Warehouse 13: Exclusive Interview

Share the madness of being in the same room as Saul Rubinek (Artie), Joanne Kelly (Myka), Eddie McClintock (Peter) and showrunner Jack Kenny

The Warehouse 13 mob enter the interview room at London Expo like an avalanche. You can hear the three main cast members, Saul, Eddie and Joanne, and their showrunner Jack Kenny bickering and bantering all the way down the corridor, and they explode into the room, brushing previous interviewees – Eureka’s Colin Ferguson and Jordan Hinson – aside in their wake. “We’re far more interesting!” bellows McClintock. Ferguson, exiting, gives us a good-humoured “good luck” glance on the way out, and then we’re left to try and get some kind of coherent interview out of a team stir crazy from 11 hours on a plane (they’ve only just landed).

To be honest, we did think of just posting the sound file of the entire interview, because they make such a brilliant comedy team between them. But on listening back to the recording, they all talk over each other so much at times it’s incomprehensible. So here, instead, is our attempt to translate all that madness into something that almost makes some kind of sense.

Also, bear in mind, a lot of what was said, was said with HEAVY irony, and should be taken with a big pinch of salt…

SFX : Season two is currently drawing near its conclusion on Syfy over here. How was it to shoot compared to season one?

Joanne: “It was a lot of fun.”
Eddie: “It was a lot of fun. We had a really good time.”
Jack: “This reminds me. We did a podcast. And we used to do the podcast before they'd seen the episode. All they would do would watch the episode. I’d be doing the podcast going, ‘Guys! Talk! Say something! I’m the only one who’s talking here. They want to hear from you !’”
Eddie: “I'd be thinking, ‘Why have they cut that line?! Another great moment that’s gone!’”
Saul: “Jack said something really interesting…”
Eddie: (On a roll) “There were a few moments that got cut from season two that I’m not happy about.”
Joanne: “Tell us at once. Tell us.”
Saul: “I bet they were moments that were his.”
Joanne: “You know what I miss, though? Our stuff in that building…”
Saul: “You’re going to have to be more specific than that.”
Joanne: “In the pool room. In the pool table room! When you were doing all that funny stuff. On the bicycle…”
Jack: “We only have 42 minutes an episode! You know, I do what I can.”
Joanne: “Cut back on the plot!”
Eddie: “No, it was the big scene with Tia…”
Jack: “But we were really long on that episode and that was a full minute that nothing to do with the story, so it had to go. But we love Tia Carrere and it’ll probably be on the DVD.”
Eddie: “Is Tia gonna come back?”
Jack: “I definitely want Tia back. But Saul you were going to say much more interesting…”
Saul: “You think that because it started with, ‘Jack said something really interesting.’ No, Jack did. You were asking about season two, and Jack said, at the beginning of season two, ‘Look guys. This is the only time you’re going to experience this. We did season one in the dark, and we had no idea how the show would turn out. You are now in season two. We may get a season three. But right now, you are starting to working on a show that is a bona fide hit, and the number one show on this network. You will never have another season two exactly like this.’”
Joanne: “Where was I during this conversation?”
Saul: “So he said, ‘You’d better have fun, because this is great.’ And it was really exciting to be on a hit show. Eddie’s line was that he’d done more pilots than stewardesses, and this was his first season two.”
Jack: “By season three you’re old hat.”
Joanne: “Are we old hat?”
Eddie: “I thought we were raising the bar!”
Jack: “Well, we will raise the bar, but you're not the new kids on the block any more and now we’re expected to wow people because we wowed people for two years in a row. In the first season we blew up Arty, in the second season we almost blew up the world. I don’t know what we’re going to do in the third season.”
Saul: “When you go in as a writer into the writers’ room, you go in knowing you have to raise the bar?”
Jack: “Uh-huh.”
Saul: “And how does that manifest itself?”
Joanne: “They take a bar… and they raise it.”
Jack: “Actually, no, we don’t consciously think about raising the bar. We just know that we have to do stories that span the gammut.”
Eddie: “Spam the gannet? What’s the gannet done?”
Jack: “And start thinking in broader ideas. We know we can do anything with you guys. We learned that last year, more so than the first year.”
Eddie: “No blumpkins though.”
Joanne: “What is a blumpkin? No, I don’t want to know what a blumpkin is. I am scared.”
Saul: “You just made that up.”
Eddie: “No, no, no, it’s…”
Joanne: “Sexual?”
Eddie: “Yes.”
Saul: “Let’s just move right on…”
Jack: “No, you guys can handle the really major drama. You can handle the big comedy stuff. You can . I’m not just blowing smoke. What’s great is that we on the writing staff realised that last year. And we did ‘Merge With Caution’, then we did ‘Vendetta’, then we did…”
Joanne: “‘Burnout’!”
Jack: “Yeah, ‘Burnout’ and ‘Where And When’ when you guys went back to the ’60s. And we want to keep doing these things. We’re talking about an episode next year that might take place in the 1890s, the 1960s and the present day, and take advantage of the repertory company from those three eras. Play a little with Jack and Rebecca in the ’60s. Play a little with HG Wells in 1890s as an agent. Maybe go to her as a Hannibal Lecter character in the present day to help us with something. We're building this mythology and this world now, with these actors and with this cast, and we really want to explore that more deeply.”
Joanne: “I want to know about my past too!”
Saul: “Now that we have that company – we have Rene Auberjonois, we have Lindsay Wagner as the Doctor, we have the Regents, who are interesting…”
Joanne: “We have CC!”
Jack: “CCH, absolutely. And I want to bring Cody Rhodes back. I thought it would be funny in the first episode of season three to find Myka back in Colorado dating Cody Rhodes.”
Eddie: “And she’s like, ‘Get me out of here! He’s got a great body but we have nothing to talk about!”
Saul: (to us) “You are allowed to ask one question.”

