Peter Outerbridge Interview

Insights into Season 4 of ReGenesis

My name is Peter Outerbridge, I am 42 years old, and I'm born and bred in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

I do, I have... I am married with kids. I have twin boys, and I've been married for six years.

My mom studied at the Royal Conservatory of Music, piano, and was going for her... I guess her doctorate, I suppose, if there is such a thing, when she married my dad. My uncle—not by blood, but he married my dad's sister, was Jon Vickers, was an opera singer. My cousin Billy is a regular at Stratford, my dad was a trial lawyer, so there's a lot of theatrics there. So I guess in a way I... you could say that I come from a background of performers.

I'm barely remembering this, but we'd gone down to Florida, and something was going on, we had to get the trailer had... something had to get fixed, or my dad had to go off someplace, so my mom had to occupy us for a couple of hours, and we were just wandering around and she just said, "Ah, I'll kill some time, I'll take them to a movie." And we actually went to see 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea when it first opened. And, you know, I... It blew my mind. When the giant squid attacks the submarine, I think I just sat there—a five-year-old kid—I'm just like, (screams) Whoooaaaaaa! You know. So, and I think at that point, actually, now that I think of it, I was pretty much hooked from that point on, that movies were a pretty cool thing to go and see.

You know, the basic template for David Sandström, what he was gonna be, who he was gonna be, I was... You spend the first year sort of getting the kinks out, sort of figuring out the way he walks, the way he talks, you know. I'd lower my voice about an octave when I play David Sandström. Once you do that, and you get it out, it becomes easier and easier and easier to put on. Sort of like just, you know, by year four, it's like you just, okay, I put on the jacket, and you sort of, you know, walk around in a circle in your trailer or your dressing room, and... and he's there, right? He's sort of... You know, takes maybe a couple of days to get back into it, but... And then, every day, it really just is a process of putting the costume on. Literally putting the costume on, going into Hair and Make-up, getting the hairstyle—David has his hair worn a certain way, and David has a scar on his head, you know? Once all of those things are in place, you sort of look at yourself in the mirror and you're just like, okay, there he is.

I mean, we were all commenting this year about how... It's sort of a weird feeling. By season four, you don't really feel like you're working anymore, because the getting into character becomes so easy because you've been doing it for so long. There's no awkwardness in the movement, there's no awkwardness in the acting, so at the end of the day, you sort of, you finish the day and you go, yeah, I don't even know if I did good work today or if I did anything, because it just felt like I was just sort of walking through the day. But, you know, ultimately that's how it should be.

Generally speaking, if you're acting on a television series, they tell you to hit your mark and say your lines and pick up your paycheck and shut, you know, shut up. But on this show, they sort of welcome the cast into the creative process. And being on the show has been one of the greatest experiences of my life, and I'll probably never have an experience like this again. Creatively, it's been intensely cathartic, and I can't imagine I will ever work on a project where I have this—as just an actor—where I have this much creative freedom again. Ever. So I'm gonna miss that for sure, when it's all over.

There's basically two schools of thought in acting. One is to work from the inside out, just to find the emotional core of the character, motivation. And the other one is from the outside in to, you know, put the make-up on, look at yourself in the mirror and see the character in the image, and that will give you your— Both of them are valid. You know, it's one of those things. You get a bunch of actors sitting around a table for a couple of hours and a few beers, and you can get into these very heated debates about what is more legitimate acting, or more genuine or more real acting. They both lead to exactly the same point, which is an emotional truth.

There's the classic story of Olivier and Dustin Hoffman, right? In Marathon Man, where Dustin Hoffman wanted to stay up—and who knows if that's apocryphal or not—but it's one of those mythological acting stories of Dustin Hoffman staying up for forty-eight hours because he wanted to really feel like he was, you know, exhausted, and Olivier— And then that day he came to shoot it, he was forgetting his lines and he was crying. Olivier just walked up to him and said, "Why don't you just try acting, it's so much easier." You know? That's— That ultimately... when these debates get out of control, and there's too much beer, that's the story that always comes up, and that's the story that makes the outside-in people go (points finger), "See, yeah!" Anyway... Meanwhile, you know, Hoffman is probably one of the greatest actors who's ever lived, so who knows, right?

Acting ultimately came down to pretending with conviction—in other words: Making yourself believe the words that were coming out of your mouth. And you can call that lying, or being, giving, having... having license to lie, which is really ultimately the whole experience between acting and audience members, is this whole suspension of disbelief.

I'm going to lie to you, and you're going to let me lie to you, and you know that I'm lying to you, and I know that you know that I'm lying to you, but you paid your five bucks, and I'm gonna lie to you really well, and you're gonna walk out of there, going, "Well, that guy's a pretty good liar."

In order for me to tell a story, or to participate in the telling of a story, because obviously whether it's theatre, film or television, there's so many components. It's all storytelling, and we all have a part to play within that storytelling. My part to you is to lie to you, knowing that you know that I'm lying. So that really is what all of these various methods said to me was, to be able to pretend with conviction to believe... to do whatever you have to do to believe the words that are coming out of your own mouth, because if you don't believe what's coming out of your mouth, there's no way the audience is gonna believe what's coming out of your— And as soon as they stop believing, the story breaks down.

