Yesterday, we had the good fortune of getting to speak to Lights Out star Holt McCallany, and what he thought differentiated his character Patrick 'Lights' Leary from some of boxing's all-time greats.
Today we got to have another little chat with Lights Out executive producer Warren Leight, where one burning question ignited our passion. How in the world could you arrive at the casting of Bill Irwin, best known as a respected clown and Mr. Noodle of Sesame Street, for the series' villain Hal Brennan?
See for yourself.
Chris Radtke: Bill Irwin plays a great villain, but he was also Noodles on Sesame Street. How did he get the role?
Warren Leight: I just called him up. In New York, he’s done a lot of great stage work. I had a play called Side Man years ago and he did a cold reading of it at a festival once, and he was just ridiculously good. I’ve known him a bit socially for a long time. It’s interesting when you get a guy to go against type. I know he’s got great acting chops, he’s very good at playing secrets. If you saw any of his Virginia Woolfe, he plays secrets very well, and that’s what Brennan has.
Bill and I talked a lot about Brennan’s backstory. Bill wanted to know everything I had on it. There’s a line in this week’s episode, because Lights took a stab wound last week. There’s a line about, “You’ve gotta be careful with those knife injuries to the stomach, they can really cause a lot of internal bleeding. Why does he know that?"
He seemed so innocent.
"He knows a lot of stuff and I wanted a guy who...he’s a very attractive, a nice looking-guy, but there’s something interesting about Bill. There’s always something going on. What we are trying to do on this show is not hit the cliché on the head. We’ve got a show set in New Jersey and there’s a mobster – that’s treacherous to me. That’s been done really well by other guys. With Bill Irwin, I haven’t seen that kind of mobster.
There were guys we researched where, there’s a guy who sits on a stool, I think he’s still there on 1st avenue and 2nd street, who’s one of the biggest sport bookies in America. I think he’s now an 85-year old guy, and he’s been on the same stool at a coffee shop down there and nobody lays a glove on him. He runs a lot of the book out of New York and he’s a legend and scary as all hell.
If you didn’t know who he was when you walked by him, you’d just that that he was another old guy. This is just another old guy with a cap on who controls a quarter of a billion dollars in book a week out of New York, and nobody touches him and everybody fears him – or at least respects him enormously. And those are the guys we were looking at, the less flashy mobsters.
The flashy guys have been done and done, and I just had to go the other way.
You can catch Holt and Bill Irwin in Warren Leight's boxing drama Lights Out, Wednesday nights at 10pm on FX.
