Tonight brings the second season of Castle to ABC, returning Nathan Fillion to his titular role as a crime novelist who shadows NYPD homicide detective Kate Beckett (Stana Katic) on the trail of killers and (hopefully) his next story. Their chemistry recalls the flirty crimesolving of Moonlighting with grisly doses of CSI gore, establishing the grounds for a dark comedy whose cult following overlaps that of Fillion's career-making work with Joss Whedon on Firefly and, later, the film Serenity.
Or at least it overlapped last week when Fillion and I chatted at SoHo's Apple Store with a few hundred of his local fans on hand (and some not-so-local; one couple said they'd driven 17 hours from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to see Fillion). An edited version of our conversation follows the jump; a full podcast will be available from Apple later this week.
So Castle blends a few different genres together here -- cop procedural, comedy, romance. What would you call it?
We're no stranger to the murder mystery-police procedurals, but we're not zooming into any wounds, going past the liver up to pancreas. If you've ever watched CSI and said, "Hey, there's a joke right there -- 'The guy really lost his head!'" On Castle, we go for it. Castle's the kind of guy who really enjoys himself. He's writing about murder all the time, and now he's living it. Every day is a field trip for Castle! He also lacks a filter that says, "Now's maybe a good time to stop."
Do you ever go too far with the character?
I pitch jokes all the time. I'm gonna say for every 20 jokes I pitch, one gets in the show.
And yet Castle and Beckett have kind of an unrecognized romance to deal with as well.
I like to think that part's very realistic. Certainly I know love at first sight exists in the world; people say, "Yeah, me and my wife, we got married 45 years ago. First, date, Vegas, that was it." They're great and happy. I'm sure that happens. For the rest of us it's a dance. You get to know someone, and then you're kind of set back, then you have to come back again. That's pretty much what we've got going on with Castle right now. Last season we coming to something, and Castle blew it. He kind of betrayed Beckett's trust. But once again, that filter... He thinks he knows best. Obviously we've got another season coming up, so something's going to have to happen where these two actually proceed along.
Well, that was quite the cliffhanger last season. Beckett didn't leave a lot of ambiguity for Castle to investigate her mother's murder. What is the next step?
I don't want to give too much away. Like I said: We have a second season. Something's going to have to happen. I found it satisfying! At the end of the day the show is about people. How do people come together after a betrayal? Tune in!
I'm interested in the mother issues on this show, which are all over the show. There's the matter of Beckett's dead mother. Then Castle's a single dad whose teen daughter is like a mother. And then there's his real mother, who is not much of a mom at all. What do you make of all this?
There, too, I think our show is very realistic. The nuclear family that I grew up with -- where the mom and dad are still married, they have kids, everybody's together, happy and moving forward? That's no longer the norm. That's the minority. Now the nuclear family consists of single-parent homes, divorced parents. These things happen. Here we have Castle, a man who's constantly surrounded by women, yet [there's] no authority figure. His mother is kind of a loose cannon herself, and his daughter is more of a parent than anyone in the family. That stuff is going on. She's got a rebellious dad who likes to drink, party and have a good time. She's kind of more straight and narrow and rebels against what her father's like. I mean, that's very typical.
And then you find Kate Beckett. Again, here's this female figure, and yet she's got authority. He's loving it! She's gorgeous. What the hell?
How did Castle come to you?
I have a holding deal with ABC; they lock you in, and you get a stack of whatever they're going to do that year. And for no reason, Castle was on the bottom of the stack. So you make your way through, and the meetings happen in a particular order. You go in, you educate yourself. I finally got to Castle, and I thought, "Wow, this would really be lots of fun. This would be a piece of cake. I know exactly what to do. I need to grab a meeting." I was doing Desperate Housewives at the time, kind of finishing my season there, and the producers and the creator were kind enough to visit me on the set. So we sat down in my trailer, and I said, "Stop looking. I'm the guy. I know what to do. In the hands of another man, this will go terribly wrong. You can count on me. Stop what you're doing! Here we go!" I'd never really done that in a meeting before, but it went well.
Were you a fan of cop shows or detective procedurals growing up?
I was a big CHiPs fan.
Jon or Ponch?
I was always Jon. My brother was Ponch. And we would ride around on our bikes. But we had Robert Pine -- the [sergeant] from CHiPs -- as a guest this season. I was going crazy. I actually shot a pilot one time in Hollywood where my character rode a motorcycle up and down Hollywood Blvd. on a very heavily-trafficked Thursday night. It was fun. When we were done, one of the CHP we had as security said, "Why don't you just drive the motorcycle back to base camp?" I said, "Great!" He said, "We'll give you an escort." So here's me and this CHP fellow riding tandem down Hollywood Blvd. I just turned to him and said, "Just so you know: This is a lifelong dream. I'm Jon."
Were there any characters you drew from for Castle specifically?
That's an excellent Andrew Marlowe question -- for the creator of the show. I like going to work and getting away with stuff I don't get away with in real life. Castle's that guy. He's very childlike. He's having such a great time; it's like he's on a field trip every day. I love his joy.
Of course, Castle's a crime novelist. He came to the show blocked up, but that's since been fixed after meeting Beckett. [ABC has a new Richard Castle novel serialized on its Web site. -- Ed.] How long does he get to just tag along before he's booted or made her partner?
Exactly. It kind of come to a head in one of our episodes. I mean, the book gets finished. That was the long and short of it; he was going to tail her until the book was done. We deal with that, too! I'd hate to spoil anything, though.