Not long before the premiere of Virtuality on Fox, I had the opportunity to speak with actor/playwright Erik Jensen, who plays Dr. Jules Braun, a key crewmember and the designer of their ship, the Phaeton. Erik talked about his character's complex backstory, his preexisting friendships with costars Ritchie Coster and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, and his hope for what could be explored should Virtuality go to series.
Tell me about Dr. Jules Braun. What makes him tick?
I'm glad you're asking character questions right off the bat. Dr. Jules Braun is the designer of the ship, the Phaeton, which in Virtuality is going to the star system Eridani, hopefully to save the world.
Braun has a lot of baggage, which he had hoped to leave behind on Earth. But of course even if you don't have any suitcases, one's baggage tends to follow you. So there's a lot of guilt that follows him along on the trip.
On the outside he seems to be the most grounded person, I think, on the show -- the least, sort of, externally conflicted. But inside, even though his personality is that is that of a straight line, there's a lot of chaos going on in him, and a lot of chaotic emotion.
As we were about two weeks into shooting, maybe a week and a half or two weeks into the shooting, [writer] Michael Taylor and I were talking, and we realized that actually Braun has a kind of Richard Dreyfuss Jaws/Close Encounters kind of vibe to his personality, which is something that got me a little deeper into the part.
Can you talk about that more? Is it just that he has that kind of intensity, or -- ?
There is that kind of intensity, but in both of those things, as the movies go on, Dreyfuss gets more disturbed and more agitated. And I think that ultimately, if this were to go further -- which I don't have any word on yet -- that's where Michael and Ron [Moore] would be thinking about taking the character. That his veneer gets stripped away as the trip goes further and further on.
He's got a long history with Ritchie Coster's character [Jimmy Johnson], and Ritchie and I are old, old, old, old friends. So we hope that some of that chemistry makes its way onto the screen. Ritche and I did one of our first TV jobs together on a show called Dellaventura that Danny Aiello did, sort of a cop/crime show, years and years ago [CBS, 1997-1998], and it's just great to be on screen with him again after all these years.
You've done a fair amount of cop shows and crime shows -- CSI, that kind of thing; not quite so much science fiction. Does this feel like something new for you?
It's so funny. The only thing that saved me from growing up in a town of 6500 people [in northern Minnesota] were guys like [comic book artists] Jack Kirby and Neal Adams and Steve Ditko, and Stan Lee, and one of the editors of DC Comics, a woman named Jenette Kahn, who's actually a friend of mine now. Comic books, any kind of science fiction I could find -- Logan's Run. Rollerball. Soylent Green. Of course, Star Wars. I have a dog now named Yoda, so you can probably tell I'm I fan there. I still have all my action figures from childhood.
I've actually been waiting for this opportunity to be in a science fiction thing for years and years and years. And I was making the joke -- I got to play a famous baseball player, a guy named Thurman Munson, who was a captain of the New York Yankees who died tragically in a plane crash a few years ago on a miniseries [The Bronx Is Burning on ESPN, 2007], and I was joking to my wife, "Well, now all I need to do is my science fiction movie and my Western and I can die happy!" So I hope there's not a Western coming up, because I think that might be a precursor to a long, dark tunnel. [laughs]
So yeah, doing Virtuality was like some of my favorite stuff that I found when I was growing up. Like Solaris -- not the George Clooney one, the original Russian one (1972). It's a little bit like 2001. There's a dark, sort of spooky mystery going on in this, and it's unlike anything I've ever seen on television. I was really excited to do it.
The thumbnail description of the virtual technology reminds some people of the holodeck on Star Trek, which can be used well or badly.
One of the things I thought about while I was watching the show, and I thought a little bit about it on set too, is that at its core, great science fiction isn't about outer space, it's about inner space. What's more terrifying than what's out there is what's in here [pointing at his chest]. Things that go "bump" in the night, and things that go "bump" in space, aren't nearly as scary as the demons that we carry with us.
I think that -- and I'm also a Star Trek fan, so I don't want to say anything disparaging -- I think that when used badly, the holodeck on Star Trek could provide a lot of answers. And really, what happens in Virtuality is this hyper-real environment that actually raises more questions. That's the way it's utilized in the show, and you're seeing this mystery of someone's internal life rather than a set piece that's in the 14th century or something like that.
So these existential issues tie in with the baggage that Dr. Braun is carrying with him.
Well, exactly. One of the things that drives him is guilt. And it manifests itself in a way where you go, initially you think, "Oh, this is beautiful," and then you go, "Oh God, that's horrifying."
Can you say more about the nature of this guilt?
If the series gets picked up -- we haven't got any word on that yet, whether it's another movie, or a series, or Ron was talking about the possibility of a comic book or a graphic novel -- I think that Braun's layers are going to be stripped away, and this sort of calm veneer that he's got as a put-on is going to start to fall apart.
The guy who plays Jimmy Johnson, my friend Ritchie, describes Jimmy as "an agent of chaos." I think Braun views himself as an agent of order. But in actuality I think both men are misrepresenting what they are in some ways feeling. And I think you're going to see a lot more order come out of Jimmy and a lot more chaos come out of Braun as things progress.
