Matt Servitto – Banshee

By: Jamie Steinberg

Q) What are the recent projects that you are working on?

A) I’ve been shooting Season Three of a crazy show I do for Adult Swim called “Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell,” where I play Satan. It’s a comedy that I’ve had a blast doing. It’s the most demented show, but the most fun to shoot. It takes about two hours to get into character and a two hours to get out of it. I just did a pilot for USA Network called “Brooklyn Animal Control” that is based on the comic book that is similar to Men In Black about a secret division of the NYPD that deals with werewolves and other creatures of the night. I’m just waiting to hear if that gets picked up. I did an arc on “Elementary” before that and finished up Season Four of “Banshee” around the end of summer in 2015.

Q) How was your character Brock on “Banshee” originally described to you?

A) It’s one of those things that I didn’t share with fans or in interviews for a long time. My character was supposed to be dead by the end of Season One. I was brought on as kind of a plot point where he would discover Lucas Hood’s (Antony Starr) secret by the end of the season. No one had figured out he was a liar until me at the end of the season and there was a big shoot out. I get shot and as I’m dying I say, “I know you aren’t who you say you are,” as I’d just found out on my way to this shootout. That would have been the end to Brock. I had a one year contract and I had no delusions that it was going to go on past that. I was just going to make myself very useful while I was there, be suspicious and angry at the new guy. About halfway through the first season, the writers and producers came to me and said, “Yeah, we’re not killing you. We like you. We like the character.” There was starting to be a dynamic between Brock and Lucas and Antony and I there was a good chemistry and dynamic. We were good foils for each other. One of the writers said he had the hardest writing project of his life by having to unkill Brock Lotus. Then, in the second season it was difficult because he said he didn’t plan to have me around so he was still spending a lot of time rewriting me into the second season. I felt about halfway through the second season like they had full figured out how to keep me there and made me integral part of the show. It was just amazing to me that what was supposed to just be a minor role ended up being a major role throughout all four seasons. It was nice to watch that transformation.

Q) What have you continued to find challenging about portraying Brock?

A) A big part of the premise of the show is that Lucas Hood is not Lucas Hood. One of the actresses on the show likes to say, “Our show is never going to jump the shark because we jumped the shark in the first episode.” The premise is jumping the shark because the premise is so insane that an ex-con comes to town passing himself off as someone else and gets the job of sheriff. With the Internet today and Google, it’s hard to believe that people wouldn’t figure out that someone wasn’t who they said they are. It was so well written and delicately laid in and finessed that you believed it. Once we got that going, my character was always the most suspicious of Lucas (going back to Season One when that was my motive). Who was this guy? Why is he here? He took my job. So, for a long time on this show I had to continue to be suspicious of this guy and I just didn’t want it to be one note of “I know you aren’t who you say you are.” I wanted to be layers to that where maybe I begin to doubt my own reservations. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he is who he says he is. That was the hardest thing to play, continually being suspicious of this character while trying to find layers to that. I was still, for the most part, the only one in town who didn’t like this guy and didn’t trust him. I just didn’t want to always play that the same. I began to let him in as the show went on into my world and share a bit of Brock’s pain or struggles with him. It kind of paralleled my relationship with Tony Soprano. I came on “The Sopranos” on the first season as an FBI agent and he hated me and, of course, I didn’t like him because I’m trying to take down organized crime. But over seven seasons of the show we kind of became friends so much so that by the end I was sort of giving him inside information right into the finale where I gave major information that kind of changed the course of the show. I found my relationship with Lucas Hood was sort of similar in that you start with a very suspicious standoff kind of behavior and eventually we didn’t become great friends, but we did go through some major struggles together and discovered a little bit about each other. Then, by the end of the show, Lucas has come a little to the good side and I’ve come a little to the bad side so we’re both somewhere in the middle.

Q) What can you tease is in store this season for Deputy Lotus?

A) This season is so hard to talk about because it is so different from the first three seasons. I’ve never done a show where I’ve done prep and they’ve given us a list of non-talking points. Usually, they give you stuff you can say about the show or season. This year we got a list saying what not to talk about. So, it’s very interesting to talk about this fourth season because it is such a turn for the show in regards to the writing. I described the first three seasons being like “Banshee” on cocaine where we were just going and going. Season Four “Banshee” is like on booze because it is slower, darker, more mysterious and we were kind of going so fast. It’s an aerobic show. I always say it’s a “thinking man’s action show.” There is a lot going on and interesting characters, but it’s a drug that people love. Fans say they like to pop a beer and “shut off their brain” to let us take them on this crazy rollercoaster ride. We go places no other show goes in regards to violence and the extremes of the characters. This season we kind of put the breaks on. I feel like the show just couldn’t continue at that pace and have us all still be alive. So, they slowed it down, but still all of that great “Banshee” stuff is there. But there is a big mystery at the core of Season 4 and it starts immediately. The fans are going to go crazy. They are going to love it! Some of them aren’t going to love it, but they will come around. We’ll have to win them over because it is a different “Banshee,” but as I said there are still all the elements there just some plot points and a tenor of the show is a little bit different. I look forward to winning them over!

