It was definitely a better "cliffhanger" than Season 2. It was more akin to the ending of Season 1. But still, I wonder when Season 4 is going to pick up timeline-wise.
UGO Editor-in-Chief Chris Radtke spent some quality time with Kurt Sutter, creator of Sons of Anarchy, to talk about Season Three, the explosive finale and what's down the road for SAMCRO.
CHRIS RADTKE: I just watched the Season Three Finale and I have to say: nice glasses, Otto.
KURT SUTTER: Oh, thanks man.
RADTKE: Did you always see Agent Stahl going out like that?
KURT: When we introduced her character in Season One, she was obviously a different animal than the current character, but Ally Walker brought this great sort of quirky madness to Stahl. You know Ally just has this crazy gleam in her eye.
RADTKE: She has that wild eye.
KURT: It really was. She really helped me shape that character and making her a little more of a predator. She was probably more of a sexual predator than any of our guys were. You know she had that crazy energy. We pushed the envelope, I've always sort of pushed toward getting to the most absurd choices organically as we can, and I think the choices she made with that character really gave me the freedom to go down that road. I think once the scene happened with Otto in the prison, I think that was really the turning point for Stahl in terms of crossing the line, in that it's no longer a necessarily objective opinion, it became personal for her.
You know obviously this season Jax plays her like a fiddle in terms of knowing where her weaknesses are and you know that Alpha Cop Paradox which is you become so obsessed with getting the bad guy that you ultimately have to become more evil than the evil you are pursuing. They played with that all the time on The Shield. I really think that was the case for Stahl this year. Seeing her need to use the Sons to get to the bigger goal of the IRA and this whole international gun running thing that would make her a superstar and that she's ultimately a woman that is driven and probably not unlike Tig, I think she's sociopathic and has no intimacy. I think all her relationships including the one with Agent Tyler weren't about intimacy, they were all as a means to an end.
I wasn't quite sure how the whole scapegoat thing would play out but ultimately as we started creating this character of Tyler and she became a greater threat to what Stahl wanted to do, it served Stahl's character best if she killed two birds with one stone, literally. We were able to push boundaries with that and to me I always knew there would be that reaction that happens in the finale when Jax figures out exactly what she's done. Jax has that moment where he literally takes a step back from her because he realizes that she's nuts. That ultimately she's far more evil or Machiavellian than he or Clay or the Club is. We knew we were going to cater down that road, and there's not a lot of places you can go after that.
RADTKE: She's one of the best TV villains I've seen in years. What do you do without her?
KURT: I hear that, and ultimately the truth is that after this season, after what she's done to Tyler karmically, she has to go away, you can't get away with that. The same way Jimmy couldn't get away with what he was doing. Honestly I always think of the way I can tell a fresh story without it feeling derivative, and after this whole thing I don't know how to plug Stahl in there without it becoming a variation of what was done before. So yeah, it sucks to lose her but ultimately I think that for the narrative to move forward and Jax to be a rat, obviously all that had to go down. You know, I think we earned that death.
RADTKE: Lets talk about Jimmy and the Irish. It was interesting to spend time in Belfast with the IRA and SAMBEL. The IRA storyline was something really unique in terms of organized crime on television. You don't see the IRA used very often. Where did that come from? What made you chose the IRA?
KURT: That's always been a component in the show, at the conception of the series I knew the whole gun-running thing, for me I loved the idea of creating mythology and this mythology was in place when I created the series. This is how the gun-running started, it started with the Irish, it started with McGee and John Teller and all the stuff that we revealed this season was back story that had been there since the beginning. Also my personal fascination with the IRA, the history of Ireland and Northern Ireland and Michael Collins, I didn't get into it but to me there are a lot of parallels with Michael Collins and John Teller. I'm not Irish, I'm Norwegian and Austrian, but I've always been fascinated by the history of it and was pulled in by the political intrigue of it all.
