Milo Ventimiglia's Three Episode Arc on "Gotham"
Milo Ventimiglia is Shrek-ing Havoc on FOX’s “Gotham!” “The Ogre” Changes Lives Forever!
*Please note that "Gotham" is recommended for our readers 14 and over!*
Milo Ventimiglia is no stranger to television. He’s instantly recognizable to fans of the WB’s “Gilmore Girls” and spent five years on NBC’s hit “Heroes.” For the most part, the California native has played a good guy. That’s not the case for his three-episode arc on Fox’s “Gotham,” which starts on April 13th.
The actor will play double-life leader, Jason Lennon, a good guy by day, lady-killer (literally) by night. Milo recently spoke with reporters about playing the villain that will change lives forever in Gotham. Here’s what he had to say!
“I got a phone call,” Milo begins when asked he found out about “The Ogre.” “I got a phone call from my agent saying that they wanted me, and I said, ‘Great!’ I’m a huge fan of Bruno Heller, his work, and I’m longtime friends of Ben McKenzie and Donal Logue, and I’ve been watching the show. And it was just one of those things where I had those connections. Then I went, ‘I’m free at the moment. So this sounds like a lot of fun.’”
How would he describe the character? “So, Jason Lennon, a.k.a. ‘The Ogre,’ is a serial killer. He is a guy who’s looking for love, but the love that he’s looking for is unconditional. And I think, as nice as that sounds and romantic as that sounds, his expectations are probably a lot more fierce and a lot past the line of what usual love is. So, he gets, I think from the setup that you guys might have seen from the featurette, he targets women for love and he also targets loved ones of cops that will investigate him. So it’s only natural that he’s going to run into a guy like Jim Gordon, who is the hero cop of Gotham. So, it’s two strong forces—one for good, one for dark—going up against each other.”
Was Milo a Batman fan growing up? “I mean, I was raised on comic books. Every Wednesday, my father would take me to a comic book shop in Orange County, California, ‘Freedonia Funnies,’ and so I was raised on it. Batman, funny enough, was always my favorite. I loved the fact that he wasn’t an alien from another planet or injected with some kind of super-serum. I loved the fact that he was a man like anyone else, and he used his resources and his intellect and his body beyond what those other people would stop at.”
“And he did it for a bit of vengeance, or vigilantism, but also, he did it for the people he saw were caught up in a horrible society, a crime-filled society. So, I’d always been a Batman fan, I’d always been a DC fan, I grew up with Superman. I grew up on comic books, so there was everything in there. There was DC, there was Marvel, there was everything, man. I mean, and even the offshoot books of other, smaller press.”
Did he use that background knowledge to develop his version of “The Ogre?” “You know, of course, he is different than what’s in the DC universe. I took what was on the page, written by Bruno Heller’s team, and I pretty much went off of that. And my understanding of what they were looking for in a serial killer that was kind of a guy who was just looking for love, and as simple as it sounds, but as complex as it may be, and I just went—everything was off the page as was written, knowing that it wasn’t a direct pull from the DC universe and the original Ogre. So, it was actually exciting and fun and simple, because they wrote a really, really complex, dark character that was a lot of fun to play.
Take a Look At The Ogre Here:
Being known for mostly good-guy roles, one reporter wondered if it was Milo nervous about playing a bad guy? “Is it scary if I say no, there wasn’t a challenge playing a bad guy?” he joked. “No, that is the nice thing about just being an actor. You get thrown into a lot of different roles, so you get to embrace the good guy when you’re playing the good guy, and you get to embrace the bad guy when you’re playing the bad guy. This guy is pretty horrible.”
“It’s hopefully one of those things that my mother won’t ask me questions about my upbringing,” he continues, “When she and my father weren’t around, when they watch it. But it’s always fun to play the villain. It’s always fun to play the foil to the good guy, the dark to the light, and ‘the Ogre’ was probably about as much fun as you could have with playing a villain.”
“I mean, I think some fans of my work, I think they’ve seen me go pretty dark and be pretty bad, but I think they’ll hopefully enjoy this version of it, which is a little smoother, a lot more charming, but then flips on a dime and is evil, evil, evil.”
That being said, is there anything that the audience will find likable about this character? “I think there’s a lot to be liked about the guy,” Milo reasons. “He’s looking for love, I think, which is something we can all connect with in one way or another. We’re looking to be accepted. And he’s a guy who is looking for that. He’s charming without being arrogant, but there is arrogance in his way of being, because he can’t see outside of himself, and what he imposes on women that ultimately lead to him killing them.”
“So, I think there is something that is true in his search, but his means of doing it are completely wrong,” he continued. “And what he’s asking for, to the degree that he’s asking for, is just, it’s skewed, it’s off, it’s not right, it’s not kind, it’s not good. But his kind of way of being and talking to a girl—I didn’t think, as I was reading the scripts, and as I was playing it, it wasn’t an act to get the girl so he can just kill the girl. He doesn’t want to kill the girl. But he eventually will, because, well, they’re not quite who he thinks they are. He’s already pushed them past the point where he’d probably be in trouble. So, why not just discard this woman and find another one? So, I think that there are small redeeming qualities about him, but the majority of who he is shadows any other good that’s possibly in there.”
