The Point Radio: Sean Hayes Steps In To Save The World

Somebody needs to save us all, so why not Sean Hayes? We talk to Sean about his busy summer producing and why he is back in front of the camera again in SEAN SAVES THE WORLD. Plus Hugh Jackman and Maria Bello explain why their roles in PRISONERS were so difficult, and is Sharon Carter headed to TV? THE POINT covers it 24/7! Take us ANYWHERE! The Point Radio App is now in the iTunes App store – and it’s FREE! Just search under “pop culture The Point”. The Point Radio – 24 hours a day of pop culture fun for FREE. GO HERE and LISTEN FREE on any computer or on any other mobile device with the Tune In Radio app – and follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.

Transcript

The Point Radio Hello, it's Mike Raub. We're going to get someone to save the world. Sean Hayes just might be the guy to do it. His new NBC comedy set to debut and he's got a sneak peek towards it. Plus Hugh Jackman and Maria Bello talk about how difficult it was to get into their roles from prisoners. And Agent Carter on TV, let's get to The Point.

This is The Point. The Point Radio gets The Point Radio. The psychodrama Prisoners stars Hugh Jackman, Maria Bello and Jake Gyllenhaal. And it involves missing children and the conflict between parents and police, all trying to find them. Right off the bat, Hugh told me there was a lot of research for his role. So the research is so much about sleep deprivation for me because the movie takes place in 8 or 9 days.

And when I read something from a father whose kid was gone, who said the most maddening part of the whole thing is the powerlessness of a parent. The knowing that your child is waiting for you and can't understand why you're not there every second of every day. And they're not waiting for the police to come rescue you. And the police the entire time are saying, please let us do a job. Just relax. And it's maddening. So the idea of what to sleep is to fail your child in a way. It's impossible to just go and rest.

And so we looked into that of what would happen, shaking hands or even in the first scene. We all know what it's like to stay up all night. But you see the first scene with Viola and Terrence and the two of us. It's almost the incomprehension of taking the information. And I think in the scene that we had in the living room, of just physically trying to take concepts in. From Maria getting into her character all involved, the look. My costumes are really important to me. And I said when I was doing the costume fitting, it doesn't feel right for her to ever change her clothes.

She's stuck in this moment, in this day. She cannot, it's a week. And you see my hair get greasier. And I really did sort of not shower. But greasier and tireder through our awesome makeup artist, Donald. And also the nights when I drank really late. So that was easy to do that. But it was those little details being really specific. And having those clothes for the same time and then changing what happened when I went to the hospital was really interesting for my character. You and co-star Jake Gyllenhaal spend a lot of the movie playing off one another with intense gripping scenes. And I ask how they both handle it off camera.

It's a great question about the scenes. I love working with Jake and I think you can see it in the movie. And for two characters who are kind of lone wolves on their journey, their relationship I think is really important to the story. They only have four scenes together. Maybe five? Four or five scenes. And we talked about that a lot. How we talked, we rehearsed. And we really wanted to make the most of those. And actually it was one of those occasions where as actors, none of us really wanted to leave the scene.

I know it was precious to move on. But we really wanted to dive in and investigate them because it was a precious little time we had together. I think, you know, I remember a number of times coming. I would spend the evening sort of letting go of whatever we did during the day. And then, you know, we were shooting in Atlanta and there were so many wonderful restaurants. And that was some sort of therapy. Food became a little bit of a therapy in a way. But then I remember also on the way to work often what I do is I sort of try and meditate on certain things in the scene.

But I would always start to watch videos of certain interrogation videos, police videos. Sometimes really horrific videos that I wouldn't really want to go into. And there were a number of times on my way to work where I could feel myself resist how dark this world was. Even in reality, you know, because you have to throw yourself into them because they were all real videos. And I could feel that push and that pull inside me as I drove to work.

