Interview: Catching Up with Mark Deklin

Mark Deklin, photo by Angelo Kritikos

Since ABC — unfairly, in my opinion, as my readers are aware — canceled “GCB,” I’ve been waiting to see its stars in other shows and movies. One of the series’ stars, Mark Deklin, can be seen next in an episode of “Castle” (to be shown this winter), as well as next year’s feature film “Tarzan” (which also stars Kellan Lutz, of “The Twilight Saga”). When I spoke with the always-charming and always-interesting actor recently, he told me all about his upcoming projects, starting with his guest stint on “Castle.”

Daytime Dial: Without giving too much away, what can you tell me about your episode of “Castle”?

Mark Deklin: You’re absolutely going to hate me, because there’s so very little I can tell you. I feel like almost anything I tell you has the potential to be a spoiler, which tells you that it’s an interesting episode and an interesting character, but I’m afraid of tipping my hand.

DD: I know exactly what you mean, because “Castle” always has you wondering throughout the entire episode, sending you down some wrong paths, before they finally solve the case.

MD: One of the things I like about “Castle” — one of the things I think that makes it smart — is that they don’t throw in a red herring. I’ve been on crime shows before, and I always play the guy where it’s like: “Oh, he’s the jerk. I bet he’s the murderer.” Everybody always sees through that, because it’s so formulaic. The thing I like about “Castle” is that it’s not like that. The twists and turns could take you anywhere. The guy I play could be a good guy or a bad guy or just caught in the middle — there’s no way to know. And I can’t say a whole lot more than that.

DD: You’ve gotta give me a little something.

MD: We first meet him when his girlfriend is found dead. And he’s not a suspect necessarily, he’s just one of the people they are interviewing. This is clearly a guy who’s very saddened by her death. And then, of course, we meet him again later on in the episode …

DD: How was it working with Nathan Fillion?

MD: He’s a funny guy. He’s such a classic Canadian boy. And I mean that in all the best ways. You know, just so nice and personable and welcoming and down to earth — just a cool guy.

DD: How was the rest of the cast and crew to work with? Does the set have a nice working atmosphere?

MD: Everyone was just lovely. I’ve been in this business long enough, and I see how when you go on a different set, there can be good energy or bad energy. And I do sort of think it comes from the top down. I’ve been on sets where you just feel the ickiness in the air. Nobody’s horrible to you, but you can just feel that it’s not a nice place to work. That’s definitely not the case on “Castle.” I was getting texts from various people (who’d worked on the show) saying: “You’re going to love it. It’s such a great set.”

From the minute I walked on set, I felt welcomed. It’s very professional and well run. It all starts with Nathan and Stana (Katic, who plays Det. Kate Beckett), who are both just really chill and cool and laid-back. I had a lot of fun working with them. I worked with Jon (Huertas, Det. Esposito) and Seamus (Dever, Det. Ryan) as well — I actually knew them beforehand — and they were great.

You can tell it’s just a group of people who made a conscious decision to create a nontoxic work environment. It’s really nice when that happens. That was one of the things I really miss about “GCB,” because it was one of those environments. We all loved each other, and I loved going to work every day. And you don’t always have that working in television, so when you find it, you really remember those sets the most.

DD: I know it’s what sets up the whole story of “Tarzan,” but I am bummed that your character has to die in the beginning.

MD: It’s funny that that’s technically a spoiler, which cracks me up, because now everybody goes into the movie knowing that I die. But that’s the story — if the kid isn’t orphaned, then he can’t grow up to be Tarzan. So by definition, to make him an orphan, Mom and Dad have to get offed.

DD: What can you tell me about John Greystoke and his wife? What do we get to learn about them before you get offed?

MD: Jaime Ray Newman played my wife, Alice, and she’s great. Our characters kick off the movie. We get a little more action, a little more screen time than the parents in Disney’s “Tarzan” got. You actually get to see us interacting and figuring our stuff out. But it’s not the Victorian “Tarzan” that we all grew up with. It’s a modern take on it. My character is almost like a Richard Branson type — a wealthy but well-intentioned adventurer and entrepreneur. He discovers that there’s a serious energy source — sort of meteorite, which crashed in Africa — and he wants to find it. He brings his family with him, which of course is a stupid decision, but I suppose in the moment it doesn’t seem stupid because he doesn’t go thinking he’s going to die. He just thinks that they are going to be going on a safari. He ends up unleashing a mystical force that he never could have anticipated, and everything kind of goes

DD: Was this a fun movie to shoot?

