Hollywood.com didn’t need Hiro’s time-hopping powers to see the future of Heroes. All it took was an invitation to the set from NBC, where we not only got a tantalizing glimpse at a scene from the fourth episode from Season Three, we got a surprising peek at the unexpected paths some of the characters may follow several years down the road.
What can we tell you? Not a lot, but the scene in question was set about four or five years in the future, in the future home of the Bennett family. We watched Hayden Panetierre as Claire, dressed head-to-toe in black and sporting dyed brunette locks, holding a gun on Milo Ventimiglia’s Peter Petrelli as he tried to talk her down – it looks very much like Claire’s gone over to the dark side.
And which Peter was she confronting? Hmm, hard to say, since Ventimiglia was portraying two Peters that day – the heroic present-day version who’s been fast-forwarded from the modern timeline, and the less-easy-to-figure future version of the character. Why are Future Peter’s motivations so enigmatic? Because he’s hanging out with Zachary Quinto’s Future Sylar, who seems far more altruistic than the brain-consuming baddie fans love to hate.
Adding to the confusion was the presence of new castmember Brea Grant, whose super-speedy character Daphne is introduced this season as an nemesis for Masi Oka’s Hiro but appears to have shifted allegiances over the passage of time. We also spotted another newbie, Jamie Hector – who’s playing the mysterious Knox – lingering on the set, but we were escorted away before we could see the top-secret character in action.
Has Hiro finally met his match? Click to find out.
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We took quick tour of the Company’s holding cells – which once imprisoned Sylar and Peter and will house yet another character this season – and the office of bespectaled Company man Bob Bishop (Stephen Tobolowsky) – or should we say FORMER office, because another character has moved in (hint: a familiar photo of Peter and Nathan Petrelli was visible on a desktop). And we spent some quality time chatting with the pixieish Grant, who for the future version of her character sported a blonde wig far less funkier that present-day Daphne’s braided knots, a wedding band and a mysterious DNA-styled pin marking her as an agent of an as-yet-unrevealed group.
In Season Three’s story arc “Villains,” Grant’s excited about the present day thief Daphne clashes with, Hiro. “It’s cool because he can stop time, but because I’m so fast I can move within his time-stopped world,” she explained. “We cancel each other out. So I can run around in his stopped world and he can’t do anything about it, but I can’t run at super-speed. So it’s a good dynamic between the two of us. He’s constantly the good guy whereas I’m more of a bad guy.”
But Daphne may not always stay a bad girl. “In the end she’s sort of an innocent,” said Grant. “She’s been a thief for a long time and she’s been on her own and has had to take care of herself and now all of a sudden she’s faced with people who have these much bigger issues at stake and that’s gonna change the way that she reacts to things. She’s dealing with lives instead of paintings or things that she stole.”
Milo’s new favorite costar: himself. Click here to find out more about present and future Peter. [PAGEBREAK]
For now, though, Grant’s grooving on the nastier side of the speedster. “It’s always more fun being the villain,” she laughed. “I wouldn’t say that deep down she’s a terrible person or anything. She’s no Sylar, but she’s a thief and that’s how she starts the season. The character though has many turns throughout the season. There’s much to look forward to.”
Finally, we stepped outside the soundstage for a lengthy and revealing chat with the once and future Peter. After a too-lengthy hiatus precipitated by the drawn-out writers strike, Ventimiglia was especially upbeat, clearly excited to be back to work on the show, which he thinks has course-corrected itself after an uneven second season – though he had some choice words for his latest co-star: himself.
Hollywod.com: You had to do that scene with yourself. How was that to film?
Milo Ventimiglia: I honestly don’t know how Adrian [Pasdar] can stand acting with me, because I was having a hard time acting with myself. But thank God I had great doubles that I was working with, guys who really made an effort to move like me and speak like me and picked up the mannerisms and actions that both Present Peter and Future Peter have which are similar, but also very, very specifically different. It’s a strange thing jumping back and forth between scar and no scar and voice and no voice and determined walk and then a little more soft.
Peter’s future posse includes Sylar? Click to find out who else he’s hangin’ with.
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HW: How much of that do you figure out yourself and how much do the show’s creative team instruct you?
MV: A lot of it is just playing two different characters for me. Something that I’ve always loved about being an actor is playing a different character. I think every role that I take whether it’s here on the show, playing two versions of the same guy or outside in a film or anything, I try to do different things with each character and imagining what catastrophic events went on in Peter’s life to get him to the place where he was as future Peter. So there’re just a lot of choices and things that I was trying to do to make them two distinctly different people.
HW: In this scene we find Present Peter in the future. He’s confronting Future Claire who looks she’s kind of on the bad side.
MV: I know and he’s been hanging out with good Future Sylar – or he APPEARS to be good.