I thought for me it there were really interesting parallels. The IRA are an outlaw group, they have an anarchistic point-of-view about freedom. There were distinct parallels with the IRA, and obviously now the real IRA, and outlaw clubs. Not specifically the IRA, but traditionally MCs have always aligned themselves with bigger entities in terms of how they make a living and it usually involves protection, it's what they did in Canada and what they started doing here. To me it was all sorts of organic and made a lot of sense. I wanted to use those parallels and what was going on in the real IRA and what Jimmy was doing to recruit kids into the Full Life and all the parallels with the same thing happening in the MC world and doing that while revealing information about the history of the club and obviously the mythology. I'm fascinated by that stuff and that narrative and I think it was a challenge for some of the viewers this season in that in wasn't.
RADTKE: Sometimes it was tough to understand with what they were saying.
KURT: Well not only that but I just think narratively the fact that we left Charming and the fact that it wasn't all incestuous in terms of the club. I think people had struggled with those bigger themes and the show being a little more epic this year than in the past, but for me expanding the world, and I love the notion of these guys being thrown into an environment where for the first time they were little fish in a big pond. They weren't used to seeing that level of violence. They weren't used to being out of control and being at the mercy of other people. I think again, people struggled with that a little bit in terms with them not being as proactive as they normally would be but to me that was kind of the point of it all.
RADTKE: I thought it was a great departure from what we're used to. It was great filling out the story and just the way you shot it. The color palette...
KURT: Yeah, we did two weeks of the second year there and then a sh**load of post color correcting where everything was fu**ing brown.
RADTKE: A computer generated Belfast glum.
KURT: Yeah. I spent thousands of dollars greening Southern California.
RADTKE: You mentioned building the mythos. Everybody has stories and you develop your characters. One of the reasons why the show is so good is because everybody has a story. Take Margaret, for example. Who knew she has giant back tattoo?
KURT: To me there was something interesting about the Margaret character and in impact on Tara, we had Jenna sort of in her ear and being the voice of the club and yet we had Margaret sort of in her ear, this other maternal figure, essentially being the voice of reason and saying this is not who you are, and sort of being pushed and pulled by these people and for Margaret to sort of have that heated discourse with Tara last season, and getting slugged, and yet have her still come back at her and try to save her to me had to come from a deeper place. And I didn't know I was going to do this with Margaret at the end of last season. It really involved this season, as I liked the idea of her sort of being this other voice in Tara's ear, especially with Jenna being away.
But to do that it's got to be deeper than just hey this is not the right thing to do, like why is fu**ing Margaret so invested in Tara, why does she really give a sh**, you know? I think that's why we decided to play out the whole thing with the kidnapping and the abduction, that we got to see some of her back story and we realize the reason she is so invested is that it's personal for her, and that she was in the same position as Tara, not necessarily as an MC but a darker version of Almost Famous. She was this groupie who ultimately lost herself to some guy she thought she was in love with and it almost killed her. She sees Tara in the same fate, as loving a guy who will ultimately get her killed and that's why it's so personal to her. It's really about how do I give this character something rich and more potent so that you understand. In other words, taking something that was ultimately a device for Tara in terms of being the other voice and then giving her some depth so that she becomes more of a character than just the voice. At least, that was the attempt.
RADTKE: Is there a story behind Deputy Hale's death? Did Taylor Sheridan get another gig?
KURT: Without it becoming gossipy, I dig Taylor, I think he's a sweet guy and I think he's a great actor. Initially we got into conversations about, you know, quite honestly about money early in this season. For whatever, it justified reasons. We are a show of limited means and ultimately it looked like we weren't going to be able to make a deal with him so our writers and I were forced to go back and go okay, if that happens, what are we looking at? We came up with a Plan B and ultimately everyone fell in love with Plan B, which was killing him off and then putting the burden of charming on Unser.
We suddenly loved that idea so, unfortunately, even though ultimately I think Taylor came around and a deal was going to be struck, what ended up happening was thematically and story-wise we all fell in love with the idea. It's just one of those things that probably wouldn't have happened if we could have reached a deal earlier, and it was by no means punitive -- it was really just about what's best for the show and ultimately it really became best for the show and I'm really glad we did it because it the narrative was so big this year that we really had limited time for a lot of our secondary characters, and had we left him in the mix I think it would have even been stretched thinner.
So that's really what it became, and ultimately seeing the burden of that fall onto Hale's brother, who will ultimately be mayor, and Unser, who's suddenly in a position where he has to chose between Charming and the Club.
RADTKE: Your cast is a small army of "That Guy" character actors. Did you create characters with actors in mind?
KURT: You know, myself and John Lin, my other executive producer, were really responsible for the casting, and my great casting director, Wendy O'Brien. I don't think it's about writing characters based on actors but I think ultimately what happens and if you're smart, and if you're a smart showrunner, is that as your actors sort of live in these characters for a while and their idiosyncrasy as human beings and through the choices that they make, they inform who the characters are. So I think as a result of having great actors, the characters become three-dimensional. I'm always making narrative decisions based on what my actors bring to the roles.
You know, when I hired Kim Coates as Tig, Tig was by no means in my mind at the time going to be a character that brought a lot of humor to the show. In my mind that character was going to be Bobby Elvis, but what ends up happening is you have an actor like Mark Boone who has such gravitas and is so soulful that ultimately he wasn't the right device for humor. He and Opie are kind of the conscience of the club. But then you have an actor like Kim Coates who has such a great sense of irony and is really by nature a funny, quirky cat, suddenly that character now, you go, "Oh, that's the guy." He's the guy that you can turn upside down and make absurd and layer in all these odd things.
RADTKE: Like getting shot in the ass?
KURT: Yeah, just keep playing with him and it never feels like comedy, it always feels like it's commanded by character.
RADTKE: I love it when Shield alumni show up. You had Jay Carnes and then the Chicken Man was played by David Marciano. But Kenny Johnson showed up last season and then having him in this season, with the opening shot in the last episode of Season Two when you see him for the first time I hit pause, "Is that Lem? Jesus Christ!" The fact that he was in this season was a real treat. Are we going to see more of him in Season Four?
KURT: I knew I had to have some sort of dynamic with the Club and Charming, that's why we left Tig and Kozik to play out their dynamic this year. I felt like Kenny is such a great actor and you know even though we had that arc with Tig, you know he as a result of the big stories was underutilized as well because he's another soulful guy. I would like to bring him back. I have to get into the season and see what other actors you know, if there's any guest stars and what the other roles are this season.
I'd like to bring Kenny back, but again I need to make sure I have something I can do with Kenny rather than have him sort of just linger in the background sometimes, as our guys tend to do. I don't want to do that with Kenny as well but yeah, I thought he did a great job, and the beef between them about the dog -- my writer Chris Collins came up with that idea - is classic. But to me that was one of the most tender scenes in the season, was the two of them talking on that swing set. You know, yeah. I would love to if it makes sense and we can make the deal I'd love to bring Kenny back.
RADTKE: I was thinking about what I should ask you and I'd love to see Walton Goggins there and [Michael] Chiklis may be looking for work soon.
KURT: Yeah, I think so.
RADTKE: You talk about the guys in the background like Happy, he gets a couple of moments of screen time and he cracks that psychotic look in his eye and you're like, there you go, man.
KURT: Yeah, yeah. It's hard, man, I have such great guys and you know obviously I have 40 minutes, 41 minutes, whatever the hell I have. It's hard, it's really hard to sort of play stuff out and give guys a lot to d,o but I also think there's guys like Happy, like a little Happy goes a long way.
RADTKE: So I do want to touch on the fact that you've given your wife [Katey Sagal] one of the greatest gifts a guy can give her. A character like Gemma comes around only once every generation, it's like Carmela Soprano, Alexis Carrington and Gemma. Did you create with Katey in mind? What's the creative process when creating her? I mean are you sitting at the dinner table saying, "Let's do this?"
KURT: Katey isn't involved in the writing. I did, I talked about this a lot first season, I wrote the role with Katey in mind and inspired by, you know, Katey is a really strong mother. When I hooked up with her she had two kids from a previous marriage and I was always impressed with how strong she was and how protective she was as a mother and I always thought what would a character like that look like in this world. Not that Katey uses physical violence or anything in taking care of her kids, but like if you have somebody who has that fierce maternal drive, but is in that world where there aren't a lot of social filters, where violence is an obvious choice, what does a strong maternal figure look like in that world?
