Laura Regan says one of the reasons she wanted to be involved in Fox’s new sci-fi series Minority Report was that she was a huge fan of the Tom Cruise film that spawned the series. “I loved it, and I actually particularly loved the character of Agatha,” said Regan during our roundtable interviews at the 2015 San Diego Comic-Con. “So it’s kind of very lucky for me.”
Both Regan and her co-star Wilmer Valderrama are big fans of sci-fi which made signing on to a series in the genre very appealing. “When I heard Harrison Ford’s voice in the new Star Wars trailer, I not only got goosebumps I got a little teary-eyed. I was like, ‘Wow, this is like a dream to see that character come to life again.’ You know, I feel like today not only technology but directors have reinvented the way we tell stories – the narrative stories – and based on the tools that we have today, the technology that we have today, imagine the stories that we can now tell.
Steven [Spielberg] has been that pioneer that creates new technology to tell a story. You go back to the movie…that was 2002…now when you look at the technology that we have now to tell that story today, the fact that he was able to pull that off in 2002 – imagine what he can do in 2015,” said Valderrama. “Therefore, take that technology to television and do it on the scale that the fans really want to see.”
Asked what, if anything, from the original movie helped inform their performances in the series and what about the film’s tone makes its way into the show, Regan replied, “I think the tone and feel [of the movie] there’s continuity into the series because we have when they went outside into the house that was where Tom Cruise’s wife lived it’s more like a lush green landscape and yet the city had more dark and threatening elements. There’s continuity in that. And, you know, of course just in the effects. The effects are unreal. I didn’t do much green screen stuff – a little bit – but there’s something that happens with my character. These guys are doing so much green screen stuff that when they see it afterward they’re like, ‘Wow!’ So there’s very much that going on and happening in the film.”
So who exactly are they playing? Regan describes Agatha as a very complicated individual. “She had a very strange history that she shares with Dash and she basically was a drug baby, was sort of a non-functioning human. They sort of were able to fix her but she had this accidental gift that she’s psychic. So when they realized this, she was basically put into service. She was exploited and from a very young age, as you remember from the film lying in a milk bath, sedated, and subject to these haunting, horrible visions. So, that’s her history,” explained Regan.
Regan added: “At the end of the film PreCrime is dismantled and here we are 10 years later. I think at this point at the beginning of the series my character has chosen to remove herself from that world and really ignore it. Isolation for her is really a form of maintaining her own sanity. But, if she were to be thrust back into that world – which she may well – I think she could really go many different directions. She could really be someone who, because she doesn’t trust anyone, she becomes more calculating herself. Or, maybe she acts out out of bitterness. Or, maybe she does take a benign approach. I’m not sure. Where she goes from here is a great journey for me.”
Valderrama plays Lt. Will Blake, Lara Vega’s (played by Meagan Good) boss. Will and Lara have had something in the past and that makes their relationship unique. They work well together and are a formidable team when it comes to solving cases. “I am more about the book. I believe in the program; I believe in the system and in the law and therefore he is climbing up the ladder fairly quickly because he’s the overachiever,” said Valderrama. “But she’s a little bit more rogue. She doesn’t mind going off the grid to try and figure something out. We’re going to see that clash a little bit throughout the process and eventually he may get some kind of information that she’s working with an informant. She’s definitely very good about solving these cases and eventually I go, ‘You’ve got to share that informant.’ He’ll find out that it’s a precog and how is he going to feel about that based on his character traits being by the book.”
Watch the full interview with Wilmer Valderrama and Laura Regan on Minority Report:
