The Event's Clifton Collins Jr. on the Television Experience, Vegan Police and Spoiler Containment

Frustrated by so many tangled conspiracies and unanswered questions about NBC's The Event? Clifton Collins Jr., who you might know as one of the Vegan Police from this summer's Scott Pilgrim or Perry Smith from Capote plays shadowy, calculating Thomas on the freshman sci-fi series. He stayed pretty tight-lipped about any plot details, but after the jump, he spills about the transition to television and how to keep spoilers in check.

How did you get involved with The Event?

They approached my manager Kim Callahan about the part, Thomas, and -- I don't know if you saw the pilot, but the pilot sets up Thomas as this guy's who's kind of running the show more or less. You can imagine we knew very little about Thomas because they weren't giving out much information about the show, but there was so much passion, you know? So much drive, so much love, so much passion for the project. That's generally a winning combination whether it be film or television; that's just usually a quality that's lacked in television.

Were they familiar with your work?

They were familiar with my work. Jeff [Reiner] saw me for another show he created called Trauma, and Evan Katz met me for 24, which I got down to the wire for the last season.

Oh, congratulations on the full-season pickup, by the way.

Thank you, I really appreciate it. I can't tell you how excited everyone was. You know, I was just telling James Franco: I had, like, eight movies come out last year, and now I'm on a TV show. When you're surrounded with actors of the caliber [of] Laura Innes and Zeljko Ivanek and Blair Underwood and Jason Ritter... What a legacy, you know what I mean? The showrunners really care for what they do -- Steve Stark and Jeff Reiner. It's a family, it's totally different than doing a movie.

Do you have an experience that you prefer? Television or movies?

It's kind of hard to say, you know? I'm basing one full-order experience, which I haven't had yet, versus 20 years of moviemaking. So you might want to ask me that question next year.

Are you filming now? Can you tell me how far along in the season you are?

We're on a tiny break right now while the writers go in there and revamp. It's such a high concept, you can imagine; we need a huge writing team and they're just trying to get it in tip-top shape before we go out there so we can do the best job that we can do.

One thing I feel like we hear more and more about with these high concept shows, these genre shows, is the effort to contain spoilers. Is that something you've had to deal with at all on The Event?

I do, but it's not too big of a deal for me. You know, when we did Star Trek we couldn't talk about anything either. We were literally delivered to set under cloak. We had this little golf cart, basically surrounded in a cloak, so nobody got to see what we looked like. In regards to the other films I've done, the Vegan Police were very top secret, too. That couldn't get out, so that was fun. You know, that's part of the fun: I think, me not having done many TV shows, it's kind of nice to have this little level of secrecy where we try to keep quiet and keep intrigue. I went on tour with Slash for about a week and a half on one of my other breaks, and Myles Kennedy, [his] lead singer, was like, "We're going to get you sh*tfaced tonight and you're going to tell us everything about The Event!" Little things like that -- it's fun.