"Hello, I'm Yannick Bisson." "I play Detective William Murdoch." "We're here in Toronto shooting episode..." "I guess we're up to episode 10 at this point, and it's going really well." "And the scripts have been really fantastic." "Detective Murdoch is getting into all sorts of adventures, and I'm really, really enjoying shooting the show." "I'm having a terrific time." "And, actually, I've encountered a lot of surprises, and that's not common for somebody in my field." "Usually, everything's sort of laid out and you know what you're gonna run into, but I've been really, really pleasantly surprised at the type of things that have come along in terms of story," "and I'm really enjoying doing the show." "Detective Murdoch has a background that is sort of hung up in religion, a lot of philosophy, as well." "He's sort of a modern man who is at odds with himself in a lot of ways." "The future is coming at him very quickly." "In fact, he's contributing to it a lot by investigating and applying science to things that haven't really been looked at with a scientific view in the past." "For instance, crime has been looked at with motive and opportunity and those types of things, as opposed to forensic methods of investigating." "Also, he's at odds with himself in terms of how he feels about God and sort of the guilt of, you know, finding out things about life that he probably wouldn't necessarily want to find out about." "Murdoch is an idealist and a realist." "I think he looks at things very analytically and knows that, you know," ""A" and "B" will often give you the result "C,"" "and, therefore, he follows that course in terms of finding the bad guy." "But he's also optimistic sometimes that good will prevail from what he does, so I think that's the course that he follows." "One of the things that I enjoy probably the most about playing Murdoch is that he's one of these characters that's forward-thinking." "You could put him in any time frame, really, and he would probably be looking ahead." "Okay, he may not know all of these things that we script for him." "Fine, good." "And he may not have known that much in all of the books, but he is the protagonist." "He is a hero." "He is us." "He is the eyes that we are looking at the story through." "So we got to know a little bit, or at least discover some of it anyway along the way, and it makes it interesting." "Well, that's the really interesting thing, is we spend a lot of time, in this day and age, with a whole sort of macro-perspective, and "Murdoch" is more of a micro-perspective." "We're going back." "We're finding out how fingerprinting came to be." "We're finding out what tracing a call actually means." "You know, we say it every day, but what the heck does that mean?" "Well, they traced it out on a diagram and figured out where the call came from, on a piece of paper." "That's tracing." "I didn't know that." "I think it's great." "So, all of these little tidbits that are interjected," "I don't think everyone's gonna believe that Murdoch invented that or discovered that, but, you know, it's a little tidbit that comes along in the story that you go, "Oh!"" "I like that." "The series does, in a lot of ways, take off where the films left off, but we do take a little bit lighter of an approach, I think." "We're going after a different crowd to some respect." "It is a little bit more lighthearted." "We've injected some humor." "We've injected a little more humanity and color." "Well, on the series, I play Dr. Ogden, who is a doctor pathologist." "She works in the morgue, works for the police department conducting all of the postmortems." "She's a woman ahead of her time in that we could be taking liberties." "There wouldn't have been too many women doing such things at that time." "However, we know that there were lots of doctors in Toronto." "Perhaps some of them were unlicensed because they weren't allowed to sit their final exams here." "So it was a tough time, but she's... she..." "We play her as a woman ahead of her time and with a really intriguing relationship with the Murdoch character." "Murdoch is very much described as the forward thinker in this show, insofar as he's inventing things ahead of his time and he's coming up with forensics that weren't invented for much time later." "But Ogden's..." "That's not what Ogden's doing." "She, however, has no restraints of religion, of oppression that was very much existent in Victorian times." "She's like this beacon of liberation in the middle of a very oppressive time." "I really love that about her." "It could be a little farfetched, but we do know there were..." "You know, as much as this is the way it was supposed to be back there, there's always people who didn't fit the mold." "They may have been, you know, burned at the stake, but she isn't thankfully." "She's a freethinker." "She doesn't have any of those restraints." "She believes in freedom of the mind." "She doesn't have any concepts of the inequality of the sexes, et cetera, et cetera, and religiousness." "It just doesn't fly with her." "She's a scientist, she's a realist, and a great character in that way." "Very