Interview with “Fringe” star Joshua Jackson

With the return of FOX's sci-fi series Fringe (airing Thursdays at 9:00 p.m. EST) we had the opportunity to talk with one of the show's stars Joshua Jackson about the progression of his character and what we can look forward to in the upcoming season.

Gamesville: What can you tell us about your characters particular story line this season?

Joshua: The entire first season for Peter and Walter was about this father and son reconnecting through the craziness of their circumstances and actually becoming something of a family.  And Season two has carried that forth. In the beginning Peter is really invested now in being part of this team and actually belonging to this Fringe family, but eventually he’s going to find out that this horrible happened to him as a child and that’s going to blow up his relationship with Walter and probably with Olivia I would imagine.  To me, that’s the great thing hanging over Peter the entire season and it gives me something to move toward as they go forward.

When we first met your character in season one we got a sense of this kind of dark background that you had, doing arms dealing and such. Will we get back to that this season?

Yes. We actually delved right into that very early in the season. We kept on hinting at it last year, but never showing it. Walter has as part of this Fringe team and we spent the first season explaining exactly why Olivia Dunham in particular, as opposed to any other FBI agent, had to be the center of this Fringe team. What we never really got into until the final episode was why it is specifically Peter that needs to be a part of this. Now that we’ve brought him in, this season we’ve gone a lot deeper into actually showing rather than just talking about this prior life that he had.

What is your reaction when you get the scripts and it’s some new crazy thing that they’re bringing into the story?

That’s the beauty of our show; if we don’t have a new crazy thing, something’s gone horribly wrong so I take it always as a positive thing. Each week it’s a little bit of a science lesson for the class, it’s a little bit of a vocabulary lesson for the class and it always presents you with some other kooky thing. The great thing about our show is that if we can dream it we can do it.

What do you enjoy more as an actor, when you get to do an episode in which there’s lots of action, fighting, racing around, when it’s crazy science elements or when it’s simply doing a scene with the cow?

It’s a little known fact that the cow’s a diva. I don’t know that I have a particular favorite. I think if I did any one of those things too much each one would become boring in their way. I would tell you that the thing I spend the time thinking about is trying to keep the dynamic between Peter and Walter truthful and growing, but the beauty of being on a television show is that you get to do a little bit of everything all the time.

Do you think that Peter and Olivia will have some sort of romantic? What are your feelings about that?

I feel like this is more of a family dynamic than a romantic dynamic. What’s unique and what’s great about our show is, as opposed to having just a leading man and a leading lady, you have this crazy father in the center of it. That would be a very, very awkward love triangle so I don’t think they’re going to go in that direction. I see Peter and Olivia as more brother and sister rather than lovers on this show. Where they’re going to take it, I have no idea, but for right now I run under the assumption that this is father, son, daughter rather than boyfriend, girlfriend, dad.

What does shooting the show in Vancouver actually add to the show?

The gray rainy-ness of it all actually seemed to add to sort of the natural moodiness of a show like Fringe; I think that’s a positive. Then whereas last year we were in New York, which has all of the obvious things that New York and that backdrop add, it’s difficult to shoot there because there are the other 14 million people that you have to deal with. It makes our production life, I think, a lot easier being up here, just the things that you’re allowed and capable of doing on the streets of Vancouver.

Fringe airs Thursdays, at 9:00 p.m. Eastern/Pacific Time on FOX.