An Interview With Mark Sheppard
Sean Elliott interviewed Mark Sheppard for iFMagazine.com back in August, where he dished about his guest spots on Medium as the evil Dr. Charles ‘the butcher” Walker and coming back for season three.
iF MAGAZINE: How did you get involved with MEDIUM after your stint on 24?
MARK SHEPPARD: The quick back-story is that I had auditioned for Glen Caron for an episode of MEDIUM, and then I got called back for an audition with one line. That’s not something I would usually go in for, but I walked in and picked up my script and said, “I’m ready for my line.” I asked him if my performance was so bad in the first audition that he only had a line for me. He started laughing and said, “No, I have something that I’m not sure what I want to do with it, but this is the beginning of something that will pay off later.”
This one line was for the dream sequence in the season one episode “Penny for Your Thoughts”, and it is the set up for a killer that exists in her [Alison Dubois’] mind. He only comes to her in her dreams and he is not seen by anybody else, nor does he have any physical manifestation at all. Dr. Charles “the butcher” Walker is a dead serial killer that was lynched in 1902 for butchering women in the old west.
So basically, in the first episode you begin to realize that I am a dead serial killer that makes new serial killers. I live in a sort of twilight area neither one place or another, and it takes me a long time to talk people into becoming my disciples. I’m the voice in the head that these people hear. It’s about a fifteen-year span [to create a serial killer] for the first five years I’m just an annoying voice in their head. For the next five years it consumes them, and for the last five years I am the only thing they hear. There are people that are more susceptible to this than others, and Alison’s gift on MEDIUM is that she has the ability to sense it and to feel these things. That’s the type of person I’m looking for to make into a serial killer.
It becomes a very complex situation. In the first episode I’m one line in a dream sequence, and she can’t put together how a dead doctor and a girl are all in the same place and aren’t connected. She discovers, ultimately, that the connection is me but in manner that she doesn’t know.
As complicated and convoluted as that gets, he [Glen Caron] had promised me there was another episode. I was happy because I was shooting 24 at the time and I had just gotten the news that I was being killed. I had just done my last episode of 24, and I got the call from Glen and he asked, “Are you dead yet?” I asked why and he said, “Because you can’t die on my show.” [Laughs] Which I thought was brilliant.
I told him that I was going to be dead and he said he was writing a script that I would get in the next couple of weeks.
iF: What happened next?
SHEPPARD: I got the script and I discovered it was all about me pursuing Ariel [Alison’s daughter] the 12 year old; which is an extraordinary direction for the story to take. Of course, this reveals that Alison’s children are also sensitive to all of these things. So, Ariel Dubois encounters me not knowing that I am not the librarian of her school, which is a truly horrifying thing. As a matter of fact, I have been accosted more times by parents as a result of that episode. I was basically talking to a twelve year old in the episode saying, “It’s ok to lie to your family, and you don’t have to tell them everything. It’s ok if you go to this boy’s house. Your parents don’t need to know everything, you’re a big girl you can do what you want to do.” That’s all kind of nasty, and I have kids myself, so it’s kind of terrifying.
So, the second episode had my intentions being for her [Alison] to flip out and be put in jail, because she promised at the end of the first episode to hunt me down and stop anyone I tried to turn. But, putting her in jail for a crime would give me enough time to work on this new “butcher” guy that I had set up to be a killer. Of course she works her way out. At the end of the episode I sort of evaporate with the line, “ you people are pathetic.” I go into the ether, but since I’m dead its sort of the context of the song never ending.
iF: So now with the third season they’re planning on having some kind of return for you?
SHEPPARD: At the beginning of sitting down and working out the third season Glen, René Echevarria, Moira Dekker, Javier Grillo-Marxuach, and others sat down and tried to plot the return of Dr. Walker. It has been a very complicated task. There is a suggestion that has come to mind that maybe a descendant of Dr. Walker’s walks the Earth. In this episode that goes into production shortly, there is the possibility that Allison has 2 entities to deal with, but only time will tell in what manner. And of course, this time it’s personal. Full interview
Tags: dr walker, mark sheppard, medium, medium nbc, interview
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