HW: Is it hard to keep all those strands in your head, or do you not worry about it?
MV: We worry about it. It’s one of those things that I think helps every scene that’s going forward. You have to know where you’ve been and where you’re headed. In my case, characterwise, Present Peter knowing what Future Claire is like, so that when he relates to the Present Claire he doesn’t want to see her go down the dark path. It’s the same thing with running into the Future Sylar. He’s not the boogeyman. It’s confusing and I don’t have it all mapped out.
Coming on strong: Click to find out what Milo and the cast are doing to ramp up this season.
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HW: How much do they fill you in on everything or do you have to fill in the blanks yourself?
MV: It’s all stuff that we’ve known. I can go back to the script and say, ‘Okay, this is where Peter was last with Sylar when they were fighting, when Peter was last with Nathan –’ or with anyone or with Greg Grunberg‘s character, with Parkman. It’s all pretty laid out, but the future stuff I tend not to worry about too much. I hear about ideas and thoughts and where they’re going with the story and characters and the multitude of all of us, but I just show up and do my work.
HW: How was starting a third season different from starting the first season, where you don’t know what’s going to happen to the show, and the second season you’re a huge hit and a lot of pressure – what’s different about going into the third season?
MV: I don’t think it’s any different than the first time when we were stepping out onto the scene. I think we’re trying to step forward with very strong episodes, very strong stories and very strong character choices. It’s no different than anything from before.
HW: Do you feel that you know more about your character?
MV: Yeah, which is nice. It’s nice to know the characters more, to have that history with them and be able to make a judgment call based on a scene immediately and not think, ‘Well, I wonder what this guy would do in this scenario?’ We all pretty much know our characters and know our limits and our boundaries and our wants and goals, all of that.
Last season Peter lost his memory, but will he lose himself this season?
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HW: Have you been working with anyone from the main cast that you’ve not had a lot of opportunity to work with before? You’ve worked with pretty much everyone at this point.
MV: Yeah, and now including myself!
HW: Can you talk in broad terms what Peter’s story is in “Villains?”
MV: In the first season I would say that Peter is finding himself. In the second season I’d say that Peter has lost himself even with memory loss. The third season, in one sentence, Peter’s not quite himself. I think the situations that Peter finds himself in with the people he comes across are dramatically influencing who he is and who he’s appearing to be, who people are perceiving him to be. I’m not sure if you saw the first episode at Comic-Con or have heard much about it, but Future Peter comes to the season and poses as Present Peter for a little while and he’s not quite himself. When he’s around the villains he’s in the body of another guy, and so again he’s not quite himself. He’s struggling to step outside the confines, I think – the physical confines that he’s in all the time.
HW: How far in the future are we?
MV: I think that this is five to seven years. I think it’s far enough to wear you can see leaps and bounds in the technology, but not far enough to where cars are flying. People are flying. More people are flying.
Meet the parents: ‘Heroes’ introduces Papa Petrelli
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HW: We’re now going to meet, in some form or another, the father of the Petrelli family. Can you talk about that at all and are we going to get to know the dynamic of him and his kids?
MV: You guys know that it’s Robert Forester. That was always one of those things that had a huge mystery behind it, the character, the figure that was going to play that. I think that every scene that we do we’re discovering more than what we were just led in to know, more than what we had just talked about. He’s such a complicated character and he impacts, out of his own megalomania, he impacts everyone for his own need or want to be important, to be the most powerful.
HW: You’ve had a chance to work with Robert? How was that?
MV: It was great. I’d worked with him before in a movie called Curse. He was actually in the film and then they rewrote the film and then he wasn’t in the film. So I got a chance to spend some time with him on the set. It’s nice being on set with him because he’s a great, great guy and we had a lot of fun.
HW: Would you think twice about doing a comic book property or a superhero film because of the show, or would you really want to jump into a role like that?
MV: Like if they called me and said, ‘Hey, do you want to play Spider-Man?’ Of course I would! [laughs] I have no problems putting on a red outfit. We don’t get to wear outfits here. No masks or anything like that. I was actually having a conversation with David Maisel last night. He runs Marvel. He was talking about Iron Man and he said to me, and I’m not going to get his words right, but he was basically saying that it’s a character piece where the guy just happens to be a superhero. I think that as long as we here or even anyone in the comic world or making movies from comic books about superheroes and all of that, as long as you’re with the struggle of the character all the extraordinary events that surround them are just going to add to, I think, the reason why people are drawn into stories which is to watch characters go through things. Me, I have no fear of going from this to playing a superhero or anything else that I do. It’s kind of cool. You want to be a superhero growing up.
HW: When fans encounter you in real life what’s the first thing they want to know?
MV: They usually either say, “You’re taller than I thought you would be,” or “You’re shorter than I thought you would be.”
