"An Audience with the 'Pope'"

Colin Cunningham has been a fixture on TV series like The L Word and Stargate SG-1. Nowadays, the 45 year-old returns for his second season as John Pope in the TNT science fiction TV drama Falling Skies.

The series tells the story of a group of survivors banding together to fight back against alien invaders on Earth. We asked Cunningham what role he would play in a post-apocalyptic world.

“When I think about that stuff, I think stupid, lame things, like guy stuff,” Colin says, ‘Wow, there would be nobody on the planet but me and I’d get to ride all the motorcycles and get a Lamborghini and drive it through the street or something. I don’t know. If there was an actual invasion or something, you fantasize, but I doubt it would be anything remotely close to anything absolutely horrible.”

“I will say this though, you know what I did?” he adds, “I took a survival course like four weeks ago, so I learned how to make fire, so the first thing that I do is I make fire. I can make fire with the stick and the thing. I thought it would be fun. I said to my brother, ‘Do you want to go?’ And it was a weekend thing and we learned how to make fire, it was up in Kern Valley. It was fun. It was really cool, it was great. All you really had to do was you showed up with an empty water bottle and a Swiss army knife and they taught you everything you needed, identifying plants and you can eat this and don’t eat that and most things you can eat, I discovered that. Most things you can actually eat.”

Colin talks about how his role as Pope pales in comparison to what his co-star Moon Bloodgood plays in the series as Dr. Anne Glass.

“In so many ways, her job on the show is so much harder than everybody else’s because

"An Audience with the 'Pope'"

if Pope’s got lines, I’ll crack open a beer,” he says, “That’s my action. I’m not holding two being surgical stuff and stents and all that stuff, so that’s action, you need to rehearse the crap out of that stuff, know it subconsciously so you can work on the scene, while you’re doing everything that you need to do.”

“And you can’t think about it because it’s part of the work, so it’s a lot of stuff to have and to do. I can just sit and look cool,” Cunningham continues, “Pope does not have to because he does not have to do a whole lot. He thinks a lot, while she physically has got stuff to do. There’s people coming in cut open and broken legs and smashed and she has to stop the bleeding, Pope doesn’t have to stop the bleeding.”

Cunningham was asked what he thinks of the experience acting with tennis balls prior to the CGI effects that come in during each episode’s post-production.

“I know what you are saying,” Colin says, “I don’t know how much of that there is. In the battle sequences, yeah, there is, that’s a trick, you do. You have to imagine that the tennis ball is the thing that’s coming towards you, but you really don’t think of it. Definitely no green screen, then we’ll break out the tennis balls, like where is it? We’re looking for the tennis balls, it’s like, OK, we got it.”

Colin talks about shooting in Vancouver, British Columbia in Canada.

“First season was Toronto, second season was in Vancouver for five months,” Cunningham says, “I came back once or twice. Forgive me, but not during October through February and March, no. It’s still beautiful, but you just can’t see it. It’s dark and it’s wet and the sun comes up at 10:00 in the morning and it goes down again at 3:00.”

Cunningham talked about how he would react if the events in Falling Skies

"An Audience with the 'Pope'"

really happened.

“To see a skitter crawl across the ceiling would make me pee in my pants,” Colin says, “They are pretty creepy, ugly-looking, spidery-looking things.”

We asked Colin how much of the mapped-out storyline is revealed to the cast on an episode-to-episode basis.

“Very little,” he says, “But that’s a great thing because every, every week when you get a new script, ‘Did you get the new script yet? Did you get the new script? Did you see it? Did you get it?’ ‘I saw it.’ ‘What is it? Tell me what happened? What did you hear?’ It’s a rumor.”

“It’s awesome,” Cunninghan says, “Because I think if we were doing a different kind of show or whatever, it’s a same episode every week, it’s just different people. So we don’t, ‘Whoa! That’s going to happen?’ So you’re really engaged in it, because we’re not shooting a TV show. It’s a miniseries, we have no idea what’s going to happen and we don’t know. So we find out as they choose to tell us. I really like it. It’s exciting and you never know.”

We also asked Cunningham whether she worries about when Pope dies in the next episode.

“In a way though, you bet you do,” Colin says, “I think it’s also a testament to the show because I’d like to think they look at the show as being bigger than any one particular piece of the show. And I hope that’s the great thing, that it is an ensemble show and for anybody, it’s the show. So you do, you wonder because you just don’t know.”

Colin tells us of what it is like to see Falling Skies as a viewer apart from acting in it.

“For me, when I was a younger actor, you’d want to see your own stuff,” Cunningham says, “You’d fast-forward and you’d be like, look at you, look at you, look at you, oh, there’s me again. Now, it’s not about that.”

“Now I’m honestly way

"An Audience with the 'Pope'"

more about seeing the other actors and seeing the visual effects and seeing how the story, seeing what the show is,” he continues, “Because a lot of the time as actors, when you’re first starting out, you work on a lot of crap, so you’re just going to go to your scene, your scene, to see how well you did while you are surrounded by all this crap. But once you’re working on a show that has some credibility and some quality to it, there’s no reason to hit the fast forward anymore. You just sit down and just, that was a good show.”

Cunningham was asked whether seeing himself act better informs his choices.

“I think it could,” Chris says, “I know there’s actors that literally watch the monitor after a take to see if they can adjust and that’s what makes pure such sense to me. Like I never approached the work that way, it was like, you make your choices and then, that’s it, you walk, you did it, so whether it was right or it was wrong, you just work towards the next thing.”