In that context she definitely was the inspiration and then I think as Katey kind of grew into the character again she continued to inform me and impress me as where she could go and what she could do and continues to do so. Her obsessive need to take care of that family is like a lot of obsessive things - ultimately, probably does more damage than good. What does that look like and how does that play out?
RADTKE: So one of the things that I can't get enough of, anything that's got the Reaper on it I'm going to buy, Jax's and his collection of custom T-shirts and hoodies... I think you've got a second income there with all of that.
KURT: Unfortunately none of that goes into my pocket, but yeah I think there is a bunch. You know it's interesting, Charlie [Hunnam] had a lot to do with those shirts. He asked me for permission, he had this idea, and our wardrobe people did some and I came up with a couple, but Charlie came up with a bunch as well. You know Charlie is the one that came up with those two Sons rings, the SO and the NS, and he started wearing it last season and I loved it, and I used it this season. In fact they wanted to sell those rings on the website and I asked them not to until after this season was over because I didn't want to exploit it that much. Yeah, we'll continue to sell. I think the Sons shirt is available. What I didn't want to do is, because I know once it goes on sale on the website, I know Charlie the actor is not going to wear it again. I didn't want to exploit all the stuff he did, but a bunch of it is, and I think as seasons progress, and I know they are selling very well.
I mean the plan really wasn't to do all this expansive marketing, but I think as all the pirating started happening, and we saw the way the pirates were exploiting it I think ultimately FOX felt like well we can't stop all this from happening but I think we can try to generate it from a home site where it is legitimate and it is licensed and perhaps if people want to buy legitimate stuff there is a place to buy it. I think that's why they did all that.
RADTKE: You get some great guest stars on the show. Stephen King this season was pretty awesome. How does something like that happen and who would be your dream people to get on the show?
KURT: That's a good question. The Stephen King thing happened just because Stephen was a big fan of The Shield, and we actually tried to get him to do a cameo on that but we never made it happen because of scheduling. You know, I knew he was a big fan of the show when we had started exchanging e-mails a while back and I gave him carte blanche, either write, direct, or star in an episode and his whole thing was he just wanted to be on the show and his only mandate was that he got to ride a motorcycle. So it just turned out, he was out here to pick up some book award and it would happen during the third episode so I was able to have a little bit of lead time on that and come up with who his character was. I pitched it to him and he loved it and we had a blast, man. He was like a fu**ing fan boy, he was so excited to be out there and meet the guys and he was on a big red Harley. Yeah I thought he was fu**ing hysterical. I thought he did a great job. ,
In terms of dream cast, I don't know, it's hard to say just because until I really have a sense of having a character in mind it's hard to envision who that might be, you know. I will say that Hal Holbrook thing was a dream cast, you know what I mean. Like coming up with Gemma's father and then a list of potential actors, he was by far at the top of my list and never I never thought we would be able to get him and ultimately it worked out, so that was just one of those dream scenarios.
RADTKE: Were you a big [Henry] Rollins fan?
KURT: I was. You know, it's interesting, I knew Henry's manager, we knew each other through acquaintances and I knew Henry was a fan of The Shield and was interested in acting and I met with him at the end of Season One and we just started bullsh***ing. He was just a very respectful guy, he loved the show, he loved the world, and you know he was really open for anything and then I came up with the character and I pitched the idea to him and he loved it.
RADTKE: At the end we got a glimpse of the "Search and Destroy" tattoo.
KURT: Yeah. His whole thing was, he was so funny, he hadn't gotten a tattoo in a while, he said he was just going to get the words "Fu** You" written across his chest. I was like that's awesome, okay.
RADTKE: Is there an endgame for SAMCRO? Is there a natural end that you have in mind?
KURT: Yeah, I think so. I think ultimately it's Jax's story and it will continue to play out as his story and his ability or inability to stay connected to the Club. I have a sense of what I had from the beginning, where the big mile markers are and what seasons some of those things play out. I do, I mentioned seven seasons primarily because I know it's a life expectancy of a cable model in terms of after seven seasons they don't become economically feasible because your above-the-line costs become too great so if I can get seven seasons, if we continue to get the viewers that we've been getting then yeah I kind of know how I'd like to get to play out. At least the broad strokes
Yeah Gemma has been needing to die for a while now. This season is going so good so I hope they don't fuck it up. But if they wait until the last episode of this season to reveal that Gemma did the deed and not the chinese, I will be pissed. They should reveal it tonight's episode. If they reveal it in the last one, the whole season would have been pointless.
