INTERVIEW: Michael Emerson says goodbye to ‘Person of Interest’

Michael Emerson, the actor best known for the TV series Lost and Person of Interest, finds himself in a strange situation. He wrapped filming the final season of Person of Interest in 2015, and he’s forgotten most of the scenes that he shot. This means each time the TV series airs a new episode — Mondays and Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on CBS — he’s in for a new experience.

“Some of it we shot last July and August, so I’ve been enjoying the episodes and sort of refreshing my memory about what we did for six months last year,” Emerson said recently in a phone interview. “I was ready for a break, I have to say. The work schedule had been really rough, particularly for this last season, and I’ve enjoyed having a little downtime to recharge the battery.”

The TV series features Emerson as Harold Finch, a mysterious billionaire who works with John Reese, an ex-CIA agent (Jim Caviezel) to stop crimes before they even occur. They use an “all-seeing machine that can predict the events before they happen,” as CBS puts it. The crime-stopping duo, however, is subject to interference from Samaritan, a destructive artificial intelligence that tries to thwart Finch and Reese’s goals. Emerson said his role of Finch on Person of Interest was a “good job” that continued to be interesting to the end, keeping his attention and stoking his invention.

“I thought all the characters on the show developed in good ways,” Emerson said. “I think that’s partly careful writing, and the careful management of the series by the producers was nice. What started out as two men on a seeming suicide mission turned out to have more nuance than we thought, and they ended up being better friends and funnier together than certainly they were at the very beginning. It’s a nice evolution.”

Although Emerson and Caviezel are both serious craftsmen when it comes to acting, their differences helped develop a unique chemistry.

“I don’t think you can make that [chemistry] happen,” Emerson said. “It’s sort of out of everybody’s control, but it did happen in our case, I think. Just the right alchemy or the right chemistry between the two of us so that, you know, the odd match we are in the real world spilled over into the fictional world of the show, and it spilled over successfully. So we’ve really had a lot of fun working together, although the work was curious in nature most days.”

As Person of Interest has progressed over the past five years, the technologies and governmental surveillance programs on the show started becoming plausible in the real world. Emerson said the cast was aware that the series was becoming more topical and less science fiction based. He even wondered whether the show was influencing those in power to take part in bad electronic behavior. The subject matter of Person of Interest started intertwining with the headlines and themes of the day, and perhaps that’s one of the reasons for its success on CBS.

TV TODAY

In addition to governmental changes, the TV industry that launched Person of Interest into living rooms across the United States is vastly different than the TV industry in 2016. The old model of premiering a show in the fall and watching more than two dozen original episodes until a hyped finale in May is somewhat of a dated concept. With competition from Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and cable, the legacy networks of CBS, NBC, ABC and FOX have needed to shift and consider the cord-cutting, binge-watching habits of new TV viewers. Even Person of Interest’s final season is breaking some rules with its relatively short episode order.

“I think network television is changing, and they’re being forced to change,” Emerson said. “Network has such a brutally long shooting schedule to make so many episodes, and I think it’s dawned on everybody that if you did a little less work, you might do it a little bit better. You wouldn’t be so stretched, so thin on storylines and always having to come up with one more chapter, one more chapter.”

Emerson said he was grateful for the abbreviated shooting schedule on the final season. However, because of budgetary constraints, the cast and crew needed to shoot each episode in one less day than previous seasons, according to Emerson, and this made the daily work difficult.

“So it was rough,” he said. “If you watch this fifth and final season … the writers were really able to get focused, and … there’s no filler episodes. There’s no marking time. It’s a hellbound train, and it’s really operating at full power.”

Emerson was tight-lipped on what the finale will bring, but he did allow a few thoughts. For one, he was satisfied with the ending. “I also have to say that here we were shooting it, shooting this final season, knowing it was the end, and I kept waiting for signs or premonitions of how it was going to get wrapped up,” he said. “And there really wasn’t any inkling, I don’t think, until maybe the last four or five episodes. You begin to think, you begin to be able to feel the ending coming, but even that, the actual finale was a surprise to me when I read it. I didn’t know how it was going to end. I didn’t know what the solution to the problem of Samaritan could be.”

REMEMBERING BEN

Emerson is a veteran of network television. His role as Ben Linus on ABC’s Lost won the actor his second Emmy Award (the first came from a guest role on The Practice), and the misunderstood villain is easily one of the most memorable characters in recent TV history. The six seasons of that culturally important series, which followed a group of survivors following a plane crash, allowed Emerson to shoot on location in Hawaii, a “tropical paradise,” as the actor put it.

“In a way my experience as an actor has some parallels to the character’s experience on the show,” he said. “I was uprooted from the world I knew and dropped down in the middle of a remote island in the middle of a vast sea, and magical things happened there. Sometimes it’s hard to separate my personal journey from the journey of the characters on the show. It was pretty good. When you’re in the heat of the work, you just take it at face value. Then when it’s over, you reflect on it, and again hindsight, you really can’t compare it to other working experiences. And you say, oh God, Lost was extraordinary. I’ll never probably do a show quite like that. I don’t expect ever to do a show that had a more passionate fan following then that show did. It got a lot of attention.”

Emerson’s role on Person of Interest further cemented him as a dynamic, versatile TV actor, and he said he doesn’t worry about the next role. The fear of typecasting doesn’t seem to be an issue when he talks about his years in the business.

“If you hope to have a long career, you do have to be careful about the next thing you pick because … the industry isn’t always really very inventive,” he said. “They see you do a thing like, let’s say, you play a serial killer, and they think, oh my God, he’s a good serial killer. What other serial killer scripts do we have? They want to plug you in to a thing that they’re convinced you can handle. So sometimes you have to spend a little time saying no to things to try to steer the ship in a slightly different direction.”

Emerson waited a bit to take on a role after Lost, and he knew he didn’t want to be another sinister, manipulative villain. Otherwise, he feared, he would cannibalize his acting toolkit.

“How are you going to do the same thing and have it be fresh or exciting?” he asked. “I just thought it was better to have just a bit of a shift of gear. You can’t change what you look like or what your voice sounds like. Those sorts of things and some qualities of character are innate. You know, I’m probably always going to play verbal characters, I suppose. That kind of thing is sort of built in. I’m probably not going to play action heroes.”

THE BEGINNINGS

Emerson has wanted to be an actor for a long time. He had other interests when growing up. At one point, he wanted to be an archaeologist, and he has always been able to draw pictures. However, since his early teen years, acting was his profession of choice.

“I thought a life as an actor would be a pretty great thing if I could figure out how to do it, and it took me a long time to figure out how to do it,” he said. “But I was very glad when the realization came to me that I could do this work, and that this could be my career and that it would be a happy one.”

The next step on the horizon remains on the horizon, and Emerson seems content with letting that next step be as wide open as possible. He realizes he’s been away from the stage for too long, so he is considering acting in a play. However, he has no plans on which one to choose or which city to perform. He doesn’t think another series will happen in the immediate future, but perhaps some guest spots, a part in a movie, reading an audiobook, some commercials.

“It’s good in life when you figure out what you can do or what you’re good at,” he said. “It’s a relief in a way that you don’t have to keep flailing around going, what am I here for? What am I to do? What is my calling? When I realized it was my calling — I don’t want to make it sound religious — when I realized that this was what I was meant to do, that this was the thing was the right fit, it made things so simple that it was a great release to me. It’s a thing that I would wish for all people.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

Person of Interest airs new episodes Mondays and Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on CBS. Click here for more information.