And by the time I, and sometimes it would panic me, you know. I mean, sometimes when you see things, you watch something like that, you know, you don't even know how to respond. It's so visceral. Interrogations or police footage or whatever it might be. And it really broke me into this world, you know, I think that particularly. And then, you know, you'd spend the day trying to use that work as a therapy out of it, you know, and then eat more.

Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal and Maria Bello in Frisners and theaters right now. The science radio. The line going on is the very latest in pop culture. A few years ago, it was Colin Firth who was said to go before the cameras to portray legendary filmmaker Roger Corman. In the movie, the man with colitis go bys.

Now, after some delays, that has changed to Quentin Tarantino. That comes from a pretty good source, Roger Corman himself, who also says the film is being fast tracked to get into production sometime in the very near future. The on the press graphic novel Ghost Project is now in development by NBC, and it does make sense considering current world events. The story of Ghost Project centers on an American U.N. weapons inspector and a Russian agent who are forced to team up to chase a group of thieves before they end up spreading dangerous materials stolen from an old Russian weapons lab around the world.

Right now, it seems that writer, Eric Gitter, may be the front runner to write the project. First, there was the featurette that's going to turn up on the Blu-ray edition of Iron Man 3 in a couple of weeks. And now there's talk that there may be an Agent Carter television series. Haley Adwell has been pretty vocal about talking about how much she likes the character, although no word yet on whether she'd be involved in the ABC series. Overall, a Marvel based series with a female lead could look pretty good on the ABC schedule.

DC is trying to get the message to retailers that Sandman is still a very hot property. Sandman Overture will be set to hit stores at the end of October, and they're giving retailers a chance to order as many as they want with them being fully returnable at the end of the sales period. The sales history of the Neil Gaiman Project of course has always been hot. Endless Night's Hardcorever have a print of about 100,000, and the last issue of Sandman number 75 was perennial, a reorder favored on Diamond's List for a number of months. Again, Sandman Overture number one will be in your comics tour right around the 30th of October.

Robert Kirkman is touting the new Walking Dead series, which allegedly will take place in the same universe, but with a different area and different characters involved. Kirkman said he's excited about exploring a new corner of the Walking Dead universe. AMC on the other hand should be pretty excited about having a show they could run in the off months when Walking Dead the original isn't on. Right now it looks like this new series will be set for debut sometime in 2015. Well the question of what's next for Bryan Cranston may have been answered, at least in one part.

It looks like Bryan will be taking the lead in the Jay Lynch film Trumbo. It's a fact-based feature based on the story of the man who broke the Hollywood Blacklist back in the 50s. John McNamara did the script for the film, and it's set to go before the cameras early in 2014. DC's Forever Evil tried something different with covers. Marvel's Origin 2 is going to do the same.

Now Valiant Entertainment has had some pretty remarkable technology involved with talking covers back in 2012, has come up with a new breakthrough for their team-up book Unity. The Unity Tech variant cover uses something called QR technology, and it unlocks a 2.5 minute 8-bit animated video game, which is almost like a short film, that explains what's going on in the comic before you actually read it.

Better make sure your retailer's got one of these for you, Unity No. 1 hits comic stores on November 13th. Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon has been a successful game series for a while, and has been talked for quite a little bit about doing a movie. Now it looks like that's moving ahead. Variety reports that writers from Jericho, Matthew Fetterman and Steven Sakia are also writing this,

as well as an adaptation of Bryan K. Vaughan's Why the Last Man 2. That one has had all sorts of delays over the past few years, and hopefully Ghost Recon will get on the road sometime early in 2014. In all the excitement evolving the last two episodes of Breaking Bad, now AMC is supersizing those episodes.

One set for this week and the finale for September 29th, both will be 75 minutes each, including commercials. AMC has reminded folks to make sure their DVRs are set to handle this. The Point Radio. After successfully producing shows like The Big Hitter with the summer Hollywood game night,

Sean Hayes is back in front of the camera with a new NBC comedy, Sean Saves the World. So why come back to TV now? Well, everything's about timing, and I know a lot of friends and fans had been saying, when are you coming back to TV, when are you coming back to TV, which is a wonderful thing to hear, and then the network asks,

when are you coming back to TV, and like everything is about timing. And so all these things just came in line, and when I met with Victor Fresco, the creator of the show, we were talking around ideas, and we landed on this one, and I was like, yeah, I've never seen that character on TV before, a single gay dad raising a family, or raising his daughter, actually.

