CusickGallery.net: Henry Ian Cusick

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Damian Holbrook January 21, 2019 10:00 am

https://www.tvinsider.com/746099/the-passage-season-1-episode-2-henry-ian-cusick/

Erika Doss / FOX

Last week, fans got their first taste of The Passage, Fox’s ambitious attempt to adapt Justin Cronin’s sprawling trilogy about the rise of vampire-like Virals and the potential end of life as we know it.

Most of the action centered on Mark-Paul Gosselaar’s Agent Brad Wolgast, who went rogue to protect young Amy Bellafonte (Saniyya Sidney) from Project NOAH, the government-backed medical team using human lab rats to test a virus that could cure all of the world’s diseases (so far, not so much).

This week, we find out more about the origins of NOAH, including the past relationship between Henry Ian Cusick’s Dr. Jonas Lear and infected colleague Tim Fanning (Jamie McShane), as well as what this virus could do for folks if it’s successful and why Lear ever agreed to participate in something so ghastly.

Based on what we learn of Lear in Episode 2, I feel like he might be the only noble one at Project NOAH.

Henry Ian Cusick: Wow. Interesting you say that.

He had very pure intentions to start with, and now he’s really the only one who’s actually speaking the truth about how out of hand this has become.

Yes, I think you’re right. His intentions were always to find a cure to help his wife, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s. He didn’t know what to do so, he approaches his best friend, Tim Fanning, who’s become a bit of a star. The backstory is, they went to university together. They were great friends, and Lear became a microbiologist, married Liz, and they all knew each other. They were all at university together.

But she does not like him, which I love.

Well, she may have liked him at one point. So that’s kinda backstory.

The experiments at NOAH are so messed up. It’s so Tuskegee Airmen.

It is, yeah. The thing about using condemned criminals, if you gave them the choice and said, “You can either die, take the lethal injection, or you can stay on and become a Viral, which basically means you’ll be locked up in a cage for the rest of your life, you’ll be yearning for blood, you will never see daylight again, you will be experimented on,” would they take that choice? Probably not, I would imagine. The carrot is the cure. If you were a test subject that the experiments were successful on, you will be almost immortal, because you’d be immune to all these diseases.

So it’s a bit of a gamble and there must be a crisis of of conscience. “What am I doing? This can’t be right. I’ve got to save my wife.” So Lear is in turmoil most of the time. And there’s a line in the book when Amy Bellafonte first meets Lear [where he’s described as] some wild-eyed, long-haired, crazed scientist that has just been working in this basement for the past four years trying to find a cure.

That’s very different from your character’s look and from this version of the story, really.

Well, yes. Unfortunately I shouldn’t have said that to you, but when I first joined the show, I came on as a guest and I hadn’t read the book. I thought I was just one-and-done, and then it turned out that they invited me to come and be a regular on the show.  I wish I had read the book, because then I would have messed my hair up and gone a bit wild-eyed.

In this week’s episode, we get more of Lear’s backstory…

And there will be more  later on in the show from [more] characters, including the NOAH subjects, which is one of the cool things we’ve got that I really enjoy. We get to see how they got there.

At what point do you Mark-Paul Gosselaar’s Brad interact with Jonas? You guys at Project NOAH are kind of sequestered in your own storyline. 

Yeah, we used to joke about that. We’d pass each other on set say, “Hey, what are you up to?” I’d say, “Oh, I’m in a vampire movie. What movie are you in?” And he’d say, “Well, I’m making a father-daughter movie.” [Laughs] So we were very separate for the greatest length of time. As you know from the books, we will all eventually come together, because that’s what the show is about. So we all do eventually. We’re forced into making decisions together.

Can you preview what that’s about?

Well, I think my first meeting with Mark-Paul, I believe, is in episode four. And it’s very fleeting. But I would say, it starts to all go down around episodes seven, eight and nine. Of course by ten, it just goes kind of bonkers.

Caroline Chikezie and Henry Ian Cusick in the “You Owe Me a Unicorn” episode of THE PASSAGE (Erika Doss / FOX)

At some point I’m imagining we’re going to deal with masses of virals?

Hmm. When you say “masses,” how many masses do you mean? This is not a spoiler.If you’ve read the books, you know that by “masses,” we mean the world.

Right. Exactly.

But in our show, we’re still only a quarter way through the first book, even though we jump around a bit. So we’re not even close to that moment yet. At Project Noah, you’ll certainly see a lot more virals that we’ve experimented on and you’ll be introduced some new ones as well.

And there’s no real coming back from this virus, right? Like Fanning and Shauna (Brianne Howey) are pretty screwed. 

As a scientist, Jonas would say you never know. If we find a cure, perhaps it could reverse the process and that’s what we’re trying desperately to work on. But for the purposes of the story, you don’t really want it to come to that. Because the virals are the next stage in evolution. They are not an evil thing, they’re just better than humans. The virals see us as the virus, you know.

They could actually be our replacement.

Yes, exactly. They would be the next stage in what takes over the Earth. There was dinosaurs for a while, and then there was mammals, and humans, and then came virals.

The fandoms will kill me if I don’t ask: Will we see you on The 100, or are you in a medically-induced coma for the entire season?

[Laughs] No, you will see me on The 100 and you will find out what happens to Kane. It’s a great show. I mean, we’ve had six great seasons. Anything that runs to six seasons, that’s a hit, I think.

