AE: Is this the first time you've played a gay character?
KR: I played a gay character twice before, and I've played transgender. I played a transgender [character] on Without a Trace. I played a gay character on Law & Order last year, and also on Spin City. I've definitely been into that world before in my career.
This is the first time I've been able to live in the character and really think about the kind of world that we're living in.
AE: The "Masquerade" episode was kind of nebulous about how things ended between
Tyler and Boone. Where are we when we pick up again? Is it the sort of
situation where Boone has the information and they're not going to talk
about it? Is the relationship strained? How does that information
change things going forward?
KR: I think Boone is going through such a change episode by
episode anyway, as you saw in that episode, his children are sort of
progressive. I think when he goes home, he's getting help at home to
come to terms with these things. The kids have friends at school with
gay parents. It's sort of like letting the children lead the way. He
starts to really understand and accept Tyler for who Tyler is.
It's not
like he's accepting the entire gay community, he's accepting this one
gay person. He's actually taken to the humanity of it, to the actual
person, as opposed to being like, "Okay! Here we go! I'm great with
everyone!"
But it's a beginning. It's a start for Boone. There's not a lot of
friction between us because of it. We quickly get back to how we were,
although there will be some funny stuff here and there, talking about
my boyfriend and seeing how uncomfortable he is hearing about my
boyfriend and our problems. It's going to cause some friction, but not
a lot.
Rankin and co-star Derek Luke
AE: This has nothing to do with the gay part of the character, but is this role hard to leave at the end of the day? The show is so intense, and you deal with so many intense situations like the office shooting. Is it hard to put this away at the end of the day?
KR: I could say no, but I actually don't know that it's not. It's like, "Why am I still up? Why is my neck so tense? Why are my shoulders so tense?" It's very deceiving. I would like to say it's easy to put away, but ultimately it's not. The character itself is played very close to the vest for me. It's not that far out there as a character from who I am. I think with the explosions and all the intense situations, that part of it, yeah. Sometimes it's hard to get to sleep at night. But character-wise, it's not hard at all.
AE: I know the ratings haven't been what I think they should be. How edgy are you guys about whether there's going to be a pickup of the back order?
KR: It's an extreme edginess right now. We all live in reality even though we work in the make-believe. We know that there's a looming cloud over our heads even as we speak. If we come out tomorrow and the numbers aren't so great, the axe could fall. We may not even be able to finish the thirteen. We all know that, and we're really just soaking it in today, just having a great day and realizing how lucky we are just to be working. We're not stupid. We know what's going on.
AE: Are you frustrated by Jay Leno taking up five nights a week?
KR: I'm just straight up frustrated with the whole ratings system. Pardon the way I say it, but it's a bunch of bulls**t. The Nielsen Ratings is just an old, out-of-date system, and it would be nice if we updated it. Trauma could be the most watched show in the country and we'd never know it.
Trauma airs Mondays at 9 PM on NBC.
Submitted by
on Mon, 2009-11-09 17:52.
I'm loving 'Trauma'
THanks, Michael - excellent interview!
I'm glad to see that some thought was given to my biggest question about Tyler coming out to Boone, namely that the issue had never come up in three years of full-time partnership. I enjoy the characters, and I wish the show had been given the time to show Boone's journey of growth now that Tyler has come out to him.
I'm also going to miss the San Francisco scenery - it's been more than a decade since I left the city, and I've really been enjoying the location shoots and flyovers. NBC is going to have to re-evaluate their priorities before they become known as the network who took the "show" out of "show business."
People want new ideas
But it doesn't help. The problem with contemporary scripted television is that viewers are bored to see same stories all over again. Surely, this works for soaps (for decades we've been watching same stories about forbidden love, unforgiving parents, illegitimate siblings popping up from nowhere, evil twins, car accidents and following amnesia... the list goes on and on, you know all about that)... but it works, because this is the specificity of this genre. Scripted television is different, it demands new stories, new twists, something unusual and never seen before, even if it should look realistic (for it's supposed to be a realistic drama like Trauma). People get bored, because they've seen it before, and it doesn't matter how much effort and money you put into SFX and authenticity — viewers expect you to do it, it's a standard now, not something you should be proud of, and all those SFX... well, we've grown accustomed to them in 90s' action movies, so we don't sigh anymore about that stuff (honestly, choppers blowing up in the first episode did not impress me at all, though, I bet, it was not cheap to shoot it).
People want new stories based on new ideas! Period. Everything else is just boring. Most of really successful dramas of this decade were based on new ideas, controversies, something unexplored before on network scripted television. And that's why it was interesting to watch, that's what created massive fandom and ensured bright future for those series.
Sorry for venting. It's just so hard to see year by year that people who are supposed to understand these things simply don't understand them (or, there is a serious shortage of new ideas — I tend to believe the latter, no, scratch that, I want to believe the latter, otherwise it's just unforgivable if they actually throw great ideas away).
So, what I wanted to say about Trauma: it's good, almost well-written (not great, though, with lots of weak parts of the story), and they are trying to step on a shaky ground of "queer question," but otherwise it's a cliché, yet another medical drama with insignificant differences. No matter how we like the characters, it simply won't make up for the fact that it all seems awfully familiar. Don't get me wrong: I'm a big fan of ER and many other medical shows out there, I love medicine and the biggest mistake of my life as of yet was choosing other professional path over medicine (I deeply regret that), but I'm trying to say that sometimes enough is enough, you gotta come up with something new... Like, I don't know, medicine in the future, say, 22nd century, with fancy technologies and believable stories, or the other way around: post-apocalyptic future when medicine is almost forgotten, machines are ruined and people are trying to treat the sick with what little they have left, and knowledge lets one of them geniuses to come up with incredibly smart ideas for diagnostics and treatment. Think more, be brave, get creative, for crying out loud! Make us sigh again!