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Xposé #26
September 1998
by David Richardson
The chase is on... Patrick Bauchau, aka psychiatrist Sydney, is desperately seeking The Pretender.
On the face of it, The Pretender has a pretty familiar premise: Jarod (Michael T. Weiss) is on the run, and special operatives Miss Parker (Andrea Parker) and Sydney (Patrick Bauchau) must track him down. Yet the show is no simple copy of The Fugitive; Jarod was one of a series of gifted children taken to the shadowy think-tank known as The Centre, a private corporation located in Delaware. Programmed by Sydney, and kept in an isolated environment, his special skills were sold to the highest bidder - including the military.
As an adult, Jarod found a way to escape. Once in the strange, outside world he uses his skills as a Pretender to take on any profession with no preparation. He can become a doctor, a pilot, a lawyer, a policeman... and, after years in which his mind has been exploited for evil purposes, he vows to bring justice in circumstances where there is none.
Patrick Bauchau was the only member of the regular cast who did not audition for the producers of The Pretender. The actor was working in Rome on the movie We Three Kings while the casting sessions were in progress, and the script for the pilot episode was mailed to him. Upon reading it, he was immediately impressed.
"The script was very good," Bauchau tells Xposé. "I was planning to do a movie in Italy straight after We Three Kings. My manager said, 'Get them to postpone your Italian film a little bit. There's no chance that this will ever go to a series, NBC has a completely full slate. It's a good script -- just do it. This is a one shot.' So I sailed into it."
Of course, the pilot episode was so well received by test audiences that NBC commissioned a full series. The third season of The Pretender is now in production -- and Bauchau's one-shot gig has developed into a long-term engagement. Nevertheless, the actor has no complaints.
"It's great," he smiles. "The pilot was interesting enough, but the area it has to explore is extremely rich."
Bauchau is blessed with a character who displays many facets. Sydney is not an obvious bad guy; he is a psychiatrist in the Centre's Psychogenic Research Department, a scientist whose actions can be interpreted as both cruel and kind.
"Sydney is the moral conscience of the show," he insists. "He is the mentor of the Pretender. Essentially the show hangs on that complicated attitude of Sydney towards Jarod.
"Sydney is fond of Jarod and wants him to reach his full potential. This causes problems for the people who run the Centre when Jarod escapes, because he's so protective of him.
"He hadn't planned to let him run away. He is the mentor of Jarod, but at the same time his task is to corral him back. But he enjoys watching and sometimes even helping Jarod to get away. Another part of him would emotionally like to bring him back... it's essentially a surrogate father position.
"Sydney has a whole gamut of grays -- a professional man who runs his program on the edge and could be seen as a guilty party to what's gone on before. Yes, he does feel guilty about the programming of Jarod, but at the same time he thinks it's also interesting. There wasn't really any way to research it, because the role sort of became as I endorsed it. I brought more colors that the writers could work with."
While some actors will approach a role by inventing their own backstory, Bauchau claims that he prefers to watch the series and its characters unfold along with the viewers.
"I like to discover with every episode what the writer thinks is the character of Sydney," he says. "I'm a great believer in finding out on the spot. The discovery for me is part of the fun of being in the series. Every week I discover what the following show will be like, and that's very amusing. Suddenly you discover you have a twin brother!"
Indeed, the season one episode "Under the Reds" found Miss Parker uncovering the facts about Sydney's brother Jacob, who also worked for the Centre. Seriously injured in a car accident, Jacob remained in a coma for decades -- until Jarod's research temporarily brought him back to consciousness.
"Obviously Jacob is the darker part of Sydney," says Bauchau of the character who, we discover, originally brought the four-year-old Jarod to the Centre in 1963. "Sydney has a pretty good idea of why and how Jacob became so dark, and he feels guilty about his brother and his fate. Guilt isn't a driving force in Sydney, but you can always punch that key, which many characters do -- Miss Parker is punching that key, and Jarod plays it all the time. Being in the grays, Sydney is a natural target for anyone who thinks he is white."
Flashback sequences have also allowed viewers to see the younger version of Sydney, training the adolescent Jarod. For those scenes, the part is played by another actor, although his voice is dubbed by Bauchau.
"The actor's doing an excellent job," insists Bauchau, "and I feel guilty right away for looping him."
It is, he says, a situation with which he can empathize. "In France the series is very successful, it's the really 'in' show. Of course, I'm looped into French, and that makes me feel very voiceless. They had promised me that I could loop myself, but then they went on the air before we had finished season one. I think he does a good job, but still I feel dispossessed. To think that all the switched on people in France are watching me with somebody else's voice."
The second season of The Pretender threw some new elements into the mix with the introduction of Brigitte (Pamela Gidley), a determined operative -- or cleaner -- who intends to recover Jarod at any cost.
"She interacts more with Miss Parker than me," notes Bauchau. "She had to take her into stride. There's endless potential for cans of worms in that character, but I don't know where they're going yet, and it probably won't have much to do with me. As far as I can see she is part of the Parker family nightmare."
Born in Brussels and raised in Belgium, England, and Switzerland, Bauchau studied modern languages at Oxford University, and is fluent in English, French, German, Spanish and Italian. A gifted performer with countless film and TV credits in the USA and Europe, Bauchau has played the godfather of the immortals in Kindred: The Embraced, had a recurring role in Earth 2, and has starred in the features A View to a Kill, Clear and Present Danger, The Rapture and Blood Ties.
Given that the actor began his career in French New Wave cinema, how does he compare making European art films to working in Hollywood?
"I guess there's more of a consciousness of the global project in America than in Europe," he muses. "In a certain way California is the last outpost -- it has a kind of militaristic structure to it. When you work for studio you immediately spot that -- the watchdogs do outnumber the creative people. American projects are better organized."
"When you are in a blockbuster movie, you tend to execute a pre-established program and seem to be part of a giant battleship. In the art films, it's more of a guerilla style and less structured. In some ways, TV and art movies have more in common, because you discover what's to be done, and then you can be more creative. I've worked a lot with Wim Wenders [the acclaimed director of Wings of Desire and Faraway, So Close!], and as often as not we shoot without a script."
It's obvious that Bauchau is enjoying his time on The Pretender, and he admits that part of this can be attributed to the on-set camaraderie.
"Unlike many shows this has a very interesting group of people... we all get on well with each other. It's got a very good team going."
Ironically, Bauchau rarely sees the show's leading man, Michael T. Weiss, with Jarod sharing little screen time with Sydney and Miss Parker, so the actors tend to work on different sets and on different days. "You can co-exist like that in the same series without ever meeting," claims Bauchau. "In the first year we had [a few] scenes together.
"He's on all the time. If you play the lead in this sort of show, you spend more time being Jarod than being Michael Weiss. I've done it once on a series in Canada, at the end of three months nobody remembers your name -- everyone always refers to you by your character's name. Of course, it's totally natural for you to answer that way. When the alarm clock rings that morning, it is to drag you to the set to be not Michael T. Weiss but Jarod. So it is an interesting experience. It's one of those weird things about doing a TV serial.
"Thank God I've got the great job of being on only three days an episode. It allows me to be myself, and be the character for only three days!"
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