Actor Rod Rowland.
I recently discovered several interviews I did a number of years ago that, for one reason or another, were never published. Rather than have them continue to gather "dust" in my computer, I thought I would share them with you. In this interview - actor Rod Rowland talks about his guest-star role on The X-Files and his work as a series regular on Space: Above and Beyond.
Have you ever heard that little voice in the back of your head urging you to take another piece of cake or warning you against cheating the IRS? Sometimes, however, people claim to hear voices that order them to do some very, very nasty things. In The X-Files episode Never Againa handsome young Philadelphia man, Ed Jerse, endangers himself and FBI Special Agent Dana Scully when he begins listening to his tattoo’s twisted tirades.
Written by Glen Morgan and James Wong, the creative team behind the science fiction television series Space: Above and Beyond, this episode features Rod Rowland as the tormented Ed Jerse. Rowland had previously played First Lieutenant Cooper Hawkes on Space: Above and Beyond. The actor is the fourth castmember from the program to guest-star on The X-Files in episodes written by Morgan and Wong during the show’s fourth season.
“Glen and Jim talked to me at, I think, the Sci-Fi Magazine Awards,” recalls Rowland. “They said, ‘Hey, we’re writing an X-Files script for you.’ I said, ‘Great!’ Sure enough, they kept their word and a couple of months later a script was delivered to me and that was that. I got the part.
“Gillian Anderson [Scully] had mentioned to Glen and Jim that she wanted Scully to be involved in something slightly edgier. So they wrote this episode in which she becomes involved with this guy Ed Jerse. hey thought I’d be perfect for the part, but Gillian wanted her choice of actors. The role had already been offered to me, though, so things became slightly complicated. They showed her tapes of some of my work and she kind of went, ‘Oh, OK.’ I don’t think she was totally convinced,” he chuckles, “but it worked out fine.”
Devastated by the terms of his divorce settlement, Ed Jerse decides to drown his sorrows at the local bar. Afterwards he goes to a tattoo parlor and has a Betty Boop-like design with the slogan “Never Again” tattooed on his arm. The following day while at work he thinks he overhears one of his female coworkers calling him a loser, but, in fact, the woman’s voice (Jodie Foster) appears to be coming from his tattoo. When Betty’s taunting and mocking continues at home, Ed is convinced that his downstairs neighbor is responsible, so in a fit of rage he murders her. Playing a character such as Ed Jerse proved to be a test of physical as well as mental endurance for Rowland.
“The hardest part of playing a role like this is having to maintain his level of despair and making that as real as possible without looking like a complete fool in front of the cameras,” explains the actor. “We discover later that it is the chemicals in the ink used in the tattoo that cause him to hear Betty speak. Ed truly is at the end of his rope, completely, fully and totally enough, so even the slightest amount of hallucinogenic rye in his system is enough to cause these auditory hallucinations. He is at such a low point in his life and has suffered such pain at the hands of women that it doesn’t take much to push him over the edge.
“Besides showing his crazy side I also had to make him likable so that the audience would have sympathy for him. That was something they told me to make sure to concentrate on because we couldn’t just show him as a full-blown psycho. You had to make him pathetic, you know? We had to get the viewers to think, ‘Oh, that poor guy.’ Even though he’s killed and you’re afraid of him you also want to feel sympathy for him. It makes the story more interesting for the audience when it’s torn in that way.
“When this role came about I was at a point in my career when I was still slightly nervous and not sure up until the last take if I were going to nail the scene,” adds Rowland. “Here I was, this umpteenth guest-star on a show that’s been around five years. It was a pretty big guest-part, too, and I’m sure a few people looked at me and probably thought, ‘OK, who is this kid? Is he going to do it?’ So it was a challenge, but a positive one.”
Scully meets Jerse while she is in Philadelphia trailing a Russian whom Mulder (David Duchovny) believes possesses valuable information about UFOs. She follows the suspect into a tattoo parlour where Jerse is pleading with the owner to remove the image of Betty from his arm. Jerse asks the agent out and, following some initial hesitation, she finally agrees. After a few drinks they return to the tattoo parlour, where Scully gets a picture of a snake eating its tail tattooed on her back. They return to Ed’s apartment but Betty does not like the competition and eventually turns Jerse against Scully.
“Now Gillian and I had worked together, I think, only two days, when we had to film this fight scene in the bathroom,” he recalls. “I had always been a huge fan of her work on the series, so I was pretty star-struck by her anyway. Well, in this scene I’m reaching for her and her hand deflected my hand which in turn hit her in the mouth. I was speechless. It was like, ‘Oh, jeez, what can I say? I’m really sorry.’ Luckily, there were no hard feelings. Gillian enjoyed doing all the fights and stunts, though, and she was beyond a trouper during the shoot.”
Rowland also has high praise for the show’s director, Rob Bowman. “He was very helpful. There were a couple of moments when I didn’t know quite how to approach things and he was right there to do what a seasoned director does and that’s to guide you. He’d say, ‘Try it this way and see if that works,’ and, sure enough, the scene came together. He was a blessing. Also, I had to do a lot of crazy things to prepare myself emotionally to play my character. An actor is very vulnerable in a situation such as this and he was especially supportive in this regard.
“I loved this role,” he enthuses. “Yeah, it was difficult because I had to go deep inside myself and pull up all these emotions. I’m not the best at getting tearful and all that stuff. It’s not easy for me. It takes a lot of effort, but I’m up for anything. If it’s a great script like this was then you’ve got to give it your all. There are no if, ands or buts about it; that’s your job. You will go through all the hell it takes to find the character and the more you do it the better you’ll get at it, hopefully.”