MD: Yeah, it was really fun. It was cool. It was all CGI work, and I’ve done a lot of that for video games. It was amazing to see how technology has progressed just within the last year or so. My favorite part was watching Peter Elliot, who is based in London. He’s a stunt man, choreographer and also he’s an ape researcher. He worked on “Gorillas in the Mist.” He’s a fascinating guy. It was his job to turn these actors and stunt men into gorillas; how to move and breathe and occupy this gorilla space, and it was pretty amazing. If you watch the making-of trailer, it is pretty fantastic how these guys embodied these great apes, and to hear him talk about these apes with such passion. He was just fascinating to work with.


And Reinhard Klooss — who directed it, from Constantine Films — was a really interesting cat too. It was cool. We shot in Munich — I had lived in Vienna for a little while, and one of my best friends lived in Munich at the same time, so I used to spend a lot of time in Munich. It’s a great city. I hadn’t been back in years, so it was really fun to be back there shooting and to brush up on my German, which is very rusty.

DD: Do you have a release date for “Tarzan” yet?

MD: I know it’s definitely 2013 in Europe. And I know that they want to get a 2013 U.S. release as well, but I don’t know.

Soap Stars Storm the Castle Set

Corbin Bernsen (“The Young and the Restless,” “Psyche”), Rebecca Budig (“All My Children”), Cameron Mathison (“All My Children”) and Jane Seymour (“Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman”) will guest star on “Castle” for a soap opera-themed storyline to air in March (date TBA). “Castle” airs Mondays (10:001-11:00 p.m., ET) on the ABC Television Network.

In the episode, entitled “One Life to Lose” (series star Nathan Fillion was on the daytime series “One Life to Live” as Joey Buchanan from 1994-1997 and on two episodes in 2007), a murder has been committed on the set of “Temptation Lane,” one of New York’s longest running soap operas. Sarah Cutler, the head writer on the soap, has been killed with a fire axe. Castle and Beckett quickly discover that the behind the scenes drama at “Temptation Lane” is just as scandalous as the fictitious storylines, and just about everyone would kill to get ahead. Ultimately, Castle’s unique skill set as a writer leads to a discovery about the killer and the secret he or she would do anything to protect.

Character teasers: Lance Buchanan (Bernsen), a rugged, self-assured, veteran actor on “Temptation Lane,” has a romantic history with Castle’s mother, Martha Rodgers; Mandy Bronson (Budig) is the young and gorgeous diva lead actress on the soap opera who is very aware of her sexuality and uses it to her advantage any chance she gets; Vince Bowers (Mathison) is the devastated husband of the victim, and as a director on “Temptation Lane” is very involved in the backstage drama; and Gloria Chambers (Seymour), the grieving mother of the murder victim, is revealed in a shocking twist to have a deep, dark secret that she’s desperate to keep.

Interview: Nathan Fillion on Life after One Life

Nathan Fillion first burst onto the scene as Joey Buchanan, a character he played for three years on One Life to Live. After that, he branched out and went on to star in the TV series Firefly and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the feature films Serenity and Waitress, to name just a few. But Nathan never forgot his roots, and he is proud of them.

Daytime Dial: Many actors who start out on soaps but go on to other things tend to try to forget their soap-opera past, but you embrace it. Why is that?

Nathan Fillion: OLTL was an incredible experience for me. I’ve talked to other guys from other shows whose experience wasn’t nearly as positive as mine. I went to One Life to Live, and it was my first show, and I knew I had a lot to learn. I was surrounded by people who’ve been in the business for 15, 20, 25, 35 years. They nurtured me. They took me in and treated me like family. I can’t say enough about them and about my experience there.

