Mark A. Sheppard

Exclusive Interview: ACTOR MARK A. SHEPPARD IS THE ’LEVERAGE’ GANG’S STERLING SILVER BULLET - PART 1

The actor reprises his role as Jim Sterling (now part of Interpol) in the Season Two finale of LEVERAGE tomorrow night at 10:00 p.m. on TNT

On TNT’s series LEVERAGE, Jim Sterling is the bane of the heroes’ lives. Once the insurance investigator colleague of Timothy Hutton’s Nathan Ford, Sterling has been dogging the group of do-gooder scam artists from the beginning.

Now that he’s an Interpol agent, Sterling has the power to make their lives even more miserable – he just keeps coming back (and will play a pivotal role in the Season Two finale airing tomorrow night at 10:00 p.m. on TNT).

One reason Sterling shows up so often is that he’s played by Mark A. Sheppard, who has become one of the kings of genre television acting, with recurring roles not only on LEVERAGE, but also on CHUCK, DOLLHOUSE, SUPERNATURAL, FIREFLY, MEDIUM and BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, to name but a few.

In Part 1 of this exclusive interview, Sheppard talks about his time on LEVERAGE.

iF: When you got the call to play then-insurance investigator Jim Sterling in season one of LEVERAGE, did you know the part was going to be such a major recurring character?

MARK SHEPPARD: No. I was honored by the fact that it was written for me, which I thought was a lovely thing. It was an interesting process. I was actually on my way to and from Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. There were phone calls being made and the next thing I know, "They want you to do it." We were then filming in Glendale and I met [LEVERAGE executive producer] Dean Devlin. I’d never met Dean before that point, but we have a mutual close friend, Adam Baldwin. They threw me in the deep end. They put me in a very cool scene with Tim, which is the final scene of "The Two Horse Job," which was great to do and I think it sort of cemented where it was going to go from there. I love the fact that [series creators] John Rogers and Chris Downey and Dean and [co-executive producer] Amy Berg and everybody else really stuck to the idea that Sterling always wins. It’s great to play a character that, as John says, with any other series, would be the lead, but because it’s a series about villains, he’s in fact the nemesis. In a cop show, I’d be the lead.

iF: If Dean Devlin didn’t know you, who wrote the part for you?

SHEPPARD: I think it was between the creators and Amy Berg. They knew me from my BATTLESTAR GALACTICA work. In fact, when I arrived, Amy was wearing an ‘Adama ’08 President’ shirt. I went through all the usual casting ramifications of having to sort out whether they want me or the Rock, or me or Nicolas Cage or whoever it is the network might want. It was very apparent that Dean and John and Chris and Amy and everyone were very supportive of the idea of having me. I think that helped a lot. It’s like they treated me in a very protective manner, and they’ve treated the character in a very protective manner.

iF: Sterling has gone from being an insurance investigator to being an Interpol agent …

SHEPPARD: It was getting to a point where if Sterling was going to continuously work for IYS, how many insurance scams can you actually run? It was going to become a non-event after awhile. So there was a conversation, I think, very, very late at night between Dean and John where they’re like, "Okay, I’ve got Interpol, I’ve got the FBI, I’ve got the bad guy and I’ve got Sterling. How the hell am I going to do this?" And Dean’s answer was, "Put them all together, make it Sterling." And John said, "Is it because it’s three o’clock in the morning we’re saying that, or is it because it’s really cool?" And Dean was like, "I think it’s a bit of both." So that was the genesis of where Sterling was going, and making him Interpol now I guess means Nick Fury, agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. [laughs]

I think it’s a great way to go. Sterling is quite happy being part of the establishment, because I think it gives him a sense of altruistic correctness maybe. He’s always right, so it just makes him more right. It gives him the ammunition with which to be right. To have me show up is kind of inevitable, if you really think of the way that second season is going. I mean, having watched where we’ve got up to, how much longer are [the main characters] going to go unnoticed by authorities? They may be able to baffle the local FBI bureau, and they may be able to do this, that and the other and they may be able to switch places, but the one person they can’t get away from is Sterling, who always seems to find them.

iF: Does Sterling figure that he can use Nate and company to his advantage?

SHEPPARD: I don’t think that figures in anything that Sterling does. I mean, Sterling doesn’t believe that manipulating, as you will, the situation is "using" anybody. They’re thieves. It’s simple. They’re good thieves, so they may run around and do a few things for you, but it’s hardly a negative.

iF: Is Sterling any different now that he’s at Interpol?

