Adam Baldwin from TNT’s “The Last Ship” - INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW: ADAM BALDWIN ON “THE LAST SHIP”
By Abbie Bernstein
In TNT’s new series THE LAST SHIP, Sundays at 9 PM, the U.S. Navy destroyer Nathan James is away from port when a worldwide pandemic strikes. The scientists aboard Nathan James may be the only people on Earth capable of curing the plague, but there are forces at work trying to sink the ship, and many of the crew want to go inland to find out the fate of their families.
Adam Baldwin plays the ship’s executive officer Mike Slattery. “I’m sort of the voice of reason to Eric Danes’ character,” he explains.
Baldwin, originally from Illinois, first came to public attention when he was eighteen years old as the title character in MY BODYGUARD. Since then, he’s been in a lot of feature films, including INDEPENDENCE DAY and FULL METAL JACKET. Baldwin is also no stranger to series television, having spent five years as Special Agent John Casey on CHUCK and playing the indelible Jayne Cobb in Joss Whedon’s FIREFLY, a role he reprised in SERENITY, FIREFLY’s big-screen continuation.
Episode 1
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At a TNT party for the Television Critics Association, Baldwin talks about his heroic new role. “THE LAST SHIP is a story of the crew of a Navy guided missile destroyer, Nathan James, that finds itself on a mission to find the solution to a problem that has caused global devastation.”
Given that Jayne was also on a ship, albeit in space, does Baldwin see any comparison between that character and Mike Slattery? Admittedly, Jayne generally could not be described as the voice of reason, except when he suggested bringing grenades.
“Public relations officer, right,” Baldwin laughs. “This guy [Slattery] is a modernized version of that – not quite as rough and tumble, clean-shaven, of course. I think of all of my characters, he’s new and improved – and older. He’s maintaining the dignity of being the captain’s conscience, as any good executive officer should do.”
Have there been any surprises for Baldwin in the storyline? “The surprises – I don’t know if I’m at liberty to discuss them.”
Baldwin is onscreen continuing real-life family tradition. His father – “Still going strong,” the actor notes – was in the Navy. “He was in the Naval Air Corps back in World War II.” This was too early on for Baldwin to have seen his father’s place of military employment. “By the time I was up to my dad’s knee, he had been out for quite awhile.”
Much of THE LAST SHIP is shot on an active-duty U.S. Navy vessel, which pleases Baldwin no end. “It was just a true blessing to be able to go on that Navy ship and have them take us out over the horizon on maneuvers for three days and just working in amongst the crew. I’m honored.”
Episode 2
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What did Baldwin learn during that initial excursion? “Do you know the difference between a boat and a ship?” he inquires of his interviewer. When he gets “no” as a response, he relates, “Yeah, I didn’t know offhand either. There’s a big difference between a boat and a ship. When a boat turns, if it’s turning left, the left side of the boat leans downward. And a ship is the opposite. When it’s turning left, the right side cants to the right, but the ship turns left, because the center of gravity is so high on a ship that if it turned into the turn, it would tip over – or capsize, in nautical terminology. [It’s about] weight distribution.”
So that’s why submarines are called “boats”? Baldwin nods. “That is correct.”
THE LAST SHIP continues to film aboard real active-duty U.S. Navy ships, which means the TV show’s schedule is dictated at least partly by the doings of the American military, Baldwin notes. “Since we are beholden to the availability of the Navy vessels and the Navy base, we’ve had to do several episodes all at once. We’ve sort of been shooting Episode One through Five all together and mixing scenes in between here and there, so it has been challenging to maintain the continuity.”
In other words, if scene three of Episode One and then scene five of Episode Three and then scene four of Episode Seven all require the ship’s deck, those scenes will all be done together? “We do those in order on one day. Yeah.”
Is that an acting challenge trying to remember the character’s mindset in each scene and episode – happy, sad, angry …? “Right,” Baldwin affirms. “We also were at the mercy of the quote-unquote government shutdown that locked us out when we were originally going to go in there, so that kind of threw our schedule into a bit of a tailspin. But we’ve recovered.”
The real ship isn’t required one hundred percent of the time any more, Baldwin adds. “We have [sound] stages now; we’ve built some stages, so we don’t have to shoot on the ship any more, but we do need it for vistas, we need it for when you’re on the deck. Otherwise, you’re just beholden to green screen the whole time, and we’re not going
to be that show.”
When THE LAST SHIP is shooting on deck, does the shot have to be at an angle pointed out to sea where no other ships are in the frame – this is the last ship in a post-apocalyptic world, after all – or are the other ships removed digitally in post-production?
“That’s above my pay grade,” Baldwin replies. “I presume there’s going to be some of that, but we are lucky enough that we’ve been invited to go back out on maneuvers on the Dewey.”
While this sounds like the plot of a TV movie, what would happen if the real Navy vessel was called into action while THE LAST SHIP cast and crew were still aboard? Would the filmmaking people suddenly have to become