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‘PRISON BREAK’S’ MILLER PREPARES FOR SEASON 2: Actor looking forward to filming life on the run.
*Last Monday, Michael Scofield finally led his brother and several other inmates over the wall on TV’s “Prison Break” and into a tension-filled season finale tonight that will set up next cycle’s plot about life on the run.
The Fox drama premiered last year to solid ratings and has been able to keep viewers around each week with the shenanigans surrounding its main plot – a man gets himself sentenced to prison in order to break his falsely-accused brother out.
Wentworth Miller is enjoying a breakout turn as Michael Scofield, the civil engineer who helped to design Chicago’s Fox River prison – the very facility which houses his brother on death row. Within moments of Scofield’s arrival on the cell block, he began working out his plan of escape – enlisting the help of other inmates who had the skills and connections to help him along.
The show’s premise may sound preposterous, but enough people found it intriguing to make the show a quick ratings winner for the network, which decided relatively early in the show’s run to bring it back for a second season.
“There’s no telling what America’s in the mood to watch,” Miller told us during a wrap party for the show. “I think we had the upper hand in terms of – it’s a show about prison. Prison is fascinating to people, it’s a horror story. And we worked really hard to create characters that despite the far-fetched fantastic nature of the plot, you could care about and relate to and invest in. Hopefully, that will serve us well in the second season when we leave the prison behind and we’re all out on the road.”
That journey began last week and will only heighten tonight and next season as Scofield and his boys attempt to evade capture while his lawyer and childhood friend, Veronica Donovan, works on the outside to clear his name.
“The second season will be about the brothers trying to unravel the government conspiracy to put my brother behind bars in the first place,” Miller said. “I hope that gives us more opportunities to explore the bond between these characters. I think Michael has spent a lot of this season yakking about toilets and Allen wrenches and pipes, and the dynamics between the two brothers, the personal issues that are there, have yet to be explored really fully.”
Another dynamic to be further explored next season is the relationship between Scofield and the prison doctor, Sara Tancredi (Sarah Wayne Callies), who bonded with the dubious inmate while giving him periodic insulin injections for his fake Type I Diabetes. The sexual tension between them has been off and on all season, culminating in recent weeks with a kiss as well as Scofield’s confession that his amorous actions may have come with ulterior motives.
“Michael is very much a man who is at war with himself,” Miller explained. “He has romantic feelings for Dr. Sara, they forged a very intense connection in extreme circumstances, and yet, he’s there to save his brother. That comes first. So he has to manipulate her, and that of course is just one more obstacle between these two characters getting together.”
Miller, the son of an African American father and white mother, was born in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire England, where his Rhodes Scholar dad was studying. The family eventually moved to Brooklyn, where Miller was raised, and graduating from Princeton with an English degree. Miller brings that Ivy League education, plus on-set experience from the ABC miniseries Dinotopia and the 2003 film “Human Stain” to the real life cells of Joliet State Penitentiary in Ill, where “Prison Break is filmed.
“It’s a concrete reminder everyday what’s at stake, where you are, what kind of character you’re playing, what you’re up against,” Miller says of his working conditions. “The writers, when they plan the mechanics of the escape, used Joliet State Pen. So when I’m talking about scaling a wall, that wall actually exists. So it helps to have a real reminder what we’re up against episode after episode.”
Miller describes his experience during the first season as “an intense learning curve” that brought “a lot of challenges.” The biggest, perhaps, is dealing with the fame that comes along with the show’s popularity.
“I run into fans all the time. It’s a reminder to me how powerful a medium television is,” he says. “I enjoy interacting with fans. I love it when someone comes up to me and says ‘I never miss an episode,’ because what they’re telling you is that they tune in to see you every week. They’ve made a place for you in their lives.”
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