HIFF: Alex O’Loughlin’s Q&A Highlights Part 1

NonStop Honolulu’s Ed Morita posted the Hawaii Five-0 HIFF panel highlights and below is Alex O’Loughlin’s part of the Q&A with moderator Anderson Le.

Mahalo to Ed for making it easier for us to enjoy our Alex fix!

Anderson: Alex, How does your Steve McGarrett differ from Jack Lord’s?

Alex: My Steve McGarrett is a lot different from Jack Lord’s, and the show is very different from the old show. I get this question a lot. “Five-0 was a really important show for television at the time. It was a huge cop show, around for 12 years, and back then, there were only two and a half channels or something. It was that or “The Cosby Show.” There were about 50 million people living on earth. A lot has changed since then. The nature of television has changed, and the nature of the business has changed. Technology had changed so much that we have to keep up, but the great thing for us is that technology has taken us to a point where we can do things that really rival what they do in movies.

Coming back to the original question, all that being said, my Steve McGarrett is a man with a huge past. In the teaser of the pilot, you already know so much about him. You know he’s a Navy SEAL. You know he’s active; you know he’s on a mission; you know his father is killed, and it’s related to the mission that he is on. Jack Lord is a man without a past. He was kind of a ghost of a man who had a lot of power, but we weren’t allowed to know anything about him. My guy is different from the beginning. I try to stay away from anything Jack did and approached it as an actor working from the ground up. We pay homage to the old show as much as we can. We’ve got a lot of props, the car. We’ve got things throughout the set. The hat rack in the office is from Jack’s original office. Wherever we can we give a tip of the hat because we play in the shadow of that show. We have great respect for what came before us.

Anderson: I like that all the characters are all flawed. Where do you pull from to build your character?

Alex: Oh I can’t tell you that. That’s like asking Anthony Bourdain how he makes his secret lobster bisque. It’s like as an actor… it’s a funny art form. If you’re an artist, you paint. If you’re a musician, you play a score. There’s something very tangible and specific about what you do. If you play the wrong note, you’re not playing the piece correctly, whereas with what we do, there are so many different interpretations of a role or a scene. That’s what makes casting so important. Sometimes you watch a movie and it’s just not quite right. Sometimes it’s down to just interpretation. I trained for three years in Sydney at the National Institute of Dramatic Art. I learned a lot. I guess it was the pinnacle of my training… I have a way that I work as an artist; you go to your experience. If you are good at what you do, you find a way to turn the objective experience into a subjective study tool.

The funny thing about television is… you get the material, and you’re working the next day. You don’t have time to go full Stanislavski and go into the forest and grow a beard and do all that stuff that we thespians like to do. It’s almost like cold reading. It’s an instinct mechanism that gets stronger. It’s a muscle as well that gets stronger the more you do work like this.

Anderson: So how’s living in Hawaii now?

Alex: I love it man. I love it; it’s my home. Australia will always be my home. I’ll always be an Aussie, but you know, I mean, it’s funny. You know a few years ago with Eckhart Tolle… and everyone became into self-help and started saying things like, “Dude it just wasn’t meant to be.” I kind of believe that’s the way things happen despite how they feel or how they seem at the time. If you kind of step away from it, you can see why it’s happening the way it is. Me being here isn’t really an accident.

… From the very beginning, it was kind of meant to be. I come here and in hindsight it becomes so much clearer to me because I wake up in the islands, and I grew up surrounded by this ocean (Pacific). I’ve never felt outside of Australia more at home than anywhere else than Hawaii. I’m now a homeowner here. I have a dog.

I think that’s even more significant than a wife or a child. Once you get a dog, where I come from, you know, “Well I’ve got a dog, I’m not going anywhere.” I’ll always have a place here no matter what happens.

Anderson: This is another question for the cast. A lot of your back stories are unknown mysteries. So how do you base your acting on stories that could have lots of twists and turns, like with the Governor last season?

Alex: Sometimes you’ll work with a director where you won’t get the whole script, and you’re never get the whole script. There are directors out there who make really important films and even the leads only get small bits of information, and that’s one way to work. I’m a technician as well. I go out and do my work. I think that even with what we do… the more information I have, I can plant seeds along the way that perhaps Peter hasn’t thought of. For me, the more information I have, the more opportunity I have to make decisions and choices.

Audience question: Why do you think your show is so successful considering so many recent remakes have failed on network television?

Alex: I think this is a good one for the final question, and I’ve been on a run of failures, so I think I’ll start the answering process. I think that what Peter said is right, luck is definitely a part of it. The world is always changing. What’s topical is always changing. What people want to see? What’s happening in pop culture? It’s the sum of all those parts, but it’s also very much you have to have a good cast, a good crew, and everything has got to be in place. I think in my experience in television, the most important thing is you have to have good stories. You have to have a good team of writers, and good scripts continually. If you give me a bad script, there is only so much that I can do. The most important part is having a good person to run the show and the material that is being given to the rest of us to do what we do.

Read the full article at NonStop Honolulu: Part 1 and Part 2