Scott Bakula

If you’re an avid TV watcher (and judging by the obesity rate and those Nielsen figures, most of us are) chances are you’ll be quite familiar with Scott Bakula’s work. He, of course, was the long-suffering time-traveler Sam Beckett in 80s hit ”Quantum Leap”, and more recently, the precursor to Kirk, one Captain Jonathan Archer, in the Star Trek prequel series ”Enterprise”. And though he’s popped up in the occasional film over the years – ”Major League : Back to the Minors”, ”American Beauty”, ”Color of Night”, ”Necessary Roughness”- Bakula’s never quite been able to escape the stigma that sometimes follows a TV vet. Thus, he was as surprised as anyone when his agent called him to say he’d been offered a starring role opposite Matt Damon in a Steven Soderbergh film titled ”The Informant”!

“I remember I got a call from my agent telling me I had the job. What happened was, one of the producers, Greg Jacob – who is a friend of mine, though we’d never worked together before – had put my name in the hat for the role. I had no idea. This had all been going on behind-the-scenes. They didn’t want to say anything to me, because if I didn’t work out, they didn’t want to be mad at Greg or disappointed. But anyway, I got the phone call that I was going to be in the new Steven Soderbergh movie with Matt Damon! And I was driving at the time – I had my kids in the car –and I was like ‘really? Is that right?’ Then it started to sink in. So when I got home about ten minutes later I called my agent and said ‘Did you say I was going to be in the movie!? I have to audition for it, right?’ and he was like, ‘No, you’re in the movie’. So it was a great surprise for me!

In ”The Informant!”, Damon plays real-life corporate whistle-blower, the wacky and delusional Mark Whitacre. Bakula plays Brian Shepard, an FBI agent who encourages Whitacre to give up the goods.

Bakula had actually lived close to where the action in ”The Informant!” took place, in Illinois. But the story with Mark Whitacre happened after he’d left, so he wasn’t really familiar with the man or what he’d done.

“I didn’t know about it. But once I started reading about it, I was fascinated by the story. And It turned out that my uncle, back in the 50s, was putting water coolers near [the company that’s the subject of the movie] silo’s to keep them cool. It’s kind of a small world back there. And we actually shot back there, so that was really fun too.”

As far as researching the role, Bakula says Soderbergh, strangely enough, prohibited the cast from spending too much time in the library and with their real-life counterparts.

“[Steven] said ‘Do not do any research. This is not about getting the right accents down, or getting the body movements down, it’s really more about the world as seen through Whitacre’s eyes. I want it to be about that, and not you guys telling me ‘well my character wouldn’t do this, cos I talked to the real guy and blah, blah, blah’.

“I did meet Brian Shepard though. He still lives in Decatur with his family – I met his family; his grandkids and everything – so I had the chance to sit down and talk to him. But we were told not to ask too much, but to just come to the set with a blank canvas. And I think that worked out for the movie really well”.

The one thing Soderbergh did insist on was Bakula donning Shepard’s flat combed-forward hairstyle.

“We took Brian Shepard’s picture and we did a little tweak to it. Everybody just loved it and I was like, ‘Oh god, do we really like it this much!?” laughs the actor, currently shooting the new cable series Men of a Certain Age. “It had to be cut in that shape, and it had to be coloured in that shape, and I had to live through that [hairstyle] through the whole making of the film; I didn’t get to take it off at the end of the day. And of course three months later we have a one-day reshoot! And we tried to figure out if we can make a wig, but it was going to cost too much, so I had to do it all again! I was stuck with it for three months again!”

But of course, it was all worth it because Bakula was getting to make a movie with Oscar Winner Matt Damon.

“I’m hopeful for him – I think he might have a future”, jokes Bakula. “I think it’s all about gaining weight for him though; he’ll work if he gets to gain 30 pounds.

“In all seriousness, I think it’s one of the great performances of the year”, Bakula says of Damon’s immersive turn as Whitacre. “And if you look at the other actors in his out range, I don’t know anyone else that could’ve done what he did in this movie. He handled it so beautifully. He’s such a great actor. We spent a lot of time together because there was, not a lot of improv, but a lot of exploring – trying to figure his character out.”

Bakula gets just as much screen time with Damon as he does comedian Joel McHale, who plays Shepard’s partner agent Robert Herndon. Being that McHale, host of E’s ”The Soup”, was a newbie to the world of film, Bakula and his fellow cast members had a bit of fun with him on the set.

“We teased him a lot; we gave him a lot of grief – we’d get on the set and go ‘Hey Joel, oh gosh, did he call you? They wrote you out of this scene last night, didn’t you get the re-writes!? They slipped them under my door last night, you didn’t get them?’. We worked him pretty good, but he was a good sport about it.”

Bakula says doing ”The Informant!” is definitely one of the best experiences of his career.

“It’s right at the top – I mean, I got to do American Beauty, but I wasn’t in the movie that much, still I knew that was something special too – and I remember we’d say to Steven ‘you’re shooting this too fast, you have to slow it down, because we’re having too much fun’. We didn’t want it to end. We didn’t want to leave this experience. He is such a great filmmaker – works outside the box, is so original, and very creative. So yeah, that was the only bad thing about it – it went so fast… we shot the film in six or seven weeks. We were all hoping for some bad weather so we could drag the thing out. But yeah, to work with Steven Soderbergh and Matt Damon is just a dream come true. And it was such a great part. And I loved this wacky, crazy, funny story – and to tell it through Soderbergh’s eyes was really fun.”

Having said that, Bakula’s enjoyed all the movies he’s worked on – a lot of which have been sports films. One of his most memorable experiences was headlining the second sequel to the sports comedy ”Major League”.

“I had a ball on that movie”, Bakula says of 1998’s ”Major League : Back to the Minors”. “Shoot, we went to Charleston, South Carolina in the Fall to play Baseball for six or seven weeks… you can’t beat that!”

Bakula’s last series ”Star Trek Enterprise” received a beating from the franchise fans (“I don’t get it. At the start they complained about the theme song. Then, it was another thing. I’m obviously partial to it, but I think it was a good show”) but everybody loved ”Quantum Leap”. The actor is hopeful Universal might resurrect it one day.

It’s a fair assumption that they will – what with the remakes of ”Battlestar Galactica” and ”V” doing well – but it’ll take someone with a sharp pair of scissors to cut down the red tape first.

“There’s always talk about it coming back – but nothing has ever eventuated”, says the actor of the series which ran from 1989 to 1993. “There’s a big, long, complicated paper trail in terms of ownership – it was bought by different studios; Barry Diller bought it… that’s the world of Universal Television. And if Universal TV gets bought, it’ll get even more complicated.”