SHEPPARD: Of course. He has a badge. He can wear his suits and put them on expenses. I like that. He likes the fact that he’s been recognized. Being asked to join is being recognized for the good that he does. Because everyone looks at him as an evil character or a bad character – he’s not the slightest bit bad or evil. He’s absolutely correct. I mean, if you’re going to mess with thieves, it’s going to be a tricky and dangerous situation. I think they would, for want of a better word, screw him at the earliest or any opportunity. If they could get to use Sterling, they would. John once said it’s like the Holmes and Moriarty situation. The interesting fact between Nate and Sterling is that each would concede that the other would come a close second [as a strategist]. So it becomes more of a battle of wits, rather than right and wrong. The moral aspects of right and wrong are muddied by the fact that you’re dealing with thieves anyway, or people that will play.

iF: Does Sterling feel that he and Nate used to be best friends?

SHEPPARD: Yes. He says that. I think when you see the second part [of the season finale], you’ll understand a little better. I think that Sterling thinks that Nate is weak, that he has the ability and the capabilities, but that he’s a drunk and there’s nothing worse than somebody who has all of that potential and doesn’t use it. I think he thinks that Nate’s lazy, in the worst kind of way, and that he could be doing far better things. Maybe it would be interesting to think of them as friendly competitors as well as friends. I believe at least Sterling believed they were friends. I don’t know whether Nate ever believed they were friends.

iF: And is Sterling comfortable with himself as a self-serving "utter bastard," as he calls himself, or is that a phrase he’s using because he thinks that’s how Nate sees him?

SHEPPARD: It’s a tip of the hat to the way that he’s treated by the team. We spent a lot of time with that line, much as we spent a lot of time with the final line from ["The Three Strikes Job"]. You had to think about, how do you do that without saying, "Sterling. Jim Sterling." How do you do that without saying, "Wow, this is really cool"? [laughs] So it kind of rolls off the tongue. It was a wonderful evolution. We sat with it for a day or two, thinking about what would be the best line. The wonderful reveal that Dean set up, I think it’s a wonderful camera move, you have no idea I’m going to show up. We went through all the trials and tribulations of removing my name from the opening credits, because if you put my name in the credits, you know Sterling’s coming, so I looked at Dean and I said, "You’ve got to take my name off the credits," because we didn’t want to blow it for the viewer. Nobody knew I was coming back, certainly not that soon.

iF: Do you discuss your LEVERAGE dialogue ahead of time at this point?

SHEPPARD: No, no, no. It’s so wonderfully written, very similar to BATTLESTAR. There’s very little that needs to be changed in anything that goes on, and LEVERAGE is very plot-centric and the writers are very, very good and understand the characters very, very well. They have the ear. I would venture to say that maybe Nate and Sterling are two facets of John’s personality, very much like the layers of John. So I think he writes us very, very well. There are a few nuances and subtleties that change at the time, but very little. It’s amazing. We were doing the second half [of the second-season finale], a walk-and-talk scene that happens right at the beginning, and there’s a line I just got stuck in. It was a long Steadicam shot, I did like eight or nine takes of this, and something went wrong on every take – somebody in the wrong place, we’re dealing with four people and then me hitting the speech, or it just not happening. We were going to do it again, and he comes running down the hallway and goes, "I totally screwed you. It was two soft sounds when it should have been hard sounds." He could hear in my dialogue that the way it was written looked good on paper, but this particular sentence was hard to say, because the consonants weren’t laid out in a manner that was easy to trip off the tongue. That’s how good a writer he is, that he has the ability to go, "I can see where that’s sticky." It’s usually not an issue. I don’t like to change things, unless there really isn’t a writer. My journey in this profession has been signposted by several great writers. So it falls into the second form of acting category, the first being, "How do I take this and make a human being out of it?" and the second being, "How does the human being that I know get to this point? How does that human being evolve to this situation?" It’s like rising to the material, rather than dropping down to the material.

iF: Do you come up with a back story for every character you play?

SHEPPARD: I don’t know that it’s a back story, I don’t think it’s as formal as that. but I know who I am. I discovered very early on that my process is probably a little different than most. I’m jokey and talky and fun, I’m very enthusiastic on the set, I’m very "up." Not always the easiest thing to deal with, when somebody’s "up" all the time. But for me, that’s a way of getting rid of all the extraneous energy that doesn’t belong to the character, it’s a way of burning off that excess or the stuff that’s not needed. I think it’s a continuum. Sterling is a very centered individual. There are lovely moments in most of the episodes where he has to make a decision. At the end of season one, he makes a decision. [He is asked], "Why the hell are you happy?" "I won." "How can you call this a win?" "Well, this is why." There is a point in every situation where Sterling decides what he’s going to do. The "utter bastard" line is like, "I get this, Nate can have this, I get this, I win." And it’s always "I win." It’s down to whether Sterling wins or not. Nate can manipulate the situation that he doesn’t go to jail, he doesn’t lose, but I never lose, either. To play that, you have to have a very good sense of who you are.