We want to know if Lena is ever going to get anything interesting to do?

Jack: “Really? You know she was pregnant last year, so in the Christmas episode we had to have her bringing in a turkey to hide her big belly. But no, Lena’s back. You know, it’s hard because this is not a show… The first day I walked on set, the first year. I looked at the Lena set and thought, ‘Holy smokes, this is beautiful, this is magnificent, but we’re never going to be in here.’ Maybe at the beginning or an end of an episode, but when are we going to sit around Lena’s? This show takes place on the fly. It’s a location series.”
Saul: “Although you guys did come up with the ultimate bizarro Lena.”
Jack: “And in the Christmas episode we do spend some time at Lena’s but other than, ‘Here’s your mission,’ and ‘How did it go?’ there’s not a whole lot else you can do at Lena’s. We did have a cool idea for her… but don't remember it right now. We’ve just been tossing lots of ideas round the writers’ room the last couple of weeks.”
Saul: “How big is the writing team this year?”
Jack: “One writer smaller. David Simpkins left last year, and one of our younger writers left last year, and we have a new woman who’s joined our staff…”
Joanne: “Woman!”
Jack: “So we have nine writers.”
Saul: “Where are you guys up to over here?”
Syfy PR: “The season finale is actually goes out on 23 December over here.”
Saul: “23 December?”
Joanne: “Tibb’s Eve. Is it called Tibb’s Eve over here?”
Saul: “Tibb’s Eve?”
Jack: “No, that’s just a Newfoundland thing.”
Eddie: “What is Tibb’s Eve?”
Jack: “It’s the night before Tibb’s, for heaven’s sake! What else would it be?”
Saul: “It’s when you go over to Tibb’s house and have a lot of beer.”
Eddie: “I thought you were saying Tibb Zee.”
Jack: “Six year’s of college!”
Eddie: “And 11 hours on a plane.”
Jack: “We’ve all just landed. Saul‘s coherent.”
Saul: “That’s what you think.”

Did you have fun with the Christmas episode?

Jack: “We actually did a little voice over thing at the beginning, a ‘Once upon a time…’”
Eddie: “No, I go, ‘A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…’ and she says, ‘What is this? This isn’t Star Wars !’”
Saul: “It’s fun. It’s really fun.”
Jack: “It’s a great episode.”

Is there snow?

Jack: “Oh yeah.”
Saul: “It’s shot in August, but very Christmassy.”
Jack: “I had the biggest arguments with… the only time I have ever fought with the production office.”
Saul: “Why? What happened?”
Jack: “Because of the air conditioning. Every day for two weeks before we shot the episode, I would be screaming, ‘It’s got to be colder on that stage. Bring on another unit. These guys are going to be in wool sweaters and scarves and I won’t have them sweating while we’re trying to do a Christmas episode.’”
Saul: “Are we doing another Christmas episode?”
Joanne: “We should do a Halloween episode.”
Jack: “They want to see how this one does first. But it makes sense. It’ll only get shown once a year so why make a new one every year? Although Charlie Brown does.”
Eddie: “So does Doctor Who . Oh, you know we got canned in Canada?”
Jack: “We were on a terrible station up there. 10 O’clock on Fridays.”

How ungrateful, when you employ lots of Canadians by shooting there!

Jack: “Yeah, we give them all that money and they can us. You know, I’d rather be a big hit in the United States and not a hit in Canada than the other way around.”

You also did a crossover episode with Eureka this year. Would you like to do more of those?

Joanne: “Do you want to tell them the secret?”
Saul: “I had a great idea. I was actually on the first season of Eureka . Not as Artie. But when I was at ComicCon I met Jamie, the showrunner, and I said, ‘I have an idea. Why don’t you have an episode where you reveal that that character was Artie in disguise, trying to get an artefact from you guys? And he arranged this whole thing. He was actually there, undercover for months.’ He kinda liked the idea. Or they come to our show to get it back.”

The funny thing is, they actually called that object in Eureka an artefact.

Saul: “Oh that’s right. It‘s called an artefact in Eureka . So it could kinda work. But it’s set in an alternative universe now, so I don’t even know how that would work.”
Eddie: “I was just talking to Lucas Bryant from Haven about going up to Nova Scotia and doing an episode of Haven . I would love to do an episode as that. But not as Pete.”
Jack: “But that’s the point of a crossover. And if you don’t go as Pete Latimer, you’re just a guest star. They pay you less money.”
Eddie: “I want Pete Latimer wages! I just found out that private school – kindergarten – is $20,000.”
Saul: “And the UK readers of SFX want to know this because?”
Eddie: “They have children here!”