Interview:
www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv/noah-wyle-discusses-good-bad-falling-skies-article-1.2278652NOAH WYLE likes “Falling Skies,” the alien invasion drama that just launched its fifth and last season on TNT (Sunday, 10 p.m.).
He also says filming it was “the most miserable five years of my acting life.”
Call it mixed feelings.
So first, let’s talk about the good part.
“I'm really proud of how we did the show,” Wyle says. “It feels authentic. It’s had a real grit and verisimilitude you don’t always see on television productions.”
Wyle stars in “Falling Skies” as Tom Mason, a genteel college professor forced to reinvent himself as a down-and-dirty foot soldier. That’s where the grit comes in, because the show routinely features visceral scenes of a raw, ragged battle to survive.
Those scenes are responsible for the not-so-good part.
In the first episode of the new season, Tom has to crawl out of the ocean in near-darkness across a beach covered with jagged rocks. It looks brutal and Wyle confirms it was.
“When we started shooting the last season,” he says, “I looked at the script, saw that scene and said okay, that’s good, we can film that in the summer when it’s warm. It won’t be too bad.
“Well, it turned out we couldn’t. It was the last thing we filmed, in November, and the water was freezing.
“What you see with me crawling across those rocks is the one and only take. What you would have seen if the camera had kept rolling was me standing up and yelling, ‘F--- this!’”
Life has eased a little since then. “Falling Skies” has wrapped and Wyle is filming season two of “The Librarians,” another TNT production that’s more cerebral.
“Totally different,” says the 44-year-old Wyle, and in several ways.
When Wyle filmed the first “Librarians” more than a decade ago, he envisioned it as a sequence of movies, perhaps six in all.
He played Flynn Carsen, who is drafted to become the head of a mysterious library that contains many of the world’s most historic treasures.
After three movies the project got trapped in legal wrangling, until it resurfaced last year as a series where Carsen starts to groom a new generation of librarians.
The series was a hit, and Wyle says he now wants the quality to match the ratings.
“It was good at times,” he says. “But it was uneven. For this second year we’re trying to correct what didn't work so well.”
Wyle’s in on the fixing because he’s an executive producer, and he says that’s gotten him hooked on the behind-the-camera stuff.
“I've seen how the sausage is made,” he says. “I want to do more of it, producing and directing.”
He’ll definitely be doing it on “Those Angry Days," a project he’s launching in the fall for FX with writer Graham Yost from “Justified.”
“Angry Days” revisits America in the 1937-1941 era, when the country was fiercely debating its response to the rise of Hitler.
Wyle costars as Edward R. Murrow, then a young radio correspondent based in Europe. His ideological counterpart, yet to be cast, is Charles Lindbergh, the aviation hero who led the fight to keep America out of war.
“It’s a fascinating time that so often gets overlooked,” says Wyle. “As a history buff, I can’t wait to get into it.”
Besides, Murrow never had to drag himself across a cold, rocky beach.
dhickley@nydailynews.com