God complex anyone? Jamie Bamber's character Dr. Tyler Wilson
gets knocked off his pedestal in the Monday Mornings pilot.
For most of us, Monday mornings are when we drag ourselves out of weekend mode and get back to the grind of our respective jobs. On the new David E. Kelley-created medical drama, Monday Mornings are the time when the doctors at the fictional Chelsea General Hospital in Portland, Oregon must defend themselves on the decisions and actions made that have often lead to huge mistakes and, in the worst cases, death.
The series was born out of the book of the same name by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, who is also Executive Producer of the series. Kelley, of course, brought us memorable series like Ally McBeal, Picket Fences and Boston Legal, and this marks his first made-for-cable series. With an impressive cast including Alfred Molina, Bill Irwin, Ving Rhames, Jennifer Finnegan and of course Jamie Bamber,he and the show are off to a solid start.
We sat down with the charming and friendly Bamber to talk about his new show, his awareness of his gay fan base and whether we’ll see his new character parade in a towel. Obviously, you know, for the sake of telling a really good story.
AfterElton: Why was the role in Monday Mornings appealing to you?
Jamie Bamber: David Kelley. When you've got a name like that doing a TNT show for cable for the first time you've got a sense that they're going to want this to work…[and] to have ingredients like Sanjay Gupta and David Kelley on the first page of this script for TNT... you go ‘this has got a chance.’
AE: And what about your character, Dr. Tyler Wilson?
JB: He's set up as this guy who never makes a mistake, he's a natural surgical kind of athlete who has, I think one of the stage directions even mentioned, he's got a well-placed God complex. And I thought, ‘great to play someone that arrogant and sure of themselves and then to have him screw up right off the bat.’
So I was very excited as soon as I read it. I said ‘I can do this. I know I can do this. I can see myself playing this guy.’ I have a facility with intelligent characters, people who think and question themselves and find themselves in situations they don't think they should be in and then having to rationalize that. I love those internal struggles, and it was all there on the first episode.
The Monday Mornings cast (l-r) Sarayu Rao, Bill Irwin, Alfred Molina, Jennifer Finnegan,
Jamie Bamber, Ving Rhames, Emily Swallow and Keong Sim
AE: How did you decide on the look of your character, because he's got the shaggy hair? He's got the scruffy beard. It doesn't seem like he's too worried about his appearance.
JB: Funny enough, I saw that by instinct, because that's how I went in for my first audition. I deliberately didn't wear a suit. I wore jeans or maybe I wore some slacks and a V-Neck like sweater and I was unshaven and I had long hair, and I subconsciously thought ‘I wonder if they'll make me change this?’ and then finally when I had to do the test for the network, they said ‘please don't shave.’
AE: From what I’ve seen of the show, most of it takes place at the hospital. Will we get to know about his personal life? Does he have one?
JB: Hopefully, you sense that there's maybe something between Jennifer [who plays Dr. Tina Ridgeway] and I. That certainly is a relationship that is examined, and it goes through some changes, so there's that element of his personal life. You get a little flashback into his reason for becoming a surgeon, in terms of what happened to him as a kid losing his older brother through a brain procedure.
Other than that, the thing I like about it is that it doesn't go the Grey's Anatomy route and spoon feed soap opera. It's more these guys spend a lot of time in the hospital. That's the prism through which we see them. They change and they evolve and they grow and they have to deal with personal challenges, but 95 percent of the time you're in the workplace and you're dealing with professional situations, but their personal lives get in the way.
AE: It's been a while since you've been in Apollo's shoes on BSG. Do you still miss that character or have you kind of put it to bed? You've definitely done a lot of things since.
JB: I don't miss playing him. I'm still super close with everyone we worked with, and I see them all the time, so our relationships are still fresh. I miss us being in the context of what we used to do.
I will tell you the greatest pleasure is I've actually forgotten a lot of the shows, so when I see a clip or a photo or a still or a scene, then I get the pleasure all the way back, because ‘hey, I don't remember that guy, I don't remember that moment,’ and yet it's me. There's a discovery to be made, a rediscovery, which is really fun because I get to be a viewer at that point. Occasionally you sit down and you watch a sequence I just do not remember. That is cool.
Let's hope we'll be seeing some of Bamber's other impressive assets on Monday Mornings.
AE: At that time of BSG, were you aware that you had a lot of gay fans?
JB: Yeah. Of course. I guess about halfway through, because Battlestar was the first ever job for me where the Internet was something that I was aware of…I was really aware of the Internet having a comment on what you'd done literally just last night on air. And I was fully engaged in it. I wouldn’t say anything, because I've never responded to anything, but I've read a lot of things, and so then you get an idea of who's watching the show, and it is funny. Yeah. It's really odd to think, oh, my God, it never crossed my mind that that could be.
And our show was…because what it did with gender was sort of interesting. It wasn't so interested in gender, so sexuality became much less polar as a result. People were people and it became less of an issue. What we should have done was, I think at some point, is have a gay couple that was never really even referred to as a gay couple, which we could have done, but we never got that done.
AE: There’s that infamous towel photo from the BSG days. Are they going to have you in a towel on the new show?
JB: [grins] There is a shower scene at the moment.
AE: That's something to look forward to!
JB: Yeah. That’s cool.
AE: Is there a gay-centric element to Monday Mornings? I didn’t see anything in the first few episodes but I know David Kelley is known to go there in his past series.
JB: Not with the regular characters yet. There's a moment where Ving [Rhames, who plays Dr. Jorge ‘El Gato’ Villanueva] thinks his son is gay…I mean, it's not a substantial story to be honest, but there's an episode where his son is in need of treatment and he has to get closer to his son, and there's an issue about what his son might be and a son that's not communicating with him.
Monday Mornings airs Mondays at 10pm on TNT.
