I love the show.
What I've seen of it so far, I mean, it's impossible to second guess.
I think I gasped about ten times just in episode one.
So was it a similar experience for you reading the scripts
and did you get all the scripts in one go?
But you kind of left in suspense.
I got I got the first script
six weeks after a discussion that we had about the idea
that John Requa and Glenn Ficarra had for the show, which was remarkably fast.
I was really kind of taken aback by that.
And the fantastic thing about that was that everything that we had discussed
and that they had said they wanted to put in the pilot script,
they actually did, which was also very unusual.
And then I got to three and four.
Certainly before we started production.
But then the other scripts came while we were shooting.
But that's still a lot of material to have before starting a television show.
Certainly from my experiences, whether it would be 24, Designated Survivor.
I mean, I interviewed
Sarah Michelle Gellar quite recently on her kind of return to Supernatural
TV and given her kind of past career choices and characters,
she's obviously set very high, bar for herself in that kind of area,
meaning every decision she has to take has to be the right one.
And I was just wondering, because of the reputation.
You've kind of formed yourself and kind of try and sort of TV series.
Do you feel quite similarly when returning to the world of that or that genre
hopping and is having that kind of quality control a good thing?
It's a genre that it's not as complicated as that.
I wish I wish it were.
But the truth is, I love the genre,
you know, John and Glenn
started talking to me about wanting to do a show that was kind
of harking back to the seventies kinds of thrillers like The Parallax
View, Three Days of the Condor, Marathon Man, All the President's Men.
Those are the films that I grew up watching,
and those were the films that I would watch and kind of fantasize,
Oh, if this works out and like, I can, you know,
if I'm lucky enough to get to work as a professional actor and film,
these are the kinds of films that I want to make.
And so,
you know, their idea of kind of taking the style of the Seventies
kind of thriller, but putting it in the middle
of a technological revolution, which is what we're in fact going through.
I think it was a fantastic balance and they're such beautifully nuanced writers.
Another thing
that I just loved and right out of the gate
with the first script was that, you know, you have a thriller and it's kind of
moving at 100 miles an hour and it's taking no prisoners literally.
And and they've managed to kind of feather in
a wicked kind of sarcastic sense of humor
with my character and a reluctant love story.
We've made a Golding's character.
So I just again, it was just beautifully layered.
And when you have an opportunity to do material like that,
you get excited about doing it.
I don't think you think about the consequences.
Well, what if it doesn't work?
I think you just have to kind of
be really focused on your belief that it will and go with that.
I noticed you said in another interview that the show you made was kind of exactly
like the show you intended to make.
Is that not always the case that you find?
Sometimes they can veer quite far away from what was initially constructed?
Well, yes and yes, yes and no.
And then and I'll use 24 as an example,
Howard Gordon, the head writer of 24,
would sit down with me at the beginning of a season,
and he would kind of pitched me the idea for the show and
and invariably, whatever conflict he would be discussing,
that would be the end conflict of that season.
Instead of it being episode 24, it was always episode 14.
So it never landed kind of where we discussed it.
And then he would
do his creative thing and figure out the last eight episodes,
which is, which is extraordinary.
But that's how we worked on that show.
And, and so 24 still was always the show we wanted it to be.
It was just they had to come up with more material in something like Rabbit Hole.
I was just very, very surprised that how
how kind of succinct and specific John and Glenn
where from kind of formulating an idea to the execution of that idea.
Yeah.
And that's that's a gift in itself as well.
So when you sign on to a project like Rabbit Hole, for example,
you have to see things forever ahead.
So, I mean, 24 lasted years.
And so after an experience like that, you always have to think
this could be a commitment
that lasts me through a large part of my career,
which you just have to sign up for one season and just kind of see where it goes.
Well, they won't let you sign up for one season
because no one would invest the money in that.
No, I think I think the goal is that that you tell a story
that's interesting enough and compelling enough
that an audience is going to want to see more of it
and that that you're going to be excited about making it.
So certainly I didn't know that when I signed up for 24,
because that was the first television show that I did,
and it was a very new experience and I got incredibly lucky,
you know, Designated Survivor.
We made three seasons of that.
I would have loved to have made more,
you know, So the things that I've signed up to do,
I have absolutely reconciled with myself that
that not only is is doing five or six
or ten years of possibility, that's actually the goal.
And so it requires
a kind of storytelling
and that's from the cast and from the writing staff
that that has to be compelling and kind of with an eye towards long term.
But, you know, when they've got a long term shows,
you find a difficult in a sense, you can't do anything about your person.
I mean, you have to have the same build the same haircut pretty much for a few years.
I mean, I know not sure this would have been up to you, but you can't really grow.
You have into a ponytail and very long bed.
That was kind of out of the equation.
Yes. No, it's it's
so. Well, you know what?
As you get older, a lot of those options aren't there anymore.
Anyway.
And I think it would take me four years to grow a ponytail.
But yeah, it's, you know,
if you're doing a show, it makes it
a little more complicated, creating some different kind of physicality.
When you go to do a film, if you have a break.
And so you start relying kind of more
on the internal definitions of character as opposed to the external definition.
And and that's interesting for an actor in itself.
You know, you just
you pray
that it's still interesting for an audience,
but if I were to say more of a rabbit hole in years to come,
thank you so much for your time today, Keifer
So much appreciated. A pleasure. Thank you.