David Mazouz – Gotham

By: Jamie Steinberg

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

A) It’s been mostly “Gotham” because it shoots nine and a half months a year and then the other two and a half months I’m going to school. I do have a movie coming out on December 2^nd that is a horror movie with Aaron Eckhart called Incarnate. It’s really, really good! Carisse van Houten is in it and Brad Peyton who directed Journey 2 and San Andreas is the director. It’s a thriller, but you are on the edge of your seat. It’s scary. It’s really scary!

Q) That is quite a difference from the work you do on “Gotham!”

A) It’s very different from what I do on “Gotham.” My character is possessed for the majority of the movie, which is really fun because I’m not possessed the entire It’s kind of like playing two different roles in the same project. I play an innocent eleven-year-old boy and a demon. So, that is a lot of fun.

Q) I guess that prepared you for this season of “Gotham” then where you play two characters!

A) Exactly! I’m also playing two people on “Gotham,” but I think the show is even more interesting because I have scenes with myself, which is confusing on set as well as difficult.

Q) What were your initial thoughts when you learned you’d be taking on two roles?

A) I opened the script of the season finale and got to the last page and it said at end of a truck of monsters a young man comes out with long hair and a scar. Then, we see it is the doppelganger of Bruce Wayne. I was like, “Wait! What?! What’s happening?!” That night I called Bruno [Heller] and talked to him a few days later and he was like, “Yeah, we’re doing this!” I was like, “Okay! Great! Let’s do it!” I was super-duper excited. I was really, really excited and it has been everything that I could imagine. It’s been really, really fun and it has been great to play. The script calls him Bruce 2. Bruce 2 is very different from Bruce. They really are different people. They communicate differently, they walk different and everything about them is different besides the fact they look identical to one another. It has been so much fun to do that. As an actor, it is a great opportunity and I have been having so much fun with it.

Q) How do you get into the mind of Bruce and Bruce 2 in order to portray each as an individual character?

A) It’s tough. I’ve been doing Bruce for two and a half years now. Bruce is a very, very complex character and there are scenes where it is really difficult to understand what he is going through and try to put myself through that. It was really more difficult for me this season to get into the mindset of Bruce 2 because I just started playing him and it is very, very different from Bruce. It took a while for me to figure him out because he is not really an archetype of any character that I have ever seen anywhere else. I don’t want to give too much away, but he is different than anything I have ever seen before so it was really tough to figure him out since I didn’t have anything to model him after. With Bruce, I had comic books and other incarnations from movies. This character was built in “Gotham.” He is born and goes straight to the lab. He is coming into the world for the very first time at the end of the finale of Season Two. So, we find him and he is very lost. It was difficult and I really had to focus. The wig helped a lot and I had different makeup that I usually do. I had different clothes on. Robin Lord Taylor (who plays Penguin) has a prosthetic nose that he puts on for his role and he always says that the nose gets him into character. Of course, I understood that, but I knew exactly what he meant when I started wearing the wig. When they chose the wig, I was like, “Okay. I know who this guy is.”

Q) What will Bruce’s mindset be this season?

A) I think that Season One Bruce was very stuck on grieving the entire season so he didn’t really get out much and do a lot of investigating. In the second season, I think that really accelerated and changed. Especially towards the end of the season, you really started to see him take on the traits of Batman. I think in Season Three he realizes that and says, “I’m going a little too fast. I need to slow myself down,” because at the end of Season Two if he continues on the path he was going on he will (again) put people he cares about and loves in danger – i.e. Alfred, Selina, Gordon, Lucius, etc. He says, “I don’t know if I’m really ready to do this. If I am, I need to really be sure what my purpose is,” and I think he will be battling that the entire season. So, I think that in Season Three he is kind of more chill and not the proven Bruce we have seen before. Throughout the season, you’ll see him take on many, many challenges. The fact he is stepping away from his investigative ways does not mean he will not stop training or be less involved in what is happening in Gotham and the evolution of Batman. It is still going to continue, but he kind of takes a step back for now. Towards the middle of the season, you will see the birth of his playboy persona and the way the producers have explained it to me in the comic books when Batman is Batman and Bruce Wayne puts on this personality of being a playboy and party boy it’s so real. I guess on “Gotham,” since Bruce is playing it so well it becomes was he ever really that person? That’s what we will be exploring in Season Three.

Q) What kind of new gadgets will Bruce be learning from Mr. Fox?

A) To be honest, I don’t know. I think it will be coming later on in the season. We saw Bruce drive a car last year and that may have something to do with the Batmobile. I’m not going to say anything…I would love to see an early form of Batarang because that is Batman’s signature weapon. I would love to see the origins of that come in.

Q) How will this season effect Bruce’s relationship with Selina?

A) There relationship is going to take a huge turn in this season. They have kind of had this flirtatious vibe the first two seasons, but this season they are going to take things to the next level. Both of them are going to probably realize that wasn’t the wisest choice. Another thing is that Selina (Camren Bicondova) in Season One was kind of enlisted by Bruce because he needed someone to show him the ropes of the streets and what Gotham really looked like – the gritty part of town. Now that we are going into Season Three, he has kind of had that experience so he doesn’t really need Selina anymore for that and that was her original purpose for her. But they are still friends so the question is why? I think the answer is because they have this connection that is unexplainable, but it has been there ever since they met. They are going to be exploring that and what exactly that means for the two of them throughout the season.

Q) Who would you like to have more scenes with or haven’t worked with at all that you would like to shoot with?

A) Most of the cast I would say! I love the people that I work with. I work with Sean [Pertwee] a lot and Ben [McKenzie] a lot. But Gotham is a huge cast. I think they have fourteen regulars that a lot of us don’t get to work with each other and if we do it is only one scene here or there. I’d love to work with Chris [Chalk] more. I love working with him and I think the Bruce/Lucius relationship is such an important one, too, to the Batman and “Gotham” mythos. I had kind of a scene with Cory [Michael Smith] who plays Nygma at the end of the season last year, but it was kind of through glass so it doesn’t really count in my book. I’d love to have some scenes with him and some scenes with Penguin. I mean, literally most of the cast I haven’t worked with so everybody!

Q) What do you think it is about this season’s Mad City theme that will draw in viewers?

A) The whole premise of the show is how a regular city can decline so much and be so chaotic and in such crap that Batman is a necessity and Bruce Wayne needs to put on the cape. This season is no exception. The city is just going to get more and more chaotic. So, I think what is going to draw viewers in is that it is alluding to the need for Batman and who doesn’t love Batman?

Q) He is such an icon that it must be so amazing for you to be the person to formulate this version of him.

A) Definitely! I’m ready for the cape.

Q) Is there anything else you want to be sure fans know about this season of “Gotham,” maybe about your relationship this season with Alfred?

A) I love working with Sean. I’ve learned so much from him over the past two and a half years. But Bruce and Alfred’s relationship will be taking…Their relationship has been so dynamic. It’s been so much fun to play with that I think in Season One Alfred was kind of the help and that’s how Bruce saw him. Then, it kind of transitioned into a father-son relationship. Then, towards the end of Season Two and especially the beginning of Season Three now they are partners. Now, they are equals and that is the relationship we know from the Batman mythos. Alfred is Batman’s partner and they are in this together. We hadn’t really felt that until really the beginning of Season Three. Alfred has really been trying to stop Bruce from going on his adventures into the underworld and so on and so forth. Now, Alfred is realizing that Bruce is going to do this because he feels he needs to – with or without Alfred. So, he kind of says he is going to help him now and they really start working together now. You won’t see that back and forth quarrel anymore.