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'Lights' star ready for kickoff
Q&A WITH KYLE CHANDLER
By DAVID MARTINDALE
SPECIAL TO THE STAR-TELEGRAM
Kyle Chandler, the actor who portrays a Texas high school football coach in the TV version of Friday Night Lights, is a Georgia boy.
So he's unwilling to wholeheartedly endorse the Texas conceit that Lone Star State football offers more quality, more intensity, more fan devotion, more everything than any other state in the country.
"I went to the University of Georgia," Chandler says. "It was pretty crazy there. There's a fervor there, too, and I couldn't tell you if there's much of a distinction."
That said, however, Chandler will concede that Texas high school football undeniably is something special. "There's no doubt about it," he says. "There's an energy that comes out. It's just insane good."
Chandler plays Eric Taylor, the first-year head coach in the fictional town of Dillon, Texas, where pressure is mounting to deliver a state title.
Friday Night Lights, filmed in Austin and widely praised as one of the best new series of the fall TV season, premieres at 7 p.m. Tuesday on KXAS/Channel 5.
Your character strikes a nice balance between being a friend to the players and a strict disciplinarian. When you did research and met with real-life coaches, is this the relationship you witnessed? Yeah, I'm still experimenting with it. I've met with a few of the coaches out here and one of the important things that I got early on, regardless of what we were discussing, was their love for the kids. Their love for them is pretty much boundless. There's so much give and take between a coach giving part of his soul and the kids giving that back in return.
So you understand what your character goes through when a player is seriously injured. You get how the coach can be devastated, but must soldier on. I'm sure there's some blame [in the back of his mind]. But how does it affect his job, with that boy sitting in the hospital bed? He's still got to finish the game. He has to carry on through the season.
Despite a demanding production schedule attached to making a TV series, do you get to leave early enough on Friday nights to catch real high school games? The schedule goes back and forth. But yeah, we've had plenty of time to get out and see different games and research. We've got a pretty good schedule. I've never done a series where, during the first five or 10 episodes, you weren't doing 14, 17 hours a day while everyone's trying to get their groove. This one, we've settled into it really nicely, really quickly.
So are there any teams you can give us an informed scouting report about? I've seen Del Valle. I've been to some Pflugerville games. There are games out by Round Rock that I've seen. That's it so far.
Any concerns that you've got the movie version of Friday Night Lights and the performance of Billy Bob Thornton to measure up to? Trying to reach the quality of the movie is what we're looking to do. Trying to capture that is giving us an immense amount of joy and challenges and responsibilities. That quality is reachable. It's a tremendous challenge, but we see the light.
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