The funny thing was, when I first got to talk to Tom about this character, has everything stripped away and what comes up? What is the real core of him? That we find out and at first, it seems like he’s just gone so crazy, but the more time went on, you realize that once he peaked through that hysteria that he started to become more and more clear on who he was.Ĥ. Tergesen: Over time, I grew to like him more. Q: How did your feelings about the character change over time? All of a sudden people were like, ‘Hey Beecher!’ It was the weirdest thing. There was a point in the beginning of the first season where the extras - the extras were there all the time, right? They wouldn’t talk to me until Episode 6, where I like went crazy and threw glass and beat the hell out of the Nazi guy. Tergesen: Well, you know, especially in the first season, there was so much stuff - being the b*tch of the Nazi guy and just like what that was and have him live through those scenes. Q: Was there a specific aspect of the role that kind of scared you? So I remember feeling panicked about how people were gonna react to it. Right before it aired, I remember thinking, ‘Oh my god what are people were gonna think? This is deep and dark and just naked.’ When we shot it, it was amazing and it really, you know, it was such a good bunch of actors and everybody was just there and we felt like we were doing something different. I remember when the first season was about to start. Lee Tergesen: It was one of the greatest experiences of my life.
What did it feel like as an actor to be given that opportunity of transforming before the audience’s eyes? Q: Your character kicked everything off and you transformed through those seasons. Lee Tergesen said the extras wouldn’t talk to him at first
#OZ TV SHOW SEASONS SERIES#
And I was like, ‘Well, what happens to them? Who do they become?’ And David Simon had written in Homicide, the nonfiction book about a prison riot, and that started stimulating me into thinking about doing a series about the prison system.ģ. Q: What made you want to do a show about the prison system?įontana: We were doing the show Homicide,and people would be sent to prison and I realized on TV shows - Law & Order all the way back to Naked City - the bad guy goes to prison and we never think about them again. You were just seeing the gun pointed at them and I hung on it a little longer than they thought was appropriate, and I changed it because I thought if I get one note a year, I should do at least one time what they want. Q: Do you remember what those five notes from HBO were?įontana: I remember one and that was - a man was in a house killing a family, and they asked me not to have the gun pointed at the children for as long as it had. They had to come out of character and it had to advance the story in the show. I think what happened though, I started to feel the responsibility to not do the violence, and the sex couldn’t be just for the sake of the violence or the sex. Was there anything though that you were like, ‘I don’t know if they’re actually going to let us do this,’ when you’re writing?įontana: HBO was incredibly open to whatever I wanted to try and over six years, they only gave me like five notes over the whole six years.
HBO told him to shorten a shot of a gun being pointed at childrenĪugustus Hill and Sister Peter Marie Reimondo in Oz | HBO
And like ‘Oh, that was so much fun to do and nobody is ever going to watch this.’Īnd so, to our surprise, people did watch it and there we were making another one and another one and another one.Ģ. It was so outrageous and there was so much that was going on that was never been done before on TV, that we would finish a scene and we would all laugh. Do you remember what you were thinking while you guys were doing the pilot?įontana: Well, the only thing we all thought was no one would ever watch the show. So my own work in the sense of the dialogue, I was like, ‘Eh, not so great’, but I think the heart of the show still beats very strong. Which I think 20 years ago was fairly unheard of. And I just watched the pilot again for the first time in 20 years and I was happy to see, most of all, how incredible the cast was and about the diversity in the show.
Tom Fontana: You know, it’s funny because when you do something and then you go and revisit it 20 years later, you’re sort of terrified that it’s going to be crap. Q: What does it mean to you to look back at Oz after all these years today? Tom Fontana | Andy Kropa/iStock/Getty Images