Comments
Tuesday nights will suck now.
Anyway, here's a interview with Kurt Sutter:
http://www.ugo.com/therush/gallery/kurt-sutter-soa-interview/712/1/
UGO Editor-in-Chief Chris Radtke spent some quality time with Kurt Sutter, creator of Sons of Anarchy, to talk about Season Three, the explosive finale and what's down the road for SAMCRO.
CHRIS RADTKE: I just watched the Season Three Finale and I have to say: nice glasses, Otto.
KURT SUTTER: Oh, thanks man.
RADTKE: Did you always see Agent Stahl going out like that?
KURT: When we introduced her character in Season One, she was obviously a different animal than the current character, but Ally Walker brought this great sort of quirky madness to Stahl. You know Ally just has this crazy gleam in her eye.
RADTKE: She has that wild eye.
KURT: It really was. She really helped me shape that character and making her a little more of a predator. She was probably more of a sexual predator than any of our guys were. You know she had that crazy energy. We pushed the envelope, I've always sort of pushed toward getting to the most absurd choices organically as we can, and I think the choices she made with that character really gave me the freedom to go down that road. I think once the scene happened with Otto in the prison, I think that was really the turning point for Stahl in terms of crossing the line, in that it's no longer a necessarily objective opinion, it became personal for her.
You know obviously this season Jax plays her like a fiddle in terms of knowing where her weaknesses are and you know that Alpha Cop Paradox which is you become so obsessed with getting the bad guy that you ultimately have to become more evil than the evil you are pursuing. They played with that all the time on The Shield. I really think that was the case for Stahl this year. Seeing her need to use the Sons to get to the bigger goal of the IRA and this whole international gun running thing that would make her a superstar and that she's ultimately a woman that is driven and probably not unlike Tig, I think she's sociopathic and has no intimacy. I think all her relationships including the one with Agent Tyler weren't about intimacy, they were all as a means to an end.
I wasn't quite sure how the whole scapegoat thing would play out but ultimately as we started creating this character of Tyler and she became a greater threat to what Stahl wanted to do, it served Stahl's character best if she killed two birds with one stone, literally. We were able to push boundaries with that and to me I always knew there would be that reaction that happens in the finale when Jax figures out exactly what she's done. Jax has that moment where he literally takes a step back from her because he realizes that she's nuts. That ultimately she's far more evil or Machiavellian than he or Clay or the Club is. We knew we were going to cater down that road, and there's not a lot of places you can go after that.
RADTKE: She's one of the best TV villains I've seen in years. What do you do without her?
KURT: I hear that, and ultimately the truth is that after this season, after what she's done to Tyler karmically, she has to go away, you can't get away with that. The same way Jimmy couldn't get away with what he was doing. Honestly I always think of the way I can tell a fresh story without it feeling derivative, and after this whole thing I don't know how to plug Stahl in there without it becoming a variation of what was done before. So yeah, it sucks to lose her but ultimately I think that for the narrative to move forward and Jax to be a rat, obviously all that had to go down. You know, I think we earned that death.
RADTKE: Lets talk about Jimmy and the Irish. It was interesting to spend time in Belfast with the IRA and SAMBEL. The IRA storyline was something really unique in terms of organized crime on television. You don't see the IRA used very often. Where did that come from? What made you chose the IRA?
KURT: That's always been a component in the show, at the conception of the series I knew the whole gun-running thing, for me I loved the idea of creating mythology and this mythology was in place when I created the series. This is how the gun-running started, it started with the Irish, it started with McGee and John Teller and all the stuff that we revealed this season was back story that had been there since the beginning. Also my personal fascination with the IRA, the history of Ireland and Northern Ireland and Michael Collins, I didn't get into it but to me there are a lot of parallels with Michael Collins and John Teller. I'm not Irish, I'm Norwegian and Austrian, but I've always been fascinated by the history of it and was pulled in by the political intrigue of it all.
