Real life catches up to fiction
“I should tell you, I’m a really private person.”
— Michael Emerson as reclusive billionaire Harold Finch, in Person of Interest
Michael Emerson is no neurotic. He just plays neurotics on TV.
And not just in any TV show, either, but in some of the most culturally defining dramas of their time.
He played Benjamin Linus, the mercurial leader of the Others and an all-world neurotic, for five of Lost’s six seasons, winning the 2009 Emmy in the process. He played serial killer William Hinks, another all-world neurotic, in a recurring role in David E. Kelley’s The Practice in 2001, and won an Emmy for that as well.
He currently plays moody, mercurial recluse Harold Finch in the paranoia-driven techno-thriller Person of Interest. Finch is an agoraphobe and former high-tech billionaire who is uncomfortable around people and panicky in crowds. Finch is a perfect fit for an allegorical crime drama about mass surveillance and its misuses, having invented a computer program that theoretically predicts crimes before they happen.
Finch is not the most welladjusted hero figure on primetime television, though. He’s squirrelly and given to panic attacks. He relies on his partner in crime-fighting, retired CIA operative John Reese, played by Jim Caviezel, to do the heavy lifting, where fighting crime is concerned.
Emerson, a career stage actor who has appeared in plays opposite Uma Thurman and Kevin Spacey, fell into Lost by chance. His character was to originally appear briefly, and then disappear. Instead, in one of those moments of happenstance that often characterizes successful, long-running TV dramas, the character of Ben Linus became the series’ main antagonist, Lost’s Iago to Matthew Fox’s Jack Shephard.
Emerson said he has yet to put Lost out of his mind. He doubts he ever will.
“I haven’t really digested that whole experience,” he said. “I’ve been thinking even more about it in recent months. It’s really interesting, but I think I like the
“I SHOULD TELL YOU, I’M A REALLY PRIVATE PERSON.”
MICHAEL EMERSON
show better the more I think about it. I think it did break new ground, and it had a ripple effect. It played with the narrative process; it presented the audience with an esoteric view of time and space and things like that, in a way they hadn’t seen before. And I think the audience paid it back with this incredible affection and fervour that has never really gone away.”
Person of Interest debuted 10 years almost to the day after the 9/11 terror attacks, and its twitchy, nervous take on life in a CCTV cameradominated world has found a willing audience. Person of Interest is one of the few broadcast network dramas flexible enough to warrant repeats throughout the summer. It airs Tuesdays on CBS on the U.S., and CTV in Canada.
Production resumes on its fourth season next month in New York.
With the recent WikiLeaks disclosures, the U.K. phonehacking scandal and growing disquiet over drone attacks in faraway countries, Person of Interest has reflected the times in occasionally uncanny, prescient ways, Emerson says.
“When the NSA story broke I thought, ‘Oh, wow, now real events have caught up with us.’ It’s doubleedged, though, because now we’re very topical and the writers can no longer write it from the point-of-view of it being fiction. In a way, the real world has forced itself on us.”