E-mail a friendAdrian Pasdar
original airdate December 4, 2007
Adrian Pasdar's acting, writing and directing add up to an impressive body of work. His credits include Top Gun—his film debut, in a role written for him—the indie, Near Dark, and NBC's Heroes. He also wrote and directed the art-house film, Cement, and co-wrote and co-directed the Civil War musical, Atlanta. Raised in a Philadelphia suburb, Pasdar turned to acting after an injury ended his promising football career at the University of Central Florida and went on to study at the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute.
Adrian Pasdar
Tavis: Adrian Pasdar is a talented actor who stars on one of the most popular shows on TV, "Heroes." He is also the co-writer and director of a new Civil War-era play called "Atlanta." The production is running through January 6th at the Geffen Playhouse, if you happen to be anywhere near Los Angeles. Here now, a scene from "Atlanta."
Tavis: Nice clip, doesn't tell us much about the storyline, so we'll let you do that. First of all, nice to have you here.
Adrian Pasdar: Tavis, nice to be here.
Tavis: It's called "Atlanta," it's a story about the Civil War. I'll let you explain it, because Civil War, obviously, massive. What piece, what slice of this are you trying to tackle?
Pasdar: Well, I think it's more a story about romance and racism, with the backdrop of the Civil War. The Civil War is such a - you could spend your life studying it and still not - how do you present two hours of the Civil War? We're not trying to define an element of the Civil War in itself, it's more the people that went through it and what it was like to imagine to confront the racial issues that were ultimately - it's the issues that were divisive initially in the country, and I think ultimately a good reason of why it was united after it was divided. So we deal with that extensively. That's really the thrust of the show.
Tavis: Tell me more what you mean when you say that it's about romance and racism.
Pasdar: Well, there's some unrequited love in the story. There's a case of mistaken identity, and there's also the idea of slaves having been perhaps sired or not by the people that are leading them, let's say. The colonel, for instance, the acting troupe that plays in his brigade that entertain him between and before battles.
One or more of those slaves may, in fact, be his illegitimate children. That's an element that we have here. The character of Atlanta is, without giving too much away - well, what the heck? She's a Black woman, and she falls in love with a man who's killed early on in the show, and there's a series of letters that she's given to him.
He, the last thing, his dying gesture, is to give these letters to the man who killed him. The man who killed him tries to write back with some sense of responsibility to this woman, who he doesn't know who it is - it's just a letter - and he finds out that he can't do it; he can't write back with an honest tone. He writes back as if he were this soldier, and she writes back to him saying, "Your voice has changed, something's new, but I love you. Please come home from the war. Please come back to your Atlanta."
And through the course of the first act, he falls in love with her, and vows to make it home to Atlanta to meet her, but he has no idea who she is. And it turns out that she's a slave from Atlanta, and he has to confront that. He falls in love with a woman blindly. It's about the power of that, and how love is blind and unfortunately, racism is still an element that's I think prominent in so many cities. Integration in so many places hasn't really worked.
Tavis: Absolutely.
Pasdar: And I'm from Philadelphia. I grew up, fortunately, in a situation that wasn't - I didn't know I wasn't Black, really, until we moved out of the immediate city that I was in. I had no racial prejudice at all growing up; it was a great way to grow up. Kids around my neighborhood, people wanted to feel my hair, and stuff like that, because it was a little different. (Laughter) But that's it.
I grew up in a perfect environment. There was no sense of - and when we moved out, I got a sense the world isn't like that. And everything I've done has always maintained an element of the things that were important to me as a child, and the things that I think are wrong with the world that we're living in right now.
Tavis: And that works its way into your -
Pasdar: Race relations.
Tavis: That works its way into your art, obviously.
Pasdar: Yeah.
Tavis: I was just thinking, I was a bit stunned, in fact, to hear you say that. There are any number of conversations I had with any number of my African American friends about the extent to which integration has or has not worked, but you may very well be the first White male that I've ever heard say to me on television or in a private conversation that integration didn't work in the way we intended, and say that without being pejorative about it.
There are a whole lot of folk who think integration didn't work, didn't want it to work. Strom Thurmond would be on that list, and others of that ilk, but for a White male to say something like that who does not mean to be pejorative about it kind of caught me off guard.
Pasdar: One of the things we've dealt with in the process of this play is of course you get reviewers in there and some of the reviews we've gotten have been pretty tough, pretty hard. And I'd be lying to you if I said it wasn't hurtful at the end of the day, but I've been looking back, thinking, if I was a Black man, if I had written this play, might be a little different.
All these reviewers, for the most part, for all I can tell, have been White. I don't know, I think that the elements that we deal with in the show racially have not been really addressed singularly in any review. And I think that's - I'm a little surprised by that. I think it's a strong part of what we're doing in the show, and for it not to be acknowledged even subtly - I know that Los Angeles is progressive. In the theater everybody thinks, well, it's just - we're fine.
But this show tackles American issues, universal issues. Issues of inequality and issues of racism that are not just uniquely American but that are global, divisive issues. And it's a huge part of what drives me to try and make the world, or at least my immediate world, a better place.
Tavis: So often, if it makes you feel better - which is why I don't read them most of the time - so often, critics don't get it right, and they don't get it right because they cannot relate to what they are witnessing beyond their own sphere of experience. So who cares about what critics have to say, number one.
Pasdar: Well, yeah.
Tavis: But I'm glad you went there, because it does matter.
Pasdar: Sure it does.
