

Ben McKenzie as Gotham's James Gordon. Photo copyright of FOX.

Being responsible for safeguarding a city and its citizens is no easy task, and Police Commissioner James “Jim” Worthington Gordon of Gotham City is well aware of the job’s many challenges. From the pages of DC Comics to the 1960s live-action campy Batman TV show followed by a series of feature films as well as various animated stories, the bustling metropolis under his care has been threatened by a host of nefarious nasties. Throughout it all, Commission Gordon has remained steadfast in his pursuit of justice for all. In the new FOX TV prequel Gotham, fans of the historic Batman franchise discover where the commissioner first developed his mettle for dealing with such criminal masterminds in his capacity as rookie Detective Jim Gordon.

In Gotham, this younger version of the character is played by Ben McKenzie. Born and raised in Austin, Texas, the actor moved to New York to pursue an acting career after graduating from the University of Georgia. In 2003, he was cast as Ryan Atwood in The O.C., which ran for four seasons. From the small screen, McKenzie made the leap to feature films, appearing in such projects as Junebug and 88 Minutes. In 2009, he returned to TV as Los Angeles Police Officer Ben Sherman in Southland.

McKenzie recently took some time out of his busy Gotham schedule to speak with me along with other journalists about the show and putting his own spin on the Jim Gordon character. The following is an edited version of that Q & A. Enjoy!

What are the differences as well as similarities in playing a law officer in the city of Gotham and the LA hood of Southland?

Ben McKenzie: That’s a good question. The overall similarity is probably in the mentality of law enforcement officers and a sense of wanting to really uphold a sense of morality and make sure that, wherever possible, the laws are enforced to the letter.

I recently received an email from the guy that did some of our tactical training on Southland. He was an LAPD cop and just wanted to congratulate me on Gotham. They recently captured a serial killer who was on the run in LA and blowing people away with shotguns. That’s just one example of the bad stuff that happens in real life. In Gotham, we want to keep a sense of realism, but at the same time it is fantastical and meant to be a little more approachable in the sense that it’s not so starkly drawn.

In Southland it was much more real, and at times it could be quite frightening. I mean, we don’t want to acknowledge that people do terrible, terrible things to each other, but In Gotham I think we want to have a bit more fun with it. We want to feel free to take a certain amount of liberty with the tactical stuff and kind of make the show more of a throwback to the old school gumshoe/film noir-types of stories with some cop tactics thrown. I hope that makes sense.

Could you talk about working with Robin Lord Taylor (Oswald Cobblepot/The Penguin) and some of the scenes you’ve had with him?

BM: Robin is a phenomenally talented guy and an incredibly nice person. One story that would sort of illustrate that is the scene in the pilot where Gordon walks Oswald to the end of the pier and, instead of putting a bullet in his head, pushes him off the edge. We had to do take after take to get that scene just right. I kept roughly grabbing Robin by the shirt collar to make it look real. After four hours of this, he finally and very politely said, “Um, could you possibly grab the actual collar a little bit more?” Robin opened up his shirt and his chest was just bright red from scratches everywhere.

So he’s the sweetest villain I think I’ve ever possibly worked with, and I think that comes alive on screen. Obviously he’s playing more of a demented guy, but his charm comes through onscreen, and you end up kind of loving this little weasel of a henchman and almost rooting for him. I think it’s a brilliant turn and completely unlike, or largely unlike, anything you’ve seen from Penguin before. That’s exactly what we’d like to do with all the villains in this show, which is give them latitude to make the part their own and not feel as though they’re doing an imitation of some other actor who’s played a villain before.

What first attracted you to the part? Were you a fan of this kind of genre in the beginning?

BM: You know, in all honesty, I worked with (series creator/executive producer) Bruno Heller last year on a pilot. Southland was ending and we did a pilot for CBS that Warner Bros. produced but it didn’t end up going to series. So Bruno called me in January or February of this year and said, “I’ve written a script and the character of Jim Gordon with you in mind. I’d like to send it to you to take a look.” So it kind of started from that.

