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Monday, March 5, 2007
By VIRGINIA ROHAN
STAFF WRITER
Adrian Pasdar sweeps into the restaurant in Chelsea, apologizing for being a few minutes late -- because of horrendous cross-town traffic.If only he could have flown above Manhattan -- an ability his character possesses on "Heroes," this season's new breakout hit.
"I think people can identify with the world that it lives in, but also [appreciate] the escapism that it provides," Pasdar says, in that familiar deep and raspy voice.On this afternoon, city sidewalks are clogged with dirty slush from a recent snowfall, yet the Philadelphia-bred actor, briefly in from sunny Los Angeles, where "Heroes" is made, says that if he could, he would live in New York full time."But it's not where they make the movies."Pasdar orders a favorite entree, Beef and Guinness, at The Half King, which is just a few blocks from the Manhattan apartment he still maintains. This is the very restaurant, he says, where his son Slade, now 5, took his first steps.He and wife, Natalie Maines, lead singer of the Dixie Chicks, also have a 2-year-old son, Beckett Finn, and Pasdar often takes both boys to the set with him."They love it. It's fun for them to be able to come and see how things are made and then watch the show on TV," he says, adding that series television is a good fit for his life right now. "I get to come home every night, which is great. Most of the movies that they make are shot on location now -- unless it's a special-effects movie -- and I can't do that right now. I can't go away from my family."On "Heroes," Pasdar plays the driven Nathan Petrelli, an attorney who's running for Congress."He's a character that, in [creator] Tim Kring's words, is 'morally liquid.' Somebody who makes decisions that seem to be self-serving, and then he'll do something heroic, for lack of a better term, and then he'll go back to doing something that is, again, self-serving," Pasdar says.Nathan's campaign has been fraught with complications. Besides trying to hide his own superpowers (self-propelled flight and levitation), and those of his younger brother, Peter (Milo Ventimiglia), Nathan had a fling in Las Vegas with Jessica Sanders (Ali Larter) and, more recently, he got news that he has a love child -- Texas cheerleader Claire Bennet (Hayden Panettiere)."He wants the problem to disappear for a little while," says Pasdar of his TV daughter. "But, we deal with that in the episode coming up in a very beautiful way. We have a very nice scene together." (His answer is so deliberately vague, it's hard to tell if this scene has yet aired.)Asked if that story line will play out for a while, he says, "To an extent."He clams up fast when questions turn to future "Heroes" story lines."There's not really much I can proffer," Pasdar says. "It makes it difficult to do interviews sometimes, because there's so many things I'd love to be able to share with you. But they've all worked so hard to develop the stories, and it's all so interconnected. They trust us not to divulge any information."Pasdar has become very friendly with Ventimiglia. But he's pleased that as the "Heroes" characters' paths increasingly intersect, he's getting to interact with more members of the large ensemble cast."I haven't worked with everybody yet, but that's coming up in the next few episodes," he says. "The writers explained the arc of the story to the actors early on, in broad strokes, and all those things have pretty much come to pass. So it's been exciting."Asked if he anticipated the show's success, the 41-year-old actor -- who saw previous critically acclaimed series like "Profit" die premature deaths -- says, "There was hope, but I'm old enough not to expect anything anymore."E-mail: rohan@...
Sharon Hulton
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