Tavis: Because people read what they say and decide to go or not go see the play, the movie, based on what somebody said. So the question for you is, how do you put your energy, your effort, your creativity, your passion into something, watch critics around town, or certainly some of them, rip it to shreds, and not feel like it was a waste of your time?
Pasdar: Well, I know it wasn't a waste of my time because I look up and they're on stage. I've seen every performance so far. I've been there at the theater, and I see the audiences, I see how they react. We did this play up in Nashville a few years back, we did it up at the Tennessee Center for Performing Arts, a small house.
And it was my first experience with what I'm talking about. I sat in the back row, and the woman I sat next to had no idea who I was, just another audience member. There's a scene where the fellow who plays Hamlet gets whipped, and she took her right arm and put it on my left leg while she was watching the play. This was a beautiful African American woman who just - she's one of those women who just had life written all over her.
Tavis: And her hand's on your knee.
Pasdar: Yeah. (Laughter) Now, I think she thought it was the armrest, but she started squeezing like this, like really squeezing, digging her - really. And I remember going - I didn't want to interrupt this moment, because she was - and it really impacted her. And as a sidebar to that, a friend of mine said, "How do you direct a scene where a Black man's getting whipped?"
He said, "How do you even, as a White guy, how do you approach that?" And I said, "What?" I said, "My brothers and sisters on that - don't have the market cornered on having been whipped." I go, ”That's a universal problem. That was a medieval problem." I go, "It's horrific for everyone." As I was explaining to my kid in the car, he said, "Dad, wouldn't it be cool if the whip came back and hit the person in the face who was doing the whipping? (Laughter) This is a 6-year-old.
Tavis: Yeah, he gets it.
Pasdar: He instinctively took the position that it was wrong. So it is a learned behavior. But anyway, this woman, she grabbed my leg with her hand, and at the end of the play we stood up and she had tears in her eyes, and she gave me a big hug. She just wanted to hug whoever was next to her. It had no - she didn't know I was part of the play or that I'd written anything.
Tavis: Nor did she know, as indelicate as this might sound, nor did she know that you were married to one of the Dixie Chicks.
Pasdar: No. And I wasn't at that point, was I?
Tavis: Were you married at that time?
Pasdar: Yes, I was, actually. I was - that was just a few years back. But yeah, it was just a great moment that I saw what the play can do, that it can have these two people who don't know each other give each other a hug at the end of the play. And isn't that what the point of theater is?
Tavis: For those who don't know, I mentioned he's married to one of the Dixie Chicks. Which one, I know you're asking. Natalie, that's who he's married to. Natalie of the Dixie Chicks. That said, you mentioned growing up in Philadelphia. Before my time runs out, we were talking before we came on the air. I knew you were raised in Philly.
I did not know exactly where you were raised. So since race is in this conversation, obviously, you were raised in the very neighborhood, on the block, for those who remember MOVE, where that bomb was dropped. Remember Wilson Goode, former mayor of Philadelphia, and the bomb that was dropped on the MOVE headquarters in Philly? That's where you were raised, in that block.
Pasdar: Yeah, in that neighborhood right there.
Tavis: That's your neighborhood.
Pasdar: (Unintelligible) and I had - the first time I drove past it as a kid after the issues that had unfolded, it was just the hugest mistake in social relations between the government and the people who lived there. On the surface, it was presented by the journalists at the time as something that needed to be civil unrest.
People weren't following guidelines; people were defecating on the front lawn and weren't behaving socially responsible and so forth. That wasn't the truth. There were things -
Tavis: And even if it were, it doesn't justify a bomb being dropped.
Pasdar: No. What happened was they said, "We're going to tear gas grenade you out of there." And they said, "Well, if you do, we've got these 55-gallon drums full of oil, they're in the basement, the whole block's going to go." And the government called their bluff, thought they were kidding, and threw in the tear gas grenades. Shot them in from - and the block went. They weren't lying.
Tavis: You really were raised in the neighborhood. That's (unintelligible).
Pasdar: It affected everyone, and I think it's still one of the divisive issues, and Philadelphia, man, is a tough town. There's nowhere to go if you don't have someplace to be after 10:00. It's tough.
Tavis: Yeah. When they boo Santa Claus, it's a tough town.
Pasdar: Yeah, right?
Tavis: (Laughs) Let me close by asking, for your fans of the "Heroes" show, I'd get in trouble if I didn't ask you how the show's coming along and how much you're enjoying that. A congressman who can fly, I love this.
Pasdar: Yeah, it's been great, man. I've had a really good time on the show, and the strike, well, that's a whole 'nother topic, but it came at a very interesting time for our season, season two, so we had to do a quick scramble with the last three episodes and try and wrap things up. It's been a lot of fun working with these folks. They have a good spirit of ensemble. All the players and the writers -
Tavis: (Unintelligible) was here not long ago.
Pasdar: Was he? Yeah, he's in my apartment in New York right now. He's a good man. (Laughter) He's a crazy cat. It's just been fun to get to know all these diverse cultures that are bleeding themselves dry for our show. Everybody's just giving, from every ethnicity, which is just great. So it's good to be able to present that on network television.
Tavis: Adrian Pasdar is his name, as if you didn't know. You can catch him on "Heroes," and hopefully the strike will end sometime soon. In the meantime, if you're in L.A., the Geffen Playhouse is where you can see his play. It's called "Atlanta." Nice to have you here, Adrian.
Pasdar: Hey, man, thanks for the time, I really appreciate it.
Tavis: Good to see you; my pleasure.
Back to December 4, 2007