I thought for me it there were really interesting parallels. The IRA are an outlaw group, they have an anarchistic point-of-view about freedom. There were distinct parallels with the IRA, and obviously now the real IRA, and outlaw clubs. Not specifically the IRA, but traditionally MCs have always aligned themselves with bigger entities in terms of how they make a living and it usually involves protection, it's what they did in Canada and what they started doing here. To me it was all sorts of organic and made a lot of sense. I wanted to use those parallels and what was going on in the real IRA and what Jimmy was doing to recruit kids into the Full Life and all the parallels with the same thing happening in the MC world and doing that while revealing information about the history of the club and obviously the mythology. I'm fascinated by that stuff and that narrative and I think it was a challenge for some of the viewers this season in that in wasn't.
RADTKE: Sometimes it was tough to understand with what they were saying.
KURT: Well not only that but I just think narratively the fact that we left Charming and the fact that it wasn't all incestuous in terms of the club. I think people had struggled with those bigger themes and the show being a little more epic this year than in the past, but for me expanding the world, and I love the notion of these guys being thrown into an environment where for the first time they were little fish in a big pond. They weren't used to seeing that level of violence. They weren't used to being out of control and being at the mercy of other people. I think again, people struggled with that a little bit in terms with them not being as proactive as they normally would be but to me that was kind of the point of it all.
RADTKE: I thought it was a great departure from what we're used to. It was great filling out the story and just the way you shot it. The color palette...
KURT: Yeah, we did two weeks of the second year there and then a sh**load of post color correcting where everything was fu**ing brown.
RADTKE: A computer generated Belfast glum.
KURT: Yeah. I spent thousands of dollars greening Southern California.
KURT: To me there was something interesting about the Margaret character and in impact on Tara, we had Jenna sort of in her ear and being the voice of the club and yet we had Margaret sort of in her ear, this other maternal figure, essentially being the voice of reason and saying this is not who you are, and sort of being pushed and pulled by these people and for Margaret to sort of have that heated discourse with Tara last season, and getting slugged, and yet have her still come back at her and try to save her to me had to come from a deeper place. And I didn't know I was going to do this with Margaret at the end of last season. It really involved this season, as I liked the idea of her sort of being this other voice in Tara's ear, especially with Jenna being away.
But to do that it's got to be deeper than just hey this is not the right thing to do, like why is fu**ing Margaret so invested in Tara, why does she really give a sh**, you know? I think that's why we decided to play out the whole thing with the kidnapping and the abduction, that we got to see some of her back story and we realize the reason she is so invested is that it's personal for her, and that she was in the same position as Tara, not necessarily as an MC but a darker version of Almost Famous. She was this groupie who ultimately lost herself to some guy she thought she was in love with and it almost killed her. She sees Tara in the same fate, as loving a guy who will ultimately get her killed and that's why it's so personal to her. It's really about how do I give this character something rich and more potent so that you understand. In other words, taking something that was ultimately a device for Tara in terms of being the other voice and then giving her some depth so that she becomes more of a character than just the voice. At least, that was the attempt.
RADTKE: Is there a story behind Deputy Hale's death? Did Taylor Sheridan get another gig?
KURT: Without it becoming gossipy, I dig Taylor, I think he's a sweet guy and I think he's a great actor. Initially we got into conversations about, you know, quite honestly about money early in this season. For whatever, it justified reasons. We are a show of limited means and ultimately it looked like we weren't going to be able to make a deal with him so our writers and I were forced to go back and go okay, if that happens, what are we looking at? We came up with a Plan B and ultimately everyone fell in love with Plan B, which was killing him off and then putting the burden of charming on Unser.
We suddenly loved that idea so, unfortunately, even though ultimately I think Taylor came around and a deal was going to be struck, what ended up happening was thematically and story-wise we all fell in love with the idea. It's just one of those things that probably wouldn't have happened if we could have reached a deal earlier, and it was by no means punitive -- it was really just about what's best for the show and ultimately it really became best for the show and I'm really glad we did it because it the narrative was so big this year that we really had limited time for a lot of our secondary characters, and had we left him in the mix I think it would have even been stretched thinner.