(Dean Buscher/The CW)

Do you find it weird that you’re now on the second show in a row about the end of the world?

It’s kinda interesting …wasn’t Lost about the end of the world, potentially? I don’t know why I’m drawn to these end-of-the-world stories! I just like shows that have big, high stakes. End-of-the-world shows are fun to be in. I mean, you don’t get bigger stakes than that.

The Passage, Mondays, 9/8c, Fox

https://meaww.com/the-passage-season-1-resemblance-lost-pilot-reveals-desmond-amy-cusick-saniyya

By Alakananda Bandyopadhyay · Updated On : 04:04 PST, 21 Jan 2019

Amy could help restore ‘the cure’ and an atmosphere of peace and harmony, thus evolving from a mere survivor to the final hero, the way Desmond had in ‘Lost’

FOX’s new show ‘The Passage’, based on Justin Cronin’s best-selling trilogy of the same name, draws inspiration from a multitude of things. From mingling together the genres of sci-fi, supernatural, and dystopian flicks, to its simplicity when its comes to the lucid pace it goes about, the best part about ‘The Passage’ is its ability to not leave viewers confused in an era of only multilayered stories being considered as gripping. But while ‘The Passage’ makes for a thrilling ride on a slow day, its subplots are packed with reminiscent angles from other dystopian flicks surrounding the supernatural. One such epic parallel the show draws can be seen through the character of Dr. Jonas Lear, played by Henry Ian Cusick, as the upcoming third episode will paint him in a light quite similar to that of Cusick’s character Desmond, on the ABC show ‘Lost’.

Cusick’s character in ‘The Passage’ — Jonas Lear — is riddled with guilt for the most part of the show’s debut season. The guilt stems from his involvement in the dangerous medical trial, titled Project NOAH, which infiltrates its subjects with a certain virus derived from a South American bat, that could either provide the cure to all illnesses or wipe out all traces of humanity from the planet. And this is what spurs the sense of guilt in Lear as he watches his best friend, Dr. Tim Fanning (Jamie McShane), crumble under the impact of the virus and turn into a superhuman monster along with the other subjects.

Lear holds himself responsible for what has become of Fanning, and the fact that he isn’t fully on board with what’s happening in the trial, only makes his conscience prick him harder. “At his core, he must feel he’s doing something that’s not morally correct because he’s working on condemned prisoners who haven’t been given the choice and don’t really know what they’re taking and how that’s going to affect them,” Cusick explained in a recent interview with The Wrap. 

To portray why Lear is feeling as guilty as he does about the situation people involved in the experiment have landed themselves in, the second episode of ‘The Passage’ takes viewers on a joyride through the past of the character, in a manner very similar to Cusick’s character Desmond in ‘The Lost’.

And while Cusick feels very strongly in favor of individual backstories unfolding in the series, just the way they did on ‘Lost’, in a not-so-direct-manner, the situation Desmond finds himself in ‘Lost’, is also quite similar to our protagonist Amy Bellafonte’s tale in ‘The Passage’.

As the official synopsis of ‘The Passage’ describes it, we know that “The Passage is an epic, character‐driven thriller about a secret government medical facility experimenting with a dangerous virus that could either cure all disease or cause the downfall of the human race. The series focuses on a 10‐year‐old girl named Amy Bellafonte (Saniyya Sidney), who is chosen to be a test subject for this experiment and Brad Wolgast (Gosselaar), the federal agent who becomes her surrogate father as he tries to protect her.”

To begin with, ‘Lost’ is just as much a story of survival as is ‘The Passage’. In ‘Lost’, we see a group of people shipwrecked and stranded in a deserted island, the way Amy is stranded with nobody except Wolgast to take care of her while the world around her crumbles under the havoc wreaked by the infiltrated test subjects, who have been turned into bloodthirsty vampiric monsters. Much like Desmond’s involvement in the sailing race that landed him in the deserted island, Amy gets roped into a series of destruction in the apocalyptic word due to chance and circumstances.

In his past, Desmond went through a series of unfortunate incidents before he found himself on the island. He was fired as a monk, had to break up with his girlfriend Penny Widmore, dishonorably discharged from the Royal Scots Regiment, and even treated with contempt by Penny’s father, Charles Widmore. That Desmond was chided by everyone until he emerged as a hero in the dystopian world is no secret, and in ‘The Passage’, we see Amy treated with the exact same misfortune and contempt as Desmond was in ‘Lost’.

For starters, Amy is an orphaned 10-year-old child who we are introduced to in a scene where she is in trouble at school.

Even though the reason behind her retaliation was self-defense, people do not consider Amy a little child, the way they would a white girl. When Amy is sitting all by herself at a diner during closing time, instead of being worried about her safety or looking for the orphaned child’s guardian, they just want her out of the premises.

Abandoned by her parents, chided by almost everyone she comes across, and even held accountable for things that weren’t her fault, Amy — despite being so crucial for the medical trial — isn’t treated with care and concern for the most part.

But just like Desmond in ‘Lost’, Amy too rose to become ‘the most important girl’ as the fate of humanity rested on her shoulders and decisions. Through its first few episodes, ‘The Passage’ establishes that it is only Amy — the girl unscathed by the virus — who could help them restore ‘the cure’ and an atmosphere of peace and harmony in the apocalyptic world, and through that, she also evolves from a mere survivor to the final hero, the way Desmond had in ‘Lost’.

‘The Passage’ airs on Tuesdays, 9 pm, only on FOX.