Fox’s The Gifted star Stephen Moyer talked about his Comic Con experience during our roundtable interview at the event, saying it was great to be back after taking a few years off. The 2017 sold-out convention was his ninth trip to the San Diego Comic Con and Moyer, who was in town with his co-stars to chat about the new X-Men series, thought it was interesting to be there with a young cast who hadn’t experienced the madness of the Con before.
“When we did True Blood, the very first one, we’d only just started and nobody knew what the show was. There was this kind of lovely innocence about that very first one that was really special. And it kind of feels a little bit like that with this, where some of these guys haven’t done this before. We can walk around without having the kind of mania. If the show is a success, next year will be very different.”
Moyer discussed his character, mutants vs. vampires, and the world of X-Men in our interview at the Con. The Gifted is set to premiere on October 2, 2017.
How do mutants compare to vampires?
Stephen Moyer: “I think one of the things that I always wanted to be able to do was fly, and I was always really gutted that (Alexander) Skarsgard got to fly. Apart from the fact that he was 6’4”, he got to fly. And of course, Polaris can do that. But there’s some things that these mutants can do like shifting metal or bringing buildings down, there’s a character – Proteus – who can turn back time which I think would be pretty awesome. There’s some things the X gang can do that we couldn’t as vampires which are pretty awesome.”
Social commentary has always been an important part of the X-Men universe. Does that hold true for the series?
Stephen Moyer: “Yeah, I think it would be quite difficult to live in the 2017 that we’re living in and not comment on what’s going on in the world. In the same way that True Blood dealt with disenfranchised and marginalized or ‘otherness,’ one of the things that drew me to this is the idea that the kids in our story – and the mutants who have become mutants previously – the gene gets activated by persecution or some kind of bullying or some kind of moment of terror. I love the idea that my children would be able to turn on people who are awful in society. I think there are certain aspects in the script that Matt (Nix) wrote over a year ago that will have quite a prescient effect that will be quite interesting given the government we’ve got.”
How does your character in the series compare to the characters in the comics?
Stephen Moyer: “My character doesn’t exist in the comics. He’s an ordinary man. My character is the sort of ordinary man in this. […] I think myself and (Amy Acker’s) characters end up being the reality, the ordinary in the extraordinary. So, the audience gets to sort of visit this world through their eyes.”
How into the X-Men franchise were you before you got cast?
Stephen Moyer: “When I was a kid I was really into Spider-Man. X-Men wasn’t my bag. I did read comic books but the X world wasn’t my sort of growing up thing. But obviously the X-Men are part of my family because my wife’s been in four of them. So, it was a bit difficult to avoid. I knew of the world; I knew about the mutant gene. I obviously knew how that gets activated and how the upper echelons of society are frightened by it, which I really like.”
Did Anna Paquin give you any sort of idea about your entry into the X world?
Stephen Moyer: “She’s done three films with Bryan Singer, and Bryan directed our pilot so that was great. She loves Bryan and Bryan has an encyclopedic knowledge of what the world is. And, so it was fantastic coming in and being able to just mine that. She led me down the rabbit hole in terms of some interesting places to go to to look at stuff. Also, Marvel gave us passwords on our iPads… You know that Marvel Unlimited? Unbelievable! It’s almost as if the iPad was invented for comic books. It’s an unbelievable thing. So, that’s been great as well just being able to go back through old editions from the ‘60s and delve. It’s amazing. Not even just the X-Men stuff.”
Watch the full Stephen Moyer The Gifted interview:
(Interview by Fred Topel. Article by Rebecca Murray.)