If it weren’t for Bob Woods (Bo Buchanan), I’d have never moved to Los Angeles. I’d probably still be doing daytime. He sat me down and said, “This is how it’s gonna work, and this is what you’re gonna do.” I followed his advice to the letter, and here I am. Every time I go back to New York City, I buy him a bottle of scotch down the street, I walk in and say, “Thank you, Bob Woods.”

These people took care of me, they taught me, they mentored me. I’ll never pooh-pooh on soap operas. They are a valid source of entertainment with a plethora of talented people, probably the hardest-working people in the industry. I can’t say enough about them.

I went back — I think it was two summers ago — and I did two episodes of OLTL as Joey Buchanan to attend the funeral of Asa Buchanan, played by Phil Carey, who tragically died a short while after that. Some people expressed surprise that I had come back. I was like: “Why are you surprised? You know I had a wonderful time here. This is my home.” For three years, that was my home, and I loved it.

DD: Your hit show, Castle, will be back to start its second season on Monday, Sept. 21. Why do you think the show has struck such a chord with fans?

NF: I think I am a pretty good judge about what’s good. I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like. Obviously crime shows, murder mysteries and procedural shows are doing very well right now — I don’t know how many CSIs are out there, but I don’t think you can hold them all in one hand — so there is something very appealing to being presented with a mystery and trying to figure it out. I get caught up in that as well. I think what we do on Castle is we take away the brooding, haunted cops and the obscure, weird lighting of those shows, and we try to make it more real life.

We filmed the pilot in New York City, and we had a bunch of New York homicide detectives hanging around as consultants. And I tell you, these guys were not brooding, and they weren’t haunted, and they weren’t tortured. They were hilarious. They had the most brilliant stories that had me bent over double laughing, and they all start with, “So this guy gets killed ....” They bend toward being light to kind of lighten up a bit of a dark job.

DD: Is it fun for you to play a character who is kind of a jerk and do things you would never do in your real life?

NF: There was a time when I said, “I don’t care what kind of job I do, so long as I’m acting.” But now I’ve learned that I do care. I want to do things on TV that I don’t really do in real life. Castle is a nice guy; there’s nothing really wrong with him. I just don’t think I’d really want to hang out with him that long. He’d weigh on me after a while.

He just doesn’t have that filter that says, “Maybe now’s the time to stop” or “Maybe this joke wouldn’t go over right about now.” He really wears his joy on his sleeve. He’s joyous, and I like that about him. He’s unapologetic. He’s kind of fearless. He doesn’t have a sense of “This looks dangerous”; he’s more like “This looks fun!” He’s living this dream life that he only would write about in the past, and now he’s in the position to live it and he is so excited. It’s kind of like me in that I used be like “I’d love to be on movies and TV,” and now I’m living my dream. So I can really relate.

DD: Richard Castle certainly has a nontraditional home life. How does this factor into who he is?

NF: The nuclear family certainly still exists — the mother and father who are still married and the 2.5 kids. It’s still out there, it’s just no longer the norm. The nontraditional family is now the majority. I think the family unit that these people have is very realistic: an irresponsible mother who is now a grandmother, living with her son who is now a father, whose daughter is a mother to him, and he is kind of a parent to his mother. These are very realistic family dynamics. It’s very modern and contemporary, this whole idea.

I think it plays very well with the kind of person Castle is. He never had a responsible adult role model in his life. He doesn’t have any male role models in his life, no father figure. No one ever taught him how to be a man, so he runs around in his life being a boy. It’s part of his charm and part of his flaw.

DD: Another aspect of the show that makes it a success is the solid foundation in the cast. You all seem to work so well together and get along. How is the working environment on the Castle set? You must have a lot of fun.

NF: We do have a lot of fun, and it is great. There’s not a weak link in the cast. And we’ve also been blessed with our guest-cast members. It takes only one weak guest-cast member to make your show suck, and we’re just always so blessed with who we get on the show. It’s been wonderful.

And you have to take into account that there are 200-plus people who are on set when I arrive in the morning and who are still there when I leave. They work harder than we do and they deserve every accolade I can give them.

Tune into ABC on Monday nights at 10 p.m. ET/9 p.m. CT to catch Nathan in new episodes of Castle.