MONDO EXTRAS

Did I know that he was going to end up being what he ended up being? No, but for example, with the writers, one of my big conversations was about Hawkins's family. When we first arrived on the set to start filming the series of Jericho, after the pilot was picked up, the only set they had built for Hawkins was his basement -- they had nothing else built for him. So, when they started bringing in his family, I suddenly realized that this is not just an interesting backstory, this is a potential future story for him. Here's a guy, who five years ago walked out on his family to do the job that he had been trained to do. He left his wife, he left a son, who was eight years old, and he left a daughter, who was twelve years old, and he disappeared from their life. And he just went away. He's a single-minded guy on a mission and then, four years later, he turns up on their doorstep and he says to his wife, "I have my kids in the van and I'm taking them out of the city. You can come with me or you can't but I'm taking my kids" and then he takes them and he takes them to Jericho and he tells them, "We have to pretend like it's all happy family." And I said to the writers, "You've created that scenario. The scenario you've created is incredibly fertile, let's explore that." And to their credit, they started to explore it, and in exploring it, one of the things that it meant is that the Hawkins house, not only had to be built as a set, but until it was built as a set, we had about seven or eight different locations -- depending on where we were filming -- as to what was the Hawkins' house. The front room, at one point, was up in Studio City; when you walk out into the garden, you're on a lot at Warner Brothers; and when you go into the front garden, it's a house around the corner from our lot in Van Nuys. And it was spread out all over the place.