Lou Diamond Phillips 24 Season 1 Interview

My guy is... It's so funny, because as soon as I tell friends "Hey, I'm doing a couple of spots on 24 with Kiefer" they go "Good guy or bad guy?" Everybody wants to know "good guy or bad guy?" And I guess in some cases you don't know which until the storyline actually plays itself out. In this respect I'm a good guy. I'm uh... the uh... warden of a class three detention center which is a prison that does not officially exist. Kiefer follows a thread obviously from the assassination attempt on Senator Palmer to this location, knowing that that somehow, something is going to happen here that will blow the whole thing out of the water. And indeed it does, i think [it] introduces a plot point that helps to explain the entire arc of this twenty four hours. Kiefer's characters is very much "here's what we have to do and we have to do it in a timely fashion". My guy's a bit more of a bureaucrat. My whole operation is supposed to be covert and every decision that is made could conceivably blow my cover, and blow the cover of my operation. So there's a wonderful dynamic at work here with me saying "well hold on" and at the same time being sympathetic to his cause and uh.. wanting to believe him because he's very compelling. It's funny how how these things come up and I don't know who it is that thought of me for this. I think they already had Dennis Hopper and they said "well let's make it a party!" (laughs) And I got a call basically saying "Would you be interested in doing a couple of episodes on 24?", you know, nothing about the character, just conceptually would I be interested? And I was a fan of the show from episode one, a huge fan of the show and i think it's certainly one of the best things on television and one of the most original. And I said "Absolutely, sure!" The fact that there was some fun stuff for me to do in this, that we get to do some real head-to-head acting. I get to do some head-to-head acting with Dennis Hopper who I've known forever but we've never had a chance to mix it up. I think interestingly enough Kiefer, Dennis, myself... we've all been leading men, but we've all been character actors as well and it's nice that range of roles is open to us. This one is a train that you have to hold on to.