Despite any initial concerns Rowland may have had about his work on The X-Files, Morgan and Wong had complete confidence in his abilities as an actor. They had been sufficiently impressed by his performance as one of an elite team of young Marine Corps cadets who helped defend the Earth against insect-like creatures called Chigs in the Fox Television science fiction series Space: Above and Beyond. Rowland played Cooper Hawkes, one of the few surviving members of an artificially bred race of humans called In-Vitros or Tanks. These test-tube babies, distinguishable from humans by a navel on the backs of their necks, are “born” at the age of eighteen but with only six years of life experience. They were originally created to serve as soldiers but over the years became the focus of racial prejudice.
“You don’t get many parts like that on television,” says Rowland. “It was just really unique. Of course, it was science fiction so the parameters were much wider and you were allowed to be far more creative. I thought it was so interesting that he was a great warrior yet had this childlike sense of wonder and naiveté.
“Over time Hawkes came to love others and to learn the value of a human relationship and what that meant to him,” explains the actor. “He had never known any of that. All he knew was pain from other people. So not only did his ability to feel emotions grow but also his loyalty and an always-present integrity that never previously had the room to develop."
One of the actor’s proudest achievements on the show is his work in the episode Who Monitors the Birds. In this story, done with virtually no dialogue, Hawkes volunteers to go on a dangerous mission in exchange for an honourable discharge from the Marines but instead he winds up marooned and practically defenceless on a hostile alien world and menaced by Chigs.
“Next to my performance on The X-Files that was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” muses the actor. “I spent twenty-one-hour days in freezing cold and being constantly soaked down. I had to go to the hospital three times due to exhaustion and also to be treated for asthma. I never had asthma in my life; I had no idea where it came from. It was worth it, though. When I look back at that episode there are several scenes, I think, which are some of my best work ever. It was such a daring type of thing to do, especially for network television. That’s typical, though, of Glen and Jim. They don’t settle for the ordinary.”
After only one season on the air, Space: Above and Beyond was permanently grounded by the Fox Television Network in the spring of 1996. Low ratings were blamed for this, but some of the show’s supporters feel that it was inadequate publicity and the network’s failure to find the program a regular time slot which helped bring about its early demise. According to Rowland, he and his costars were not all that surprised when they heard the news.
“Honestly, we knew something was going on during the last quarter of the season. They’d preempt us for three weeks in a row and we’d think, ‘Uh, oh, there’s some bad politics happening.’ It hurt. When the show was given a chance to play it had the numbers. It did what it had to do. I think things would have been different if the network had had more faith in Glen and Jim. For example, we had our highest ratings ever with Who Monitors the Birds and this continued the following week. Fox, however, wanted a program geared towards a much younger audience and that’s not Glen and Jim’s modus operandi. If the network had just gone ahead and let the two of them make the show they wanted, then, who knows? Maybe we’d still be around today.”
Although his work on Space: Above and Beyond lasted only one season, Rowland came away from the series both a better performer and performer. “I learned how to act without saying anything and realized that I could do that well. On a personal level, I found out how easy it is to fall into the trappings of believing your own publicity. Being a regular on a television series was very new to me and there was a lot of hype that went along with it in the beginning. When you go from having a really difficult time getting a job to being part of a big, expensive series your head tends to expand a bit, you know? So it’s important to put that all into perspective right away or you can get lost very quickly,” he warns.
This past year the actor took to the skies once again to play First Lieutenant Bobby Griffin opposite former Marcus Welby, M.D. star James Brolin in the syndicated television show Pensacola: Wings of Gold. The series follows the exploits of Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kelly (Brolin) and his team of hotshot military fighter pilots. While the program’s San Diego locations gave the actor the opportunity to pursue his favourite pastime, surfing, the series and his character fell slightly short of his expectations.
“We got off to a slow start,” he says. “None of the characters was really that well-defined, which was too bad. I love the actors. Everybody would constantly do their best and try to make the most of what they were given. Towards the end of the season they added some interesting layers and intricacies to the series and its characters which made the work much more satisfying. Bobby Griffin just wasn’t my cup of tea, though,” admits the actor, “but like Space, this program was another wonderful learning experience for me.”
Recently Rowland guest-starred on an installment of the Sci-Fi Channel’s new anthology series Welcome to Paradox (formerly known as Betaville). He plays a forty-four-year-old jaded, high-society, low-life multimillionaire who has created his own unique fountain of youth.
“My character has a bunch of clones of himself who serve as organ donors,” he says. “There’s a six-year-old, a fourteen-year-old and then a twenty-four-year-old character, which I also play. He’s done certain things to their brains so they don’t know what’s happening. It’s really decadent and extreme and I had lots of fun with the part. The story’s production values are extremely dark and moody as are the characters, so it’s similar in tone to The X-Files and Space: Above and Beyond.”
Not one to rest on past accomplishments, Rowland is constantly working to prepare himself for whatever challenges might be awaiting him in the future. “All I can do is give it my best and hopefully grow with every job. When I’m not acting I try to work on things to better myself physically and spiritually as a person in order to keep everything moving forward and upwards. I have faith that my efforts will show in my work and in turn point me toward quality jobs.”
Over the past couple of years, Rowland has guest-starred on such series as Flash-Forward, Saving Grace, NCIS: Los Angeles, The Closer and Burn Notice.
Steve Eramo
I believe that the image on Ed Jerse's tattoo was actually a nod to pin-up model Betty Page.
Posted by: A Fan | 04/20/2011 at 01:32 AM