And so, to me, television is all about characters you haven't seen and relationships you haven't seen, and this one I haven't seen yet, so I thought that was interesting. Some critics have already called the show groundbreaking, but Sean isn't fully comfortable with that just yet.

Absolutely not. If that's a byproduct of their viewing experience, fantastic. But it's definitely not in the forefront of our minds when creating the show week to week. It's making people laugh and telling great stories. I think with me playing a gay dad, the gay part should be the fifth most interesting thing about the character. It definitely doesn't need to be focused on that, just like in real life.

If it's groundbreaking for being extra funny, great. But there's no agenda here. Sean saves the world centers around Sean's character, and it's one that he hopes will grow during the season. The goal is for him to move forward and evolve as the show goes on, and that includes more dating and hopefully sooner than later,

and he'll come down with somebody, including that person into our family and mine and his. And where did that title come from? That actually was the first title that Victor came up with, Victor Fresco, the showrunner. I hate coming up with titles, and he just loved the irony of my character thinking the way to the world, quite literally, was on my shoulders and balancing all the crazy people in my life in my own world,

which feels like the entire world is on your shoulders. So I think that's just the thought of it. And it was kind of fun for my name to be in the title, and it just seems to fit the show perfectly for what my character does to every weight. Last year, Sean was on Smash for a story arc and had some great chemistry with actress Megan Hildy. And now she's on his show.

She's fantastic. I mean, we are so fortunate to get her and to have her come on board to share her talent. And, you know, I'm excited for viewers who are fans of hers from either Smash or Broadway or anywhere to see on a large scale her comedy chops, which are brilliant. And she is just a delight to have around and adds so much comedy to the team. So we're very lucky to get her.

In addition to Megan, there's Linda Lavin. She is a living legend. She is a lot of people don't know her extensive success on stage and on Broadway. We have a lot of theater folks on the show, which I think is a huge factor in cultivating a hit sitcom. Sickoms are multi-cams, I should say, are the closest things related to theater.

And so in that sense, we're so fortunate to get Linda on board, Tony Award winning Linda Lavin, who you could give literally any line to and she'd get a huge laugh. And so aside from being incredibly talented and gifted and zingers and playing the truth of scenes, she is also an incredibly warm down to earth person. And we've developed this wonderful working relationship where I actually do think I actually do feel like it's my real mom. You know, of course, nobody can take place in my real mom, but she certainly comes close with all these different ambitions. Who really inspires Sean?

Oh, that's such a great question. Well, my comedy idols growing up were Marty Short and Steve Martin. And my music idols classically were Mozart for sure. And then in pop music, Andy Bell, which is a blast from the past. I just met him the other day and I was like, oh, I forgot what an influence you were on me as a singer, like for Broadway and stuff.

But as far as comedy goes, definitely Marty Short and anybody funny, anybody who I love, Carol Burnett and Tim Conway. And I was a big fan of sketch comedy. So any any sketch artist I love, as we said, Sean's racked up a lot of experience, both in front of the camera and behind it. So ever considered doing a book on all this? Yeah, I mean, that's always a tricky thing.

You know, the answer is no, I'm not going to write one right now, but maybe someday. I just I just feel like you need you have to have something that you want to say to the world as opposed to just writing about yourself or people to read more about you. Because you can get that on Twitter or Facebook. Sean saves the world joins the NBC lineup of Thursday comedy starting October 3rd and see more right now at NBC.com. That is a wrap for right now, but we're back on Monday with a winner of the million second quiz.

We'll find out what that experience was like. Let's look at NBC's returning hit Chicago Fire. Follow up on pop culture. Twenty four seven. We're on the air right now.

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