Finnigan intrigued by Tyrant role
LOS ANGELES, Calif. — Jennifer Finnigan was in a hurry. She had a rendezvous to make, and a plane to catch. She was headed to Israel for the filming of Tyrant, the new FX political thriller in which she plays the American wife of a Los Angeles pediatrician who, unknown to her, is the youngest son of a Middle Eastern dictator suddenly in danger of being deposed.
He’s been living in self-imposed exile in the U.S. for 20 years, but returns home one day for a family wedding, accompanied by his wife and children.
Fate intervenes, and he decides to stay.
For the Montreal-born Finnigan, life was about to imitate art.
Finnigan was used to the relative comfort of her adopted home in Los Angeles, where she appeared in more than 500 episodes of The Bold and the Beautiful, for which she won a trio of Daytime Emmy Awards, before starring in the CBS crime drama Close to Home for two seasons in 2007.
Jumping on a plane to Israel, where Tyrant has been filming since March, was similar to her character’s being uprooted from her comfortable suburban existence and thrust into a region of the world plagued by civil strife and war.
Whatever anxiety she felt was blunted by the opportunity as an actor, though.
“There’s nothing better for an actor than to be completely immersed in a location where the characters themselves feel out of place,” Finnigan explained. “It informs your work so much more to actually be in a place, as opposed to a sound stage in Burbank. This is going to bring out a side of myself I’ve never really been able to grab onto before. I’m a little scared, but also thrilled. It’s sightunseen.”
Finnigan prefers to alternate between drama and comedy. Her most recent role was as a star neurosurgeon in David E. Kelley’s and Sanjay Gupta’s medical drama Monday Mornings. Doing another drama so soon after Monday Mornings was not in the cards, or so she believed at the time.
And then she read Israeli writer Gideon Raff ’s script for Tyrant.
The pilot episode was directed by BBC veteran David Yates, director of the BAFTA winning BBC miniseries Sex Traffic and the Emmywinning HBO film The Girl in the Cafe.
Yates was also known for directing a modest, littleknown two-part film called Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
Clearly, Tyrant was not to be ignored.
“The minute I picked up the script, I couldn’t put it down,” Finnigan said. “I loved the idea of telling the story of this woman who has been kept at arm’s length by her husband their entire life together. Can you imagine being married to someone for 20 years and not knowing that side of them, not knowing where they grew up or seeing where they were born, only to learn it’s the Middle East and it’s royalty?
“I was curious to explore that.”