So that's really what it became, and ultimately seeing the burden of that fall onto Hale's brother, who will ultimately be mayor, and Unser, who's suddenly in a position where he has to chose between Charming and the Club.
RADTKE: Your cast is a small army of "That Guy" character actors. Did you create characters with actors in mind?
KURT: You know, myself and John Lin, my other executive producer, were really responsible for the casting, and my great casting director, Wendy O'Brien. I don't think it's about writing characters based on actors but I think ultimately what happens and if you're smart, and if you're a smart showrunner, is that as your actors sort of live in these characters for a while and their idiosyncrasy as human beings and through the choices that they make, they inform who the characters are. So I think as a result of having great actors, the characters become three-dimensional. I'm always making narrative decisions based on what my actors bring to the roles.
You know, when I hired Kim Coates as Tig, Tig was by no means in my mind at the time going to be a character that brought a lot of humor to the show. In my mind that character was going to be Bobby Elvis, but what ends up happening is you have an actor like Mark Boone who has such gravitas and is so soulful that ultimately he wasn't the right device for humor. He and Opie are kind of the conscience of the club. But then you have an actor like Kim Coates who has such a great sense of irony and is really by nature a funny, quirky cat, suddenly that character now, you go, "Oh, that's the guy." He's the guy that you can turn upside down and make absurd and layer in all these odd things.
RADTKE: Like getting shot in the ass?
KURT: Yeah, just keep playing with him and it never feels like comedy, it always feels like it's commanded by character.
KURT: I knew I had to have some sort of dynamic with the Club and Charming, that's why we left Tig and Kozik to play out their dynamic this year. I felt like Kenny is such a great actor and you know even though we had that arc with Tig, you know he as a result of the big stories was underutilized as well because he's another soulful guy. I would like to bring him back. I have to get into the season and see what other actors you know, if there's any guest stars and what the other roles are this season.
I'd like to bring Kenny back, but again I need to make sure I have something I can do with Kenny rather than have him sort of just linger in the background sometimes, as our guys tend to do. I don't want to do that with Kenny as well but yeah, I thought he did a great job, and the beef between them about the dog -- my writer Chris Collins came up with that idea - is classic. But to me that was one of the most tender scenes in the season, was the two of them talking on that swing set. You know, yeah. I would love to if it makes sense and we can make the deal I'd love to bring Kenny back.
RADTKE: I was thinking about what I should ask you and I'd love to see Walton Goggins there and [Michael] Chiklis may be looking for work soon.
KURT: Yeah, I think so.
RADTKE: You talk about the guys in the background like Happy, he gets a couple of moments of screen time and he cracks that psychotic look in his eye and you're like, there you go, man.
KURT: Yeah, yeah. It's hard, man, I have such great guys and you know obviously I have 40 minutes, 41 minutes, whatever the hell I have. It's hard, it's really hard to sort of play stuff out and give guys a lot to d,o but I also think there's guys like Happy, like a little Happy goes a long way.
RADTKE: So I do want to touch on the fact that you've given your wife [Katey Sagal] one of the greatest gifts a guy can give her. A character like Gemma comes around only once every generation, it's like Carmela Soprano, Alexis Carrington and Gemma. Did you create with Katey in mind? What's the creative process when creating her? I mean are you sitting at the dinner table saying, "Let's do this?"
KURT: Katey isn't involved in the writing. I did, I talked about this a lot first season, I wrote the role with Katey in mind and inspired by, you know, Katey is a really strong mother. When I hooked up with her she had two kids from a previous marriage and I was always impressed with how strong she was and how protective she was as a mother and I always thought what would a character like that look like in this world. Not that Katey uses physical violence or anything in taking care of her kids, but like if you have somebody who has that fierce maternal drive, but is in that world where there aren't a lot of social filters, where violence is an obvious choice, what does a strong maternal figure look like in that world?