“But he, I mean, he’s just off. He’s just off, but I didn’t want to paint the guy as not having any kind of sense of humanity inside of him just because that’s, I guess, me as an actor, I had to humanize the guy in some way. But he’s just mentally off in how he views the world, and I think, so selfish. So, so selfish that he believes that he can do whatever he wants to whoever he wants because of his charm or his nice Gucci suits or money. But ultimately, I mean, it’s power. It’s wielding a power.”
“I think, when I was thinking about this role and I was kind of researching and looking at other serial killers, like Ted Bundy was someone who kind of stuck with me, and how he approached people in life, and women, and what other people had crossed his path that he didn’t kill said about him; that he was charming. You could talk to him, and he was engaging, and that was the way to pull you in. But Ted Bundy, he was all about possession, having possessions.”
Was there one particular scene that he was worried about filming? “Gosh. I mean, there were a lot of scenes, a lot of tough scenes, but I think the first one is always the hardest one, just because you’re on a set, you’ve got a bunch of new people, I’m always trying to learn everybody’s name, and do my job. The first scene that I shot, it was not even as the character. It was the character within the character within the character. So, I think that might have been the hardest one. But it was just because you’re the new kid at school. You’re the new kid at school, and you just want to go in there and do good work and not get noticed in a bad way, so the first scene is always just the hardest scene. Everything after that you settle in, you’re relaxed, you’re amongst friends, and you’re among the people that want you to do good work. You want them to do good work. So then you just do good work together.
With social media and the Internet, was Milo excited about the instant feedback from fans? You know, it’s funny. When I’m on set, I do it for the crew, I do it for the cast that I’m with, and then you just kind of hand it off to the fans. And some people are going to love what you do, some people are going to pick apart what you do. But, at the end of the day, it’s like, I feel really good about the work, and I had a lot of fun. I mean, this cast and crew of ‘Gotham’ is just, they’re the best. There’s a lot of laughter and a lot of fun had. And I think, looking on Twitter, or something like that, and seeing the fans’ immediate reaction, of even just the featurette, it’s all pretty positive so far. So, I think people are going to enjoy seeing what we put together.
See for yourself how Milo did wreaking havoc on “Gotham” by playing “The Ogre.” His three-episode arc beings on April 13 at 8:00PM!
More From Milo:
On Playing a Gotham Villain:
I mean, look. Those, you know, Joker and Scarecrow and Penguin and Riddler, I mean, they’re all staples. The Ogre, I think, you kind of have to just look at what the show is, and it’s a different version, a pre-story of a story that we already know, of characters that we already know. So if you’re adding somebody new, hopefully—I think the writers have accomplished this, but hopefully the character is interesting enough, and seeing my silly mug up on the screen is going to be fun for audiences to say, “Oh wow, this guy is bad. He’s not the usual that we know.” But, at the same time, what the writers had created, and what I was able to do with the creative team on set, people, hopefully fans will enjoy it and say, “Wow, the Ogre is just as bad as the Penguin, or Scarecrow, or Riddler. Or anybody.”
I mean, for selfish reasons of liking the actors, I think it’d be fun to team up with Robin, who plays Cobblepot, or Cory, who’s playing the Riddler, who’s beginning to go dark. Just because there’s a lot of fun and good guys. But, I mean, I kind of wait until the pages come in, the scripts come in, and just go, “Oh, okay. This is the fun I’m going to be having, this is who I’m going to be having the fun with.”
What He Didn’t Want The Character to Be:
I’ll tell you what I didn’t want to be was a villain twisting his mustache while there’s a dame tied up on a train track. That’s what I didn’t want to be. What I basically wanted to do, I think, I was lucky because I had this amazing material, these great words and these good scripts. I was able to just follow that, and follow my instincts, and follow my want to just be an honest person. Honest with what he wants, like I said, even though what he wants is horrible and kind of odd, and how he gets it, what measures he goes to. He’s a sociopath.
On Good Guy Role Vs. Bad Guy Roles:
You know, good roles are good roles. It doesn’t matter if they’re the bad guy, if they’re the good guy, if they’re the sideline guy, they’re anything. It’s just, good roles are good roles, and I think, right when I—probably, after I come out of playing the bad guy, sometimes you’re like, “Oh, maybe I want to be a bit of a golden heart on the next one,” and then you play the good guy and you’re like, “Oh, maybe I want to go dark for the next one,” but, you just kind of have to, or I have to, just take the roles that come at me, and embrace what it is, and put my heart into it and paint my heart with a lot of gold or a lot of shadow. So, for me, I just—I play them as they come. And I enjoy the h*** out of all of them. I really, really do.
For more on "Gotham" visit http://www.Fox.com/Gotham
Follow Milo on Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MiloVentimiglia