As far as the attraction, the opportunity to work with Bruno again was at the top of the list. We had a very good time on the pilot and really see eye to eye on a lot of things. Our sensibilities are similar. It’s exciting to be a part of this kind of mythology that’s been around for 75 years, but it’s also a bit daunting. So I’d say it was both an attraction and a cause for a series of meetings to talk about exactly how this would work, how we wouldn’t screw it up and how I wouldn’t embarrass myself completely. Bruno and (executive producer) Danny Cannon more or less assured me that worst case it would only mildly fail and It wouldn’t be a huge disaster (he jokes). So that was pretty much how it all came to be. I’m a fan of Batman, but not a hardcore fan, you know?

Do you feel that your work on (the animated movie) Batman: Year One has offered you any additional insights into these characters, and, if so, has it translated at all to your work on Gotham?

BM: I don’t know, I’d like to think so. I’ve always been a fan of Year One, even before I did the voice of Bruce Wayne/ Batman, for it. So it was an opportunity for me as an adult to reread it and look more closely at it in terms of how to interpret it onscreen, albeit with just my voice, not my body. So I’d say it certainly pulled me in a little bit closer, and then when Gotham came about, (comic book/television writer) Geoff Johns sent me a bunch of literature, including Gotham Central, Long Halloween and the like.

I think it certainly helps to understand what this is all coming out of, which is, of course, the (Batman) comics that have evolved wildly over 75 years. So I think you pick certain reference points, at least stylistically, and then you need to go out and do what you would do on any other job, which is to work on the script as well as with the directors and your fellow actors to bring those scenes to life, playing your beats and playing your objective. So I’m not really doing anything different than I would do on any other job except that there’s a certain heightened style to Gotham.

How much of your own stunt work do you actually handle, and are stunts a major part of the show?

BM: I try to handle as much as I can, and as much as I feel comfortable with. We have a great stunt team lead by Norman Douglas, our stunt coordinator, and stunts or action is a big part of the show. That being said, it’s all coming from sort of a central aesthetic conceit of the world that we’re portraying being more swift and brutal than it is operatic and grandiose.

If Jim is in a fight, he wants to get it over with as quickly as possible and take out whoever he has to as swiftly and efficiently as possible. So it’s more in the kind of brutal, military fashion as opposed to the Kung-Fu, acrobatic stuff. There hasn’t been a lot of wirework and things like that yet. We may get to that point, but I would prefer that my character is portrayed for what I think Bruno, Danny, and I agree he is, an old school hero. Jim Gordon is just a man, completely fallible, who can’t jump over buildings or fly though the air. He has to use what he’s got, and occasionally he loses. I think that grounds it in more of a sense of reality. So that’s kind of what we’re aiming for, but at the same time, with each passing episode, the fight scenes get more and more complicated, so we may end up there anyway. We’ll see.

A lot of people are so excited about the villains on the show, and obviously the Penguin is going to be in a huge arc this season. Who is your favorite Batman villain, and has there been any talk of non-human enemies, like Killer Croc or Clayface, making appearances on the show?

BM: Because he’s front and center in the pilot, I’m really excited for people to see what Robin Lord Taylor is doing with Penguin. I have a weird soft spot in my heart for Nigma, and I’ve always liked The Riddler. I know for a lot of people that is a very unorthodox choice, but I find The Riddler fascinating. Scarecrow, I think is really cool, too.There has been no talk thus far that I am aware of, and I’m not in the writers’ room, obviously, about the non-human Batman villains. I think we’ll start with the humans and then branch out from there. Again, though, it’s early days. Knock on wood, we’ve hopefully got a long way to go and we can bring some of the non-human characters in, if need be.

Do you have a favorite Gotham episode or storyline so far?

BM: Well, I’m not sure how much I can spoil. We come to a place around the seventh episode where certain things come to a head and Jim is kind of put in a situation where he has to take action. I haven’t seen it cut together, but I’m pretty fond of it. Bruno wrote the pilot as well as the second episode and then episode seven, so I’m a big fan of whenever he writes the episodes directly. We have a great team of writers, but it all kind of comes out of Bruno’s “demented” mind (he jokes), so I’m very excited about that.

What’s nice is that in the pilot alone, we laid the groundwork for an enormous number of characters to kind of spring out. Hopefully we’ve laid the foundation for a world in which you can walk down any alley in Gotham and encounter some bizarre human being who might become a villain or a hero, or might get killed immediately. That’s a very exciting maze to walk through, and I think that presents us with, I don’t want to say unlimited opportunities, but bountiful opportunities for characters as we go forward.