In that context she definitely was the inspiration and then I think as Katey kind of grew into the character again she continued to inform me and impress me as where she could go and what she could do and continues to do so. Her obsessive need to take care of that family is like a lot of obsessive things - ultimately, probably does more damage than good. What does that look like and how does that play out?
RADTKE: So one of the things that I can't get enough of, anything that's got the Reaper on it I'm going to buy, Jax's and his collection of custom T-shirts and hoodies... I think you've got a second income there with all of that.
KURT: Unfortunately none of that goes into my pocket, but yeah I think there is a bunch. You know it's interesting, Charlie [Hunnam] had a lot to do with those shirts. He asked me for permission, he had this idea, and our wardrobe people did some and I came up with a couple, but Charlie came up with a bunch as well. You know Charlie is the one that came up with those two Sons rings, the SO and the NS, and he started wearing it last season and I loved it, and I used it this season. In fact they wanted to sell those rings on the website and I asked them not to until after this season was over because I didn't want to exploit it that much. Yeah, we'll continue to sell. I think the Sons shirt is available. What I didn't want to do is, because I know once it goes on sale on the website, I know Charlie the actor is not going to wear it again. I didn't want to exploit all the stuff he did, but a bunch of it is, and I think as seasons progress, and I know they are selling very well.
I mean the plan really wasn't to do all this expansive marketing, but I think as all the pirating started happening, and we saw the way the pirates were exploiting it I think ultimately FOX felt like well we can't stop all this from happening but I think we can try to generate it from a home site where it is legitimate and it is licensed and perhaps if people want to buy legitimate stuff there is a place to buy it. I think that's why they did all that.
RADTKE: You get some great guest stars on the show. Stephen King this season was pretty awesome. How does something like that happen and who would be your dream people to get on the show?
KURT: That's a good question. The Stephen King thing happened just because Stephen was a big fan of The Shield, and we actually tried to get him to do a cameo on that but we never made it happen because of scheduling. You know, I knew he was a big fan of the show when we had started exchanging e-mails a while back and I gave him carte blanche, either write, direct, or star in an episode and his whole thing was he just wanted to be on the show and his only mandate was that he got to ride a motorcycle. So it just turned out, he was out here to pick up some book award and it would happen during the third episode so I was able to have a little bit of lead time on that and come up with who his character was. I pitched it to him and he loved it and we had a blast, man. He was like a fu**ing fan boy, he was so excited to be out there and meet the guys and he was on a big red Harley. Yeah I thought he was fu**ing hysterical. I thought he did a great job. ,
In terms of dream cast, I don't know, it's hard to say just because until I really have a sense of having a character in mind it's hard to envision who that might be, you know. I will say that Hal Holbrook thing was a dream cast, you know what I mean. Like coming up with Gemma's father and then a list of potential actors, he was by far at the top of my list and never I never thought we would be able to get him and ultimately it worked out, so that was just one of those dream scenarios.
RADTKE: Were you a big [Henry] Rollins fan?
KURT: I was. You know, it's interesting, I knew Henry's manager, we knew each other through acquaintances and I knew Henry was a fan of The Shield and was interested in acting and I met with him at the end of Season One and we just started bullsh***ing. He was just a very respectful guy, he loved the show, he loved the world, and you know he was really open for anything and then I came up with the character and I pitched the idea to him and he loved it.
RADTKE: At the end we got a glimpse of the "Search and Destroy" tattoo.
KURT: Yeah. His whole thing was, he was so funny, he hadn't gotten a tattoo in a while, he said he was just going to get the words "Fu** You" written across his chest. I was like that's awesome, okay.
RADTKE: Is there an endgame for SAMCRO? Is there a natural end that you have in mind?
KURT: Yeah, I think so. I think ultimately it's Jax's story and it will continue to play out as his story and his ability or inability to stay connected to the Club. I have a sense of what I had from the beginning, where the big mile markers are and what seasons some of those things play out. I do, I mentioned seven seasons primarily because I know it's a life expectancy of a cable model in terms of after seven seasons they don't become economically feasible because your above-the-line costs become too great so if I can get seven seasons, if we continue to get the viewers that we've been getting then yeah I kind of know how I'd like to get to play out. At least the broad strokes
And then allures to it all starting again with Abel.