SINGAPORE — He has successfully crossed over from movies to TV and back. As an actor, who is on the lookout for the next acting frontier to discover, James Marsden said that unpredictability is an interesting quality of an onscreen character. It’s safe to say that playing Teddy Flood, a handsome gunslinger host — a robot/android — on HBO’s drama series Westworld, sit well with James.
“You always wanna play characters that there’s more going on to them than just what’s on the surface, you know,” he shared with Asian writers during his recent visit in the city to promote Westworld’s season finale. “You don’t really know what they’re gonna do in any circumstance, a lot of different things that drive them, different motives. So I think Teddy is very similar in that way. I think he sees himself having a peaceful life with Dolores someday but there’s this past he has to come to terms with.” By the way, Dolores, played by Evan Rachel Wood, is Teddy’s object of affection, who learned that her reality was a lie. Also in the cast were Anthony Hopkins as Dr. Robert Ford, founder and chief programmer of Westworld, and Ed Harris, the Man in Black.
This type of roles excites James to develop from ground up. With Westworld, the cast members didn’t have a full knowledge on the 10 episodes. None of them knew where the story was heading, James related. His character had gone from “good guy that turned completely upside down and he can be a savage killer if he needs to be,” he said. The actor found working on Westworld satisfying and playing Teddy’s different sides exciting.
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