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Savage Pursuit

As enigmatic government agent Donald Lydecker in DARK ANGEL, John Savage keeps everyone on their toes – especially the show’s genetically engineered heroine, Max. Joe Nazzaro catches up with the distinguished actor and discovers what drives Lydecker’s pursuit of Max…

Villains are easy to create, but difficult to maintain. Without the right actor and good scripts, all you’ve got is another black-gloved baddie shaking a fist at his escaping prey and shouting, “I’ll get you next time!”

Fortunately, the makers of DARK ANGEL seem to have found a solution to this dilemma with the show’s central villain, Donald Lydecker. A former operative of Project Manticore, a top-secret government initiative to create a race of mega-warriors through genetic manipulation, Lydecker leads the pursuit of Max (Jessica Alba) in a manner which has kept viewers on the edge of their seats since the show’s debut last year.

For actor John Savage, who was cast as the modern-day Javert, the premise of DARK ANGEL was full of potential from day one. “I saw something that was very contemporary,” he explains, “but by putting it into the scariest realm of the future, they can do something different with it. They’ve got generational conflicts, there’s a lot of difference, racial stuff, a lot of urban stories, there are technology questions including the genome question and whether to privatize or nationalize it; all of those things are there.

“In the series, I’m basically doing a job, but then I find out that the job is being misused. Those kids are my hope, but by the same token, they have a different opinion about what they’re going through. There are different relationships between all of the people and how they’re dealing with them, and I might have my opinions, but I’ve been there, I was a young person once.

“I think the writers are doing a great job in handling all the relationships and answering what some of those big questions are,” he notes. “The kids want questions answered more quickly than maybe someone like my character, who has a little more time and experience. Lydecker has made mistakes and had some failures in life. He’s also an alcoholic, and I thought that was very courageous of the writers to do that – I wouldn’t know anything about it! Anyway, he’s trying to let go of the old and start something new, and it isn’t easy.”

Before Dark

A showbusiness veteran with more than 25 years of experience, John Savage has spent most of his time working in features rather than on the small screen. The Long Island native first gained worldwide attention in 1978 when he co-starred opposite Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter, the classic movie about a trio of buddies who go off to Vietnam. Other films followed, including Hair, The Onion Field, Inside Moves, Do the Right Thing, Salvador and The Godfather, Part III. He’s appeared in nearly 100 features in all; some good, a few best left forgotten.

Savage has been a bit more selective in his choice of television appearances (“Yeah, I only take what’s offered to me!” he jokes), but his handful of genre outings have certainly been memorable ones. They include the Tales from the Crypt episode Revenge is the Nuts, and an Outer Limits called the Conversion.

Viewers of The X-Files will also remember his appearance in the second-season episode Dod Kalm, as a crewman trapped aboard an ancient freighter with agents Mulder and Scully. “That was a lot of fun, and Gillian [Anderson] was such a wonderful lady, and [David] Duchovny; I look forward to working with them again. I was really nervous, but it turned out to be a good experience.”

The episode also called for Savage’s character to undergo rapid premature aging, hardly the most comfortable experience for any actor to endure. “I’ve done it several times before, and there is a little bit of fear and paranoia when you have to wear that much make-up. I did a version of Beauty and the Beast with Rebecca De Mornay years ago, and the make-up was great, but the heat was really difficult. Just getting into that make-up and taking the time to learn how to distort it and make it move – that can get pretty spooky. Your heart starts racing, you can’t enough air, and there’s nothing you can do. Your body is free to move, but you can’t really get out of it.”

One of Savage’s more recent genre appearances was in Star Trek: Voyager, playing renegade Starfleet Captain Ransom in the two-part Equinox episode. “That was a similar kind of experience to DARK ANGEL,” he recalls, “with a good company and great actors and writers. You’ve got a guy who’s thinking he made the best decisions he could as captain of the ship and the best decision for the survival of his people. In the meantime, he’s violated a bigger [principle], and that will cause the suffering and possible imprisonment of his entire crew. So when the opportunity arises, it’s a very easy decision to make, to sacrifice his life for the future of his crew.

“I’d been following the show off and on for years and I knew friends and family of Kate [Mulgrew, Captain Janeway], even though we’d never met. Back then, television scared me a little bit. It doesn’t now, because I have enough trouble recovering from the amount of sleep I’ve lost, so I don’t have the time for fear anymore. I just thought that Star Trek was the best rep company I’ve ever seen. Their technicians would just pick up and go from set to set – sound, lighting, camera, actors; everything would be piled on the cart and like a bunch of ants, they’d move on to the next studio.”

Dark Horizon

When the producers of DARK ANGEL began looking for an acto to fill the role of Lydecker, pilot director David Nutter suggested Savage as a candidate. “I think David had a lot to do with my being cast, and getting through the obstacles. They might have gone for actors who are better known on television, so for me, it was a big shot.

“It was a good script and there are good writers, so I have to be careful not to become too involved in other people’s jobs. The less I’ve done that, the better they’ve been for me too, so I’ve kept a balancing act going, which is good for me.” As the first season neared its end, Lydecker remained one of DARK ANGEL’s most enigmatic characters, with few details of his past being revealed. Did Savage find himself maintaining his own mental back-story for his on-screen persona?

“I have my own opinions,” claims the actor, slipping back into first-person to discuss his character, “but I also have to face the fact that I don’t really have anything to say about anything. You have to make adjustments.”

“I can play Lydecker as a completely frustrated, self-centered, opinionated alcoholic, and then I don’t really know the things they’re going to write for me. If they say, ‘Shoot a guy!’, I shoot him. You can’t say, ‘Well, I don’t think I should shoot the guy.’ If they write ‘shoot him’, I’ve got to shoot him. I have a lot of feelings about using weapons on television, but can I express them through my character? No, I have a job, and I’m duty-bound to do it.”

“In my mind, I’m hopefully trying to bring some integrity back to our government, or retain what’s left of the few threads of our economy, and I feel a sense of loss or frustration. But at the same time, I think those kids signify hope, For me, they are hope in a sense that they might not only be a very strong front-line defense force on the ground, but I forgot they were kids. I forgot they needed nurturing and a sense of support, something that I missed and now I’m answering for it. I don’t want to see them die or be subjected to manipulation by my own government or other corporate powers who want to kidnap them or anything like that.”

“I don’t know where the writers are going with it, but I know what I’ve suggested and they’ve brought it to a simplistic form with Madame X [played by former Deep Space Nine actress Nana Visitor] who’s in there now. She’s not a medical person, and I don’t know where she got her authority, but she’s got authority, so I don’t know how much longer I have.”

With DARK ANGEL now heading into its second year, just what the future holds for Donald Lydecker will have to remain a mystery, at least for the time being. “My desire at this moment is to see my character continue to grow,” says John Savage, “and my hopes are that’s what will happen. I’m afraid to express my desires too much, because Lydecker is only another cog in a wheel of a lot of parts and ideas, so who knows? Maybe characters who die [could] come back in another form or another being. That remains to be seen. I have no idea. I would like that, but I just don’t know what’s going to happen.”