You have great onscreen chemistry with your fellow castmates. Can you talk a little bit about any kind of interaction with your costars and how you developed a working relationship with them?

BM: Thank you for that compliment. Well, Donal Logue (Detective Harvey Bullock) and I had never met before, but there’s sort of this two degrees of connection between us and I’d always heard great things about him. I actually worked with his sister on an episode of Southland. She played a hooker and at one point I had her by the throat in a crappy alley in downtown LA. She was just fantastic in the episode.

The reputation that Donal has is that of a real gamer – an actor who comes in, does the work, is a team player and brings an enormous amount of life, humor and pathos to every character he plays. So that was a real kind of easy connection, and one that I think we realized very early on. From the moment it was announced that we were cast in Gotham, Donal and I reached out to one another and just said, “We’ve got to make this as good as we can because it, or at least the pilot, is going to live or die in large measure on whether the audience likes these two guys individually and as partners.

At the end of the day, we are relying a little bit on that old cop conceit of a pair of mismatched cops, and finding a way of doing that that feels authentic and is endearing, in a way, as well as interesting to watch. So with Donal it was easy, and overall we have a great cast, all the way up and down the line. Everyone is working hard and focused on the work, and as long as it stays that way, we should have a great show, and a great environment to work in. Donal and I will make sure that happens, so it’s all going to be great.

You also have great chemistry with David Mazouz who plays the young Bruce Wayne.

BM: David is amazing and a terrific actor, he really is. He listens, which is an incredibly hard thing to teach anyone, and it’s something that I, like any actor, struggles with. It’s the hardest thing to do on camera, I think. It’s not easy with all the chaos on a film set, to just listen to what the other actor is saying to you, and how they’re saying it in that moment, from take to take, and David does. In fact, he’s calmer than me, which kind of blows me away sometimes. He also couldn’t be a nicer young man. David was obviously raised correctly and is perfect as Bruce.

What perhaps were some of the initial acting challenges you found stepping into this role and becoming comfortable with the Jim Gordon character?

BM: The initial challenge is to not let the degree to which Batman and all of its mythology has permeated all aspects of pop culture and society, to not let that overwhelm what is, at the end of the day, just an acting gig. This is great acting gig. It’s a little more public than others, but at the end of the day, it’s just a part that you play on, in this case, a TV show, and you have to treat it like any other.

My school of acting is there is no such thing as “the character.” There is no Jim Gordon, Bruce Wayne or Batman, for that matter. There is only the script and the actor that’s playing a part. If you cast 1,000 different actors as Jim Gordon, you would get 1,000 different Jim Gordons, and as long as I was able to breathe and not get caught up in everything that came before me, that was helpful. When it comes to understanding and playing Jim Gordon, it was conversations with Bruno about, well, who is he? There are a lot of plot mechanics in the pilot alone that have to get sort of ironed out in order to tell the story and set up the world that we’re setting up. It has to happen awfully fast, too, but if we don’t understand or believe his point of view coming in to it, then we’re going to have trouble.

So a lot of what I was talking about with Bruno is that Gordon can’t come in completely naive and blown away by the corruption in Gotham. He can be idealistic, but he has to understand that people are, again, capable of terrible things. I mean, he’s a war hero; he served overseas and has seen terrible things firsthand.

So as long as he understands how bad people can be to each other, and yet he rejects that and still believes in such a bizarre concept as right and wrong, then his whole point of view is framed and it can kind of all proceed from there. As we then go forward in the season, he can become surrounded more and more by the powers that be in Gotham, and his own moral compass can be thrown off. He will have to make deals with the devil in order to get along in Gotham and to make progress. That journey, I think, is kind of fascinating, but we made sure to start with a sense of morality and a real sense of experience when it came to the Jim Gordon character.

Ben, what would you say makes a career in this industry rewarding for you, so far?

BM: I need to be proud of and engaged in what I’m making. That was one of the things that I was concerned about with something this big, is that there can be so many cooks in the kitchen that we lose the through line of a guy trying to clean up a city and trying to bring some sort of justice to an unjust world. So what I hope for in an acting career is work that I’m proud of as well as friendships and working relationships with all sorts of people, making a little bit of money, and eventually providing for a family.

As noted above, photo copyright of FOX, so please no unauthorized copying or duplicating of any kind. Thanks!