John Noble (Walter) recently sat down to interview with Fox television about his role in Fringe, what he really thinks of Walter and his thoughts on “fringe science” amongst other things:
Fox: Do you have fun playing this character?
JN: Well, it’s as much fun as it looks like. I mean it’s an absolute hoot playing. It’s obviously got serious aspects to it, but I treat it as a hoot to play the thing. Preparation, well, that’s probably the hardest bit, getting the timing right and doing the preparation on the scientific work. But working on Fringe is a great job.
I mean it’s a great group of people to work with, and amazing scripts from the minds of J.J. Abrams and other people. They’re geniuses. Living inside their heads much be a very strange thing to do because they’re always coming up with something different. Overall, fantastic experience.”
Fox: How do you navigate the twists and turns?
JN: I kind of enjoy reading things that make me concentrate or watching things that make me concentrate, and so, you know, that’s what Fringe does. And I watched an episode on Tuesday night, and I was in it, but there were things I missed, and I said, what was that? What did they say there? So I mean it’s fascinating to be watching something that does require concentration.
Fox: How do you balance the sweet with the scary of your character?
JN: It’s the dark side to stuff, isn’t it? I guess it exists in all of us. But with “Walter,” because of who he is and how he is and how bright he is and how disturbed he is, it just sort of surfaces a bit more often and a bit more radically than it does in most of us.
I don’t find it that hard to find. I mean taking each moment when I’m doing a scene, I take each second and look at what’s gone through at that point, and sometimes those reactions just come out, to be honest with you, out of frustration, the character’s frustration, or out his greater purpose, whatever, out of his madness.
But it’s certainly interesting to play, and it shocks the people I’m playing with at times. You see these shocked reactions from the other actors, but that all makes some good fun too. I think there’s – as an actor, I always have to find a reason.
I can’t just sort of say something out of the blue, so I always find some sort of neural pathway in there, some image that it’s tapped. It’s like we are, we’ll see, we’ll smell something or we’ll hear a sound, and it’ll take us into a memory. You know how that happens to you as well?
And so it’s like he continually has these little memory jolts that will – but instead of keeping them to himself, he talks about them, and say, “I had a fruit cocktail once in Atlantic City.” And that’ll just come out because it’s a memory, so he’s quite inappropriate at times.
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