TV INTERVIEW: MICHAEL CHIKLIS
A Superhero Cop on ABC's New Action Dramedy, 'No Ordinary Family'
Izumi Hasegawa: You’re doing another superhero role!
Michael Chiklis: It’s funny — I’ve gotten that a handful of times: “Superhero again?” Where, as an industry, we’re on cop show number 557,000 and everybody’s like, “Oh, another cop show.” I can only think of one other superhero genre television show in the last 20 years, and people are like, “Ugh, again?” I just think it’s a huge genre. There’s so much room for it to grow. Look at Comic-Con — it’s growing like Vegas. People love the genre and there are so many possibilities, and there’s something that captures people’s imaginations, and it’s so exciting. I’m really happy to be doing a show that blends and melds genres, and this is, at its core, a family show wrapped in a police procedural wrapped in a superhero genre.
IH: What is your character like? Is it like Vic Mackey, your character from The Shield, with powers? Vic is terrifying.
MC: No, not at all. This guy is not Vic Mackey at all. He’s heroic in spirit; he’s a good man. There’s no ambivalence about that. He’s an ordinary guy; he’s very much an everyman, and something extraordinary happens to him and his family. I say it’s Parenthood with superpowers, and that’s a well-made and entertaining show, but add the superpower element to it and it heightens all the different questions we can ask.
IH: Did you want something lighter after playing Vic for so long?
MC: I suppose if the miracle occurred where a script came across my desk that was as brilliantly well-written as The Shield was in a totally different world with a character as well-defined as Vic Mackey, I would have jumped on it. But that’s the kind of character you really don’t ever get to play in a lifetime. I’m always on the lookout for something like that, but in the absence of something that good, from a hardcore drama perspective, I really wanted to do something that was decidedly lighter, that had a much broader appeal because, let’s face it, The Shield wasn’t for everybody. It just wasn’t. My 11-year-old is starting to doubt I was an actor at all. She’s like, “Dad, do you really act?” The short answer is yes. I wanted to do something lighter and more palatable to a larger audience.
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