free." "According to the script," "I studied medicine at McGill University, which was not called McGill back then." "However, in reality, that probably wouldn't have been the case." "She probably would have studied either in America, at an institution, or, at the time, there was a school of medicine for women in Kingston, Ontario, and that would have been her reality." "Being employed by the police force is perhaps a little bit of a, you know, creative license we took that perhaps wouldn't have happened at the time." "We do know there were plenty of doctors around at the time... female." "And my relationship with Murdoch." "Murdoch and Ogden have a meeting of the minds." "It's..." "We don't flirt much." "There's not much going on in that way." "But we just inspire one another and get one another, and it's one of those symbiotic relationships where we know what each other's thinking all the time." "And, so, they spark off each other and spar off each other and enjoy that kind of thing together." "And, so, it makes it very lively, and they're a little connected and addicted to one another." "They keep coming back for more, but their work brings them together." "They're both scientists, and they..." "And realists." "Well, as you would need to be, as a woman in the time doing what she does, she is very forthright and says what she thinks, what she believes." "And, occasionally, they've come to blows just over a couple of issues." "I think actually there was an issue about homosexuality, where they have a big fight about whether that's against the Bible, et cetera." "She doesn't believe in any of that." "She believes that everybody should be free to do what they want to do and live their life." "And, so, she can be a bit fiery." "Got a little bit of a temper and tells dreadful jokes." "They seem to just write dreadful jokes." "She has a very funny sense of humor." "Maybe it's about working around dead people all the time." "None of that upsets her too much, and she seems to say inappropriate things occasionally, but it's very funny." "Yeah, you know, I've gotten way better." "But in the beginning, particularly the first day..." "We tend to shoot all my morgue scenes in a big chunk." "And I had..." "On the first day, when we had a lot of prosthetics and we had real organs and a lot of fantastic makeup that looks just real..." "You know, people's chests opened up and guts hanging out and organs and pieces of brain open and stuff, and I'm really bad with that stuff, really, really bad with that." ""Ew, we have guts. "" "And so I was getting shaky, my knees, and clammy and everything." "But I'm..." "And, apparently, I don't look like I hate it, but I do." "I hate it." "But I've gotten way better..." "way better." "I can look at a wound..." "a head wound... and it only makes me uncomfortable for a little while, and I remind myself, "It's makeup." "It's makeup." "It's not real." "He's alive," you know." "And I'm okay." "My name's Thomas Craig, and I'm playing a character called Inspector Thomas Brackenreid." "I thought I was gonna be playing Murdoch," "I thought it was in Vancouver, and I thought it was three episodes." "That's what the information me agent had." "Wow." "So, when did you find out it was for a 13 one-hour drama series?" "Not until after I accepted, really, because they sent me a copy." "And in England, we just call it "series one. "" "And I got a copy on the e-mail, saying, "102."" "And I went from excited, thinking a new series, to like, "Oh, this is episode 102." "It must have been going for years. "" "You know what I mean?" "So I was, like, dead disappointed then." "And then when I talked to Peter Meyboom," "I said, "How long has this series been running? "" "He said, "What do you mean? "" "I said, "Well, it's episode 102."" "He went, "No, season 1, episode 2."" "I was like, "Ah. "" "Well, Brackenreid." "I've made a bit of backstory up myself, 'cause they mentioned in one script that he'd been to university, but I decided to change that and make him a career soldier so that he's been in the British Army" "and he's been all around the world as possibly..." "I don't know... possibly a royal... a sergeant major." "And he settled in Canada." "And so he's seen the world and he's very capable and he's a soldier, really, until he met his wife and had kids." "It's a very period kind of drama... a detective drama that I think audiences in England will love, because these kind of shows do really well on a Sunday night." "But the only fly in the ointment is that they've let me swear quite a lot." "And before I actually acted in it," "I think it could have been an 8:00 slot in England, but now it's looking at it as a 9:00 slot, because I get to say..." "I swear quite a lot." "And I don't think the Canadians have realized how much bad language I'm using, but I've said a few." "The first episode I did," "I did a couple of scenes outside, and I never thought of the cane." "And then we had a character come in who's playing Conan Doyle." "And he had a cane." "And I thought, "A cane, man? "" "Everybody had a cane." "You know what I mean?" "So, ever since then, most of the stuff I've