I've always been a huge fan of science. Since I was a little kid, my brother got me hooked on science when I was about five or six. I've been a fan of science fiction, I've been a fan of speculative science, all through high school I loved, all through high school I loved doing science, and I've always sorta been up on it. You know, I get all the magazines and the monthly journals, and all that stuff, and I'm a bit of a geek, really. At heart.

What I loved about ReGenesis was that it was a science fiction show that wasn't science fiction. In fact, somebody once described it as being a "hard science fiction" program, which I thought was a pretty apt description. And the fact that the characters were so dysfunctional... They weren't like scientists that you saw on other programs. They weren't "clean", and they weren't... you know, they swore, and they drank, and they had emotional problems, or they... You know, they were imperfect, and I thought that the juxtaposition of that, where you're talking about this high, big brain, scientific, you know, there was something almost so perfect about that.

And then to have that portrayed by these less than perfect people, it's almost like having, you know, utopia being described by dystopia, and so there was sort of a nice mixture there, of, you know, David Sandström who's the smartest guy in the world, but he's, like, an alcoholic, womanizing, you know, guy who's a bad father and all of this stuff. So there's a really nice balance to it, you know? Instead of having, "Not only is he the smartest guy in the world, but he's a great family man, and he doesn't drink and he doesn't smoke," and you know... There was a nice... there was a nice balance, and there was something really great about having human beings, or these characters that were written very human, with their dysfunctions and their problems, talking about playing God, or dealing with the stuff that is very God-like. The whole... the whole world of genetic science is very God-like, and yet it's being handled by these clearly mere mortals. You know? And I thought that was a really nice... a really nice creative mix. Not to say that all scientists are smoking, swearing, womanizing alcoholics, but you know... Well, some are.

I pulled on a couple of characters that I had done in the past, that I had a lot of fun with because they were so... They had so much bravado and so much courage. There's definitely sort of that cocky... cocky Han Solo aspect. And I'm a huge Star Wars fan, so it's a no-brainer to me that I would pull that out of my subconscious, you know.

He's also... clearly has an authority problem, so I wanted to give him a swagger. I'm gonna... He's gonna... whenever he walks, David swa— He doesn't walk, he swaggers everywhere. He blows into rooms, and he's rude, and he yells, and... As much of that that we can put into the script, that's great. It was pretty easy with ReGenesis, it was pretty clear from the very beginning that that's what they wanted to do, that that was the plan, was to juxtapose all of this greatness with this scuzziness. So that became pretty easy. In other things, it's more difficult, but there again, it's... You just go to the writers. You go to the source and you say, "What picture are you painting? And, you know, what color do you want me to be?"

When you work on a script now, whether it's a play or a film script or a television series, your reading comprehension skills become so fast that it becomes very easy to realize what the writer's trying to convey. And that if suddenly— and to also recognize false beats of drama. Where you suddenly just go, okay, these... these... these lines just don't meet here. You need to switch the scenes so that these connect. And that becomes a remarkably useful tool to have, because sometimes the scripts that you have, in particular television, and in particular on this show, which is very expository, and there is so much science and there is so much plot, you need to be on your toes in order to make those lines join up. It definitely helps in that sense, much to, I'm sure, the writers' chagrin, because I'm sure I'm a huge thorn in their side when I get going. But not as bad as Conrad Pla!

Conrad Pla talks about Peter Outerbridge:
He's great. He's a pleasure to work with. He's very professional, you know, he takes every day seriously, there's no sort of "take things for granted and walk on set unprepared". He has this very good work ethic, so we prepare scenes before, go to his trailer to read, discuss them, go to the writers, discuss, you know, story arcs and character things, and so he's a pleasure to work with. He really cares about what he does, and he's always there for you as an actor, whether the camera's on him or not. So, it's been really good. I've grown to really enjoy working with him.

Peter Outerbridge interview continued:
There's a line in the series, in season one, where David says, "Everything I touch turns to shit." And by season four, I think he really believes that. I think he... his... his will to carry on, I mean, he's a stubborn guy, and that is what keeps him going forward. But I think he's just become so jaded that he's just a lot darker.

David and Peter are very different people. I mean, David Sandström is stronger than Peter Outerbridge in almost every front. He's braver, he smarter, he's... he's got a hell of a lot more guts, he's got a hell of a lot more power. He's mouthier, he's a lot more confident, and you know... I alw— I kinda look at David as being my id. You know, the way... if I had no sort of social control, it would be fun to be David Sandström, because I could say anything I wanted to without impunity, or with impunity, and I could, you know, get away with murder, basically.

It's nice to play a character like that. It's nice to play a guy who's completely out of control, his life is completely out of control, and yet he manages to constantly sort of save the day. David's biggest peeve is ignorance. And if there's a problem that people say can't be solved, that's what really gets him going. And certainly when people tell him not to solve a problem, that really gets him going. So I think what drives him is a... is a desire to know the truth. It's a desire to know what's in the dark, so that you don't need to be afraid of monsters anymore. And that's really what, I think, drives him the hardest.

I think, like probably a lot of actors when I first got into the industry, what drove me was my ego. And then, you know, you have children—that changes everything. You know, you can either make a choice in your life where you are driven by the unconditional love of your children, or you can be driven by getting your star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame. And it sort of is a no-brainer, you know, when the face of your kids are looking at you, smiling. That's really all that carries you through the day.