Alan Ruck on Persons Unknown, the Death of Multicam Comedies, and Missing John Hughes

In his 30 years as a showbiz mainstay, Alan Ruck has starred in movies and TV shows that have come to exemplify their times. The John Hughes movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off, in which Ruck played hooky accomplice Cameron Frye, remains a hallmark for rambunctious '80s teen comedies, while Spin City, where Ruck played the quipping Stuart Bondek, typifies the multicamera sitcom streak of the '90s. Now, his new NBC miniseries Persons Unknown encapsulates the DVD-friendly serializaed appeal of television today, complete with a jigsaw mystery that can please fans of Veronica Mars, Lost, and The Twilight Zone alike.

Ruck phoned Movieline last week to discuss the curious production of Persons Unknown, his disappointment with current TV, and the legacy of John Hughes.

Did seeing Christopher McQuarrie's name on the script for Persons Unknown influence you before you read it? Are you a Usual Suspects fan?

Well, as soon as I saw his name on the script, I got very, very excited, because that's one of my favorite movies of all time. So before I opened it up I knew it was going to be good. He wrote the original pilot and they changed some things as it expanded into a series -- in the original pilot, there were flashbacks about most of the characters as soon as you meet them. Like, as soon as you met Charlie [Ruck's character] in the town -- as soon as Charlie opened that door and says, "My name is Charlie. Tell me you're a cop, Joe, tell me this is over" -- then you flash back to a key scene with Charlie and his wife. The structure was a little different. The way we wound up showing it, I still think it's really, really good. It's just that there were certain secrets that couldn't be given away too early.

You've said that the cast only got wind of the story with each script. While it was probably fun to learn more about the show's mystery in real time, did it hinder you from understanding your character?

Not really. I mean, there was a sense of discovering this thing as we went along, I think maybe on the part of the writers as well. Obviously if you're going to do a standalone episode of a comedy or drama or anything, you need to know everything up front since you shoot it all out of order anyway. You need to know pretty much everything and then go. In this, since it's serialized, it's a little more like life. You never know what's going to happen tomorrow. You might get the promotion of a lifetime, or you might get hit by a bus, none of us know.

As an actor, it's very satisfying when you tell a story with a beginning, a middle, an end -- at least on stage. But this situation, it was a little more like life, for better or for worse. There were certain things that [executive producer] Remi Aubuchon would keep back from us. He would give us information we needed to know for that week or the next week, and he would give us some information that was for us alone and not to be shared with any other characters. He tried to keep a sense of urgency and mystery about the whole thing. It was kind of like a game: "This is what I think, but I don't know." It's like what you see on the blogs now. "I think it's the mother!" In our own way, we were doing that.

There's a definite throwback quality to Persons Unknown, a Twilight Zone air. Can you talk about how that sets it apart from other shows with paranormal influences like Lost?

I felt Twilight Zone from the beginning, so I think great minds work in a similar fashion. I have to be honest and tell you I've not seen one episode of Lost. I know there are some comparisons between this [and that], and I think there's other comparisons between Harper's Island and Happy Town and a few other things. Between those two, I think, they were short-order series -- 12 or 13 episodes, and they told the story and were done. With Happy Town, they had some scheduling issues. They pulled it off the air, they put it back on. I don't know anything about that show, but I do know that if take it off for a couple weeks and then put it back on in a different time slot, you're not helping build a following. The thing I know about Lost is there's people stranded on an island, and they don't really know each other. And they need to form alliances and figure out how to survive on this island. Am I leaving something out?

That sounds about right.

Just basically. Obviously we're not isolated on an island. We're being held captive by technology -- and all of this technology, by the way, exists. This is not some voodoo kind of prison. They're not held captive by a magic spell. This thing called a "pain wall," it's existing microwave technology used in places like Iraq for crowd containment. It's only supernatural in that people with power can do what they want. There's some organization behind this thing, and the more you look at it, it seems like a laboratory. When Janet shoots one of the cameras, it's immediately replaced by another camera. The town is a laboratory of some kind. We are being watched for some reason. It'll be episode four on Monday. As far as our original seven go in the town, we're figuring, "Escaping is an impossibility. What else do we do? How do we work this town out of what we have?" And this is how alliances are starting to come together. I believe it's in this episode -- or definitely by [episode] five -- you start to find out some big stuff about more people. We found out a little about Charlie, but we'll start to find out more.

This filmed quite awhile ago, right?

I don't know how well I remember it, but by the time the series finishes in September, it will have been two years since I got the job.

Wow. I applaud you for remembering the specifics of the episodes so well. Is it unusual to wait this long to see your work air?

It is unusual. It's more common with movies where you make a movie, and you work on it for three or four months. It takes nine months for it to sort of gestate, and it's at least a year until from the time you get the job to when it hits the theater. In television, you audition for a pilot, hopefully you get it. Then you make a pilot, the brass get together and decide what they need to plug their schedule with, and they pick your show or they don't.

I've been doing this since the early '80s. Hard to believe. Things have changed so much, because it's kind of like there's 57 channels and nothing's on. It's amazing that there's so many different cable channels, and to my way of thinking, so little good television on. But it's expensive to produce. In the old days, you'd be given a shot. I mean, If they ordered thirteen episodes -- first of all you make the pilot, they say, "OK, we like it," and they order thirteen plus the pilot. They don't do that anymore. They usually order six and with the pilot, a total of seven. If you're not popping some kind of numbers -- what they want within the first few airings -- you could easily be gone. It's become so competitive and so strange.

Pages: 1 2