done on location," "I have the cane, and I think that's right, 'cause they won't let me have a gun, so I've got a cane." "Who do you play?" "Well, I'm Jonny Harris, and I'm playing Constable George Crabtree, who is Detective Murdoch's right-hand man." "He's a younger, a little bit maybe naive, but very eager." "And I think he looks up to Murdoch and wants to..." "He wants to be like him." "He's a big admirer and fan of Murdoch's." "Doesn't necessarily have all the smarts that Murdoch has, but he's a good guy." "I think people will like him." "Well, he does a lot of the footwork, and he tries his hand at some of the detective work." "He has his own interesting theories." "He's a bit of an eccentric thinker, I think, and definitely thinks outside the box, maybe too far outside the box." "But, luckily, most of the real detective work is left to Murdoch." "I come from Newfoundland, and there was nothing in the script giving a lot of backstory on where George came from." "But during one read-through, one of our guest stars had spotted my accent and said, "Oh, you're from Newfoundland. "" "I said, "Yes. "" "And she said, "Do you use your accent in the show? "" "And I said, "No, I pretty much neutralize it for the show." "I flatten it out. "" "And the rest of the cast burst into laughter." "So, I think maybe I don't really hide the accent as much as I thought that I did." "So, after that, Cal Coons, who is the head writer on the show, came to me and said," ""Yeah, well, maybe he's from Newfoundland and came up... moved up when he was younger. "" "And, so, we've never directly addressed that, but there's a few..." "Like, he was kind of saying to me, "Just feel free." "You know, if you had some East Coast colloquialisms that you want to throw in there, feel free to. "" "And maybe that'll be something that'll be fleshed out in the next season." "I think what makes it very interesting..." "When I first heard about the project," "I thought, it's a show kind of based on forensics at a time when forensics was not terribly exciting." "But I don't think that's the case." "The more that we're doing now is really it's kind of the birth of forensic science, and the... and you get more of a kind of organic introduction into forensic science, instead of someone just coming in" "with, you know, the magical blue light that finds blood." "Everything is..." "You can wrap your head around everything, and you can kind of understand the science behind it." "And I think that's kind of..." "In a way, that's made it more interesting." "I mean, George is an odd fella and a bit quirky, and, so, yes, he does provide some comic relief." "But I'm trying to kind of keep an earnest side to him so it doesn't just kind of make everything absurdly light." "And, hopefully, that will read that behind that kind of funny facade is a real character who's really trying to do some good and, hopefully, he's not just kind of that unifaceted foil." "This hat is actually too small for my head and leaves a kind of a red welt here that they just make-up before we had this interview." "But I insisted on wearing it 'cause it's the least dorky of the police hats." "The other ones are much bigger and broader, and this was the..." "this was kind of the most..." "I thought this was a little bit kind of a cool one." "It's narrower and with a sharper peak." "And I'll take the pain to avoid looking dorky." "I'm Maureen Jennings." "I wrote the original Murdoch stories from which this series is being adapted." "Yannick Bisson plays Murdoch, and he..." "Physically, he looks exactly like the Murdoch of my books, except that he doesn't have a mustache, 'cause Murdoch had a mustache." "And he's going a beautiful job." "Very sensitive, very dedicated." "He looks very fit, which Murdoch was supposed to be very fit." "He was always in training to be in the police games and things like that." "He's a wonderful choice." "Helene, yes." "Well, she was in another "Murdoch"" "in the Movie of the Week, and she was fabulous, so I was very, very happy that she got this part." "And I think she's bringing a lot of her own style to it." "She's very elegant, very attractive, and yet the slightly cool facade, which is gonna be interesting to see it melt in the face of Murdoch's charm." "I think he's amazing, actually, 'cause we've had some good..." "We had a good Brackenreid before, but he has brought a sort of warmth to this part, which was not there, and I really like that." "And he's very funny, but he's... you can believe that he also believes what he's doing." "He's not just a buffoon." "He's not just a fool." "And I think he's an amazingly good choice, actually." "Crabtree?" "The character in the series is physically, again, very, very different from my character, as I call him, because I wrote Crabtree as being really big." "But I think Jonny's bringing a lovely humor and integrity to the part that it's growing on me more and more." "He's very, very endearing and makes a lovely balance to Yannick... to Murdoch." "I really like it." "After a while, watching these actors, you want to start writing for them, you know, so I hope we can do that next time."