Q) What have been some of your favorite moments from filming the show?

A) This is going to sound so cliché, but I had one sex scene on the show and the actress Tanya Clarke…The poor thing came to the set and her first scene on the first day was our sex scene. So, that’s when she got thrown into “Banshee” world.” I think I was forty-nine years old and I just couldn’t believe I was finally getting my first sex scene. After all of the years of having a good body and having a full head of hair, I finally get a sex scene as a middle aged bald fat guy on a show. So, of course, I got in the best shape of my life. But I loved the challenge of it. You’ll hear many clichés from actors where they say, “I just treat it as an acting scene,” but we did because there was so much going on, she was a new character and we were playing a divorced couple that still hangs out occasionally and still need each other for emotional reasons. So, the set was going to be its own beast because you are expressing a lot about these two people through a sex scene. I also wanted it to be a little weird and this element of now you can see why they work because they are both a little violent, a little weird and a little kinky. So, we had to bring so much to this one scene – more than any other scene I’ve done on this show. Then, there is the beginning of the scene where you see us drinking and arguing. The scene had to be cut down quite a bit and it just also being sensitive to a sex scene you have to tune everything out, stay in the moment and be with the actress. Even between takes, you have to kind of stay in that world. So, it was truly one of my favorite scenes. Also in that episode, right after the sex scene the next time you see me is me doing a monologue at a gravesite. One of the cops on the show, Emmitt, gets killed and I go to his grave and I’m still a bit tipsy from seeing my ex-wife. I go to his tomb and kind of cheerfully talk to him for what by television standards is a huge monologue. You never get that, especially on “Banshee” because everything has to keep moving. They said, “We’re going to slow things down a little bit and let you just be there with him and talk to him.” It was me leaning on his tombstone talking to him and sharing the mess that was my life at that moment. It was great! I remember walking up to the tombstone and starting to well up and cry because he was one of my favorite people to work with and I loved him on the show. It gave the sense that he was gone, too. When you see someone’s name on a tombstone, even though it was a fictional character, it was still kind of emotional. The one thing I just loved about the show was the action and the fact that I was able to participate in so many shootouts. Again, I’m a Julliard trained theater actor form New York that has spent a lot of time doing independent films a lot of classical theater. To think that I would end up on a show where I would get to blow things up, shoot them up and be a part of big explosions was just a blast! Make no mistake about it, those were fun to shoot. So many things on my acting bucket list I got to check off on “Banshee,” including having a giant shootout with the bad guys and having a sex scene.

Q) What have you taken away from your time working on “Banshee?”

A) When you work on a show like that it is so intense. All the tropes that we say when we do interviews like the friendships…Really, I’ve worked on a lot of shows, but this show was so intense. We were also on location so it felt like we were shooting a film. You spend a lot of time together. When you do a show like “The Sopranos,” you finish shooting in New York so everyone just goes home to their apartment, houses and loved ones. With “Banshee,” we all went back to the same apartment complex and then we’d all go to dinner. We’d stay up late working on the lines for the next day and then be with each other all day on set. So, we spent an enormous amount of time together over and over and over. Everyone said it felt like college because the show was four years and we were usually all in the same housing. We spent a lot of time together and this group got really, really tight. I loved that process and I loved these people. I loved those friendships that I will take away from that. It was only four years, but the friendships I have taken away from it will last a lifetime.

Q) What would you like to say to everyone who is a fan and supporter of you and your work?

A) Thanks for watching and really something for me is that this was just another wonderful experience on a road of many great experiences. It’s fun to be an actor in the age of the internet and social media because we are people that like attention, feedback and accolades. In the day of social media, you can get those instantly. It used to be the only way a fan could reach out to you was if they actually saw you or maybe they wrote a letter. Now, I just get emails and texts from all over the world! I was just going through the feed on Facebook from fans asking for autographs and pictures from me that were in Moscow, Sweden and Bulgaria. “Banshee” has a HUGE international following. I think we might be as big if not bigger overseas. Action plays internationally. Anything with action speaks the international language. It’s just fun to have that interaction with fans and I love that this point in my career to be able to have fans finding things I did twenty years ago on TV, a movie theater or airplane and sending me some sort of reaction to me is just great.