EARTH TWO

by Judy Sloane (Oct. '98, #27, Xposé)

Xposé visits the set of Earth: Final Conflict and meets new leading man Robert Leeshock, who shares some secrets about the highly anticipated second season.

 

[Note: I left out the beginning, which explains what the show is about. For a more detailed explaination, see the December 1998 Starlog Interview.]

   ...When the actor auditioned in Los Angeles with Lisa Howard, who portrays Lili Marquette, he heeded the advice given to him by the show's producer, Jonas McCord. "He kept saying, 'The minute you try and play an alien, you're done.' The biggest trap that you have is to 'play' an alien. What's interesting to watch is the human element in it. How does two-thirds of me as a human being deal with this one-third of me that's unknown? I just used myself and my own history as the foundation for this. You just try to mine your own resources and draw enough parallels to your own life in order to make it come across. Whether you want to call it the collective unconscious, you look at your own personal history and you go, 'I must have traits of my father and grandfather... okay, what about my European heritage that I know nothing about?' I'm one of those American mutts - I'm Polish, Czech, English, Irish and Italian."
   Although the actor felt he lacked a firm connection to the science fiction genre, he did feel a spiritual correlation with one of the main concepts in Earth: Final Conflict. "A friend of mine turned me on to a guy who taught him a philosophy about a new way of thinking, how powerful your mind is and how we only use 10 percent of our mind. We are basically what we think. So when I picked up this script it had this race, the Taelons, who to me made absolute sense. They had so developed their mental faculties that they evolved and they are not freakish. That's the thing that appealed to me. When I was finally able to watch the show, I saw them and I went, 'Oh, this makes sense!'"
   The actor admits that his first impression of the role has changed considerably since he began shooting the series. "There's a trap with playing the hero. It's difficult to stay in touch with the fact that a hero is someone who acts heroically under adverse circumstances and goes through trials and tribulations like everyone else. Also, if you get into the human psyche you can run the gambit in a lot of ways. My character goes from being animalistic, which is interesting because he regresses to a very primal form, to sitting around and pondering very esoteric thoughts about human nature."
   Leeshock acknowledges that coming into a show that was already up-and-running was a little disconcerting, particularly as he was replacing the lead actor. At the end of last season Kevin Kilner, who portrayed police Captain William Boone, a double agent who worked for both the Taelons and the Liberation group in a personal search for the Truth, asked to be released from his contract in order to pursue other theatrical work. "[Getting the series] was really like a storybook kind of thing up until the point I got to Toronto," confesses Leeshock. "On the first day I realized, 'What was everyone's relationship to Kevin Kilner? How do I step in here?' This is going to be a long haul, a marathon, and I have to really stay with it the whole way."
   But the actor found his cast mates were more than willing to help him settle in. "The first day Von Flores [Sandoval] and Leni Parker [Da'an] came to my trailer and said, 'How 'ya doing?' They just welcomed me. They are very supportive actors as well as very kind people. And the moment I met Lisa in Los Angeles, she just takes you in. So they made me feel really at home. And I thought, 'They're human beings first, and they're actors second.' I think it should be in that order."
   Taking the show in a totally different direction, the concept of time travel has been introduced this season. "in this particular episode Kincaid goes two days into the future," says Leeshock. "I witness a horrible massacre and I'm trying to figure out who did it. I come to realize that I did it. So then we get into the thing about can I change fate?"
   As Leeshock and I walked onto the soundstage where the set for the Liberation Hideout was erected, it became obvious that the massacre takes place at Doors' headquarters and that Jonathan Doors and Lili Marquette are involved - this was easy to surmise as both actors were being filled with squibs (small packets filled with 'blood' that explode on cue). In a series of dream sequences, Kincaid experiences different versions of the disasterous event. "I'm about to shoot a scene where Doors and Lili are killed in the Liberation Hideout," says Leeshock. "In one of my dream sequences, I think I've done it, so this is the scene where I actually come in and shoot up the place. I'm going to wreak some havoc today! There are a couple of different versions of it. It's like a who-did-it, which version is real? It's very blurred and gray. What it looks like in the beginnig is that somehow Doors and Lili killed each other. I come in and witness this. Everybody else is dead, and I try to put the pieces together and then I have a dream where I realize that I'm the killer. I can't live with this so I decide the best thing to do is to take my own life."
   The actor confesses that the origin of the dreams is never fully explained. "What's suggested in the episode is there is one nasty Taelon who's using brain waves to induce psychotic bouts in certain targets, certain people. But that's not what happens with me. I think what happens with me is that my unconscious pulls up anything that's possible from the million years of my history, so what it leads me to believe is that I'm capable of doing it. It's possible that it's in me. Now the big thing to figure out is whether, in actuality, I've done it or not.

Friends and Foes (small, seperate interview on same page)

   Although he's only been alive a relatively short time, Liam Kincaid has definate opinions about the people he associates with, which he shares with Xposé

Lili Marquette

"A devoted protector, very professional, with a sparkle in her eye. Lili and I are working together. She's a link to the resistance so she serves as the intermediary between Doors, the Liberation and their paranoia. I'm looking for people to trust and I don't know if I can trust her yet."

Ronald Sandoval

"I'm torn because I know he's my father, yet he basically set me up so that I could possibly be killed. So he's smarmy and he's got the devil lurking somewhere inside. He's extremely concerned because he set me up to have me killed and I'm not dead, so he's got to deal with me now."

Da'an

"Just a beautiful enlightened soul. I think I can learn something from Da'an. I feel a kinship. I am Da'an's companion/protector. It's an intermediary role between the Taelons and the Earthlings."

Jonathan Doors

"He's a paranoid, crotchety old man and he just rubs me the wrong way. It's becoming personal now because I don't put up with his crap. I'm not part of the Liberation. At this point they have to deal with me because I'm Da'an's protector."

Augur

"Augur is the ultimate capitalist, but his sense of humor reveals the true nature of his good intentions."

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