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Rufus Sewell
INTERVIEWS
October 08, 2008
Rufus Sewell crosses the pond and brings along a remake of the Brit series Eleventh Hour
By Mike Szymanski
They call it "science fact, not science fiction," and that's how producers Cyrus Voris and Ethan Reiff want Eleventh Hour to be thought of by audiences. They want to explore futuristic ideas ripped right from the headlines and put them in weekly stories.
The series is based on a British SF horror thriller that ran four episodes. The American version stars Rufus Sewell (The Illusionist) and Marley Shelton (Planet Terror).
In interviews with Voris, Reiff and Sewell in the late summer at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, Calif., Sewell told SCI FI Weekly that he was a bit intimidated at first when he found out he would take over the series that once starred Patrick Stewart (Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation). They talked about Sewell's American accent, some of the science that is going into future episodes and their competition with Fringe.
Look for the series, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, to debut Oct. 9 on CBS.
A brief excerpt:
... Have you felt compelled to read up on any of these subjects, like cloning? Are you satisfied—and I don't mean this as pejorative in any way—have you been satisfied the subjects are pretty well documented in the script in terms of whatever your character has to be doing with regard to them?
Sewell: Well, I'm very much in the early stage with it, so I'm only really familiar with the pilot and a couple of things that I've seen. All I can say is I'm very prepared to go deeply into those subjects, although I haven't—I'm, by nature, a truant, and I've always tried to avoid work. But yes, I completely trust, in terms of the team of writers, the background work, that it wouldn't be a matter of checking up to find that they've got their facts wrong. But whatever work I can do to back that up so I do know what I'm talking about, and I think I'm at the beginning of quite a big journey of education in many wide-ranging subjects.
Voris: Yeah, we have—I just want to say we have—again, Ethan and I coming from Sleeper Cell, we worked with tons of technical advisors and people to make sure that show was as accurate as possible. It's the same on Eleventh Hour. Two of our writers on the show—one actually used to work for NASA, actually literally was a rocket scientist. One of the writers was a science journalist for years and has written about science for Time magazine, The New Yorker—
Reiff: Scientific American.
Voris: Yeah. And plus, we have a full-time technical advisor, who actually does have a biophysics background, who is, like, literally reading all the scripts and vetting all the scripts. So we're very conscious of trying to keep everything as accurate as possible. And I think that's what separates Eleventh Hour from, I think, some other shows like this, the idea that it is firmly entrenched in the real world. And Danny Cannon, our director, mentioned that one of the things he loved is that after every episode, he hopes that people will run off and start Googling the topic of that particular episode and find out all this stuff, which I think is very cool.
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