desert. And Max is that little desert rose. She’s a very precious thing to him, but he’s incapable of communicating anything like that because he’s a bit of a workaholic. People like him. They don’t lead with their heart. He overthinks the problems. I’m kind of the same way.’

One aspect of Cale to which Weatherly can’t relate on so personal a level is the character’s status as a paraplegic. The first few days of filming scenes in a wheelchair proved tough for the actor, who reports that the secret to making the wheelchair work for him was getting past thinking about it. ‘We just do the scenes,’ he says. ‘Getting past it has simplified my life a lot, in terms of how I approach scenes, because you really have to focus and just speak directly. You can’t use body language to communicate. You have to say it and mean it and be truthful. It’s a difficult gig because, of course, I’m not disabled like that. You want to do it a certain amount of justice for those people who live in that world. But the truth is that we all adapt. The human being is a highly adaptable creature, and anybody who has that kind of an obstacle put in their life does their best to just get on with it. It’s something I’ve stopped thinking about, though, and I just do the scenes as if I were walking around. Except that I’m rolling.’

Logan’s Fun

It could also be said of the Cale-Max relationship and the Weatherly-Alba chemistry that they’re rolling. ‘You can feel chemistry,’ argues Weatherly, who will neither confirm or deny rumours that he and Alba are romantically linked away from the set. ‘When we first read together, neither of us knew exactly what the other was up to, and that’s good, and that’s the way we still relate to each other now on the soundstage. Jessica is the most prepared, creative and professional woman. She’s completely committed to the task at hand, be it walking down a hallway saying half a page of dialogue or standing still for a very complicated six-page scene. She’s always there and she works very hard. And it becomes more and more remarkable with each episode because she’s working 80-hour weeks.’

While most viewers seem to appreciate Dark Angel, there are detractors who dont find it quite up to scratch. They complain that it’s too dark, too derivative of other SF stories, including Cameron-written and/or directed material, and that too much of the rest of the world is ignored in the process of tracking the Seattle-centric actions of Cale and Max. Asked where he thinks there might be room for improvement, Weatherly shoots back, ‘My hair. As good as Jessica’s hair is, mine is not.’ He then more seriously ponders the question, ‘Room for improvement?’he asks rheatorically. ‘I’m always just thinking about how to improve my own world, how to make Logan and what he’s doing more interesting. I feel that’s my job. It’s a weird balancing act of making it more accessible, but more impenetrable, more of a mystery. As far as the show as a whole, people really enjoy Dark Angel. I’ve never been on anything that people have been so uniformly fascinated with.

‘We were working the other day and I met a 45-year old guy who said, “I love this show. I love James Cameron. Blah, blah, blah.” And then his wife, who was about 40-years old, said, “It’s so great to see a show that has a female lead. It’s just a great, empowering stance.” And then, of course, there was their 13-year old daughter, who was just standing there saying, “I am Max. I am Dark Angel.” So we got to see the cross generational appeal. In terms of improving the show, then, I think there might be a revolt if we changed anything too severely.’

To hear Weatherly hear it, there was room aplenty for improvement in at least one of his previous genre excursions, namely The Colony, an SF thriller that aired in 1998 and co-starred Isabella Hoffman and Jeff Kober. ‘It’s a terrible, terrible, terrible movie if you watch it without a sense of humour,’ he warns. ‘If you bring a sense of humour to it, you’ll enjoy it. It was a Sci-Fi Channel TV movie kind of thing that Trimark released on video. It is so bad! It’s up there with Ed Wood films. I played a young Earthling who gets brought up to a spaceship by all these guys planning to evade Earth, take over the population and make them slaves. And if they can’t turn them into slaves, they’ll just kill them all. It’s like Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. They’re clearing a superhighway and they need to get rid of the planet. I thought the movie was talking about 19th-century colonisation of Asia and Africa by the British. I thought it was a commentary on that. It wasn’t. It was just a bad movie.’

And what of The Specials? ‘I’ve never seen it,’ he says of the ultra-low-budget Mystery Men-like spoof of comic book heroes that stars Thomas Haden Church, Paget Brewster and Rob Lowe. ‘We were up in Canada shooting Dark Angel when it got released and I never saw it. I just know I had my scene with Rob, who plays the superhero, Weevil. But that’s it.’

Inbrief

Michael Weatherly is quick to point out that he is an SF fan. Growing up, he recalls, Logan’s Run ranked as one of his favourite films, as did Planet of the Apes. The actor even liked the TV version of Logan’s Run. ‘I must have some recessive gene for SF, because I’m fascinated with it,’ Michael Weatherly concludes. ‘You have so much freedom to explore all these hypotheticals. What will the world be like in 2020? What will the currency be? Will there be ATMs or some sort of barter system? Working in those SF parameters, you have to make these decisions, and they have a domino effect on the rest of the world you’re creating. If you’ve got that, then this and this must comply with that. It’s great. Another great thing about SF is that as much as it’s about speculative thinking, it’s very much about where we are as a society today. The freedom you get in the genre lets you reflect on your own fears and prejudices, and your strengths as well. So SF is an extremely, extremely creative and fascinating genre.’

Source: Eyes Only