“You get a longer run into a show, it just very naturally becomes richer and deeper and more dimensional because more gets revealed, and the actors and writers have so much more to draw on.” – Josh Radnor
In an interview with Collider, actor Josh Radnor reflected on signing on for another television series, Amazon Prime’s Hunters, after playing Ted Mosby for 9 seasons on How I Met Your Mother and his on and off-screen relationship with co-star Al Pacino, who portrays Holocaust survivor Meyer Offerman.
As a veteran of a popular, long-running television series – albeit one that ended in a way that divided fans – Radnor is keenly aware of the importance of having trust in how the creators will steer the series after thoroughly reviewing the pilot’s script. He explains:
“It’s a little bit of a leap of faith, just to say yes to a television series, anyway… You really have to trust that they’re gonna do something exciting. And also, in a weird way, you learn about your character, as you go. But if you have a good relationship with the creators, you can ask, and we certainly had good relationships with Nikki [Toscano] and David [Weil]. You could ask, ‘Where are we headed here?,’ or they’d drop little hints, along the way, about certain things. So, I knew the overall shape of certain things, but I was still learning as I went. That’s why I think pilots are very difficult, even though I thought this pilot was really amazing. You get a longer run into a show, it just very naturally becomes richer and deeper and more dimensional because more gets revealed, and the actors and writers have so much more to draw on. So, starting things is hard. All of it’s hard, but they did a great job shooting us out of the cannon with just enough information to be compelling and mysterious.”
Obviously, one of Radnor’s joys is working with co-star Al Pacino, and he compares his character’s on-screen relationship with Pacino’s character to his real-life relationship with Pacino. He reveals:
“I find on series television that there’s always some sort of meta side narrative going on. You have your on screen characters, and then you have this off screen life, which is not completely analogous, but there’s some resonance, in terms of roles that you play. For instance, you know, Meyer, who Al [Pacino] plays is this incredibly high-status leader, and off camera, Al Pacino is this incredibly high-status leader, and that translates on the stage. When Al would talk, we would listen, and when Meyer talks, characters listen. They honor that he has experience and he knows what the drill is.”
