Fan favourite Wil (Wesley Crusher) Wheton is back on Leverage , and here he tells us what it takes to be a TV geek.
Wil Wheaton: āWell itās important to know why Chaos is the way he is. Heās obviously very smart. Heās obviously very motivated and very, like, committed but where he could very easily use his abilities and his talents for good, he instead chooses to use them for evil.
āAnd I had to make up a reason that was really meaningful for why that is. I built a background story for him thatās, you know, not too far removed from my own experiences as a young geek. He was picked on and he was misunderstood and he was lonely and he was isolated. And rather than take those experiences and turn them into something positive for other people that may be experiencing that, heās taken all of his abilities and instead used it to just sort of punish people and kind of lash out at the world.
āAnd whenever I get to work on Leverage , itās very important to me to make it very clear that Hardison is the only guy in the world that Chaos respects. Everybody else is just a jerk and doesnāt even come close. I mean he doesnāt respect Nate. He doesnāt. If he ever encountered Sterling, he wouldnāt respect him. He certainly didnāt respect the rest of the Two Live Crew guys. He really respects Hardison. And I said earlier today, if they were on the same team, the world would really be in a lot of trouble.”
But how did he manage to fit the guest spot it, considering how busy his schedule currently is?
Wil Wheaton: āWell I lucked out. My schedule which has been unbelievably busy and complicated had a nice big Leverage -sized gap in it last summer. And I was able to go up to Portland, my favorite city in the world, and work on the show again.
āAnd, you know, John Rogers told me when we did āTwo Live Crew Jobā that you donāt create a crew like the crew Chaos is part of if you donāt plan to bring some or all of them back in the future. And I think the way that we all related to each other was so fun and so rewarding to the audience that it was really not a question of if but when we would all get to come back and go head to head again.”
Does he actively seek out geek roles?
āYou know, itās more about the character than it is about the genre. And I have settled into these characters that you kind of love to hate. And itās been so much fun for me and I am really grateful to everyone thatās given me an opportunity to work on these shows and create these characters and keep playing them because itās really, really a lot of fun. And itās sort of like being in the middle of a no-hitter. Everything is really working right now and I just try not to think about it too much and just keep going out there to the mound every inning and just try to keep doing what Iāve been doing.”
āI think whenever you work on a genre show there are such passionate, devoted, core audience members that are so invested in, you know, not just our show but other shows that are a little bit outside of the mainstream. And itās always wonderful, you know, most of these shows are run by people who are also fans.
āAnd itās really wonderful to give a very subtle and very clever wink to people in the audience who know what youāre referencing. And then everyone else on the couch with them who maybe doesnāt watch the other show has no idea and it doesnāt stand out like, āWell that was a weird thing that came out of nowhere.ā Itās something that people who know get it. Itās like a dog whistle; some people will hear it and some people wonāt.
āOne of my favorite moments ever on Leverage is where Hardison says, āListen, if things go south, Iām going to say the name of one of the Star Trek movies thatās one of the odd-numbered ones. And if itās going well, then Iām going to say something thatās from the even-numbered ones.ā And everybody looks at him like, āWhat?ā And then all of us in the audience who are Star Trek fans are cracking up because we totally get that.”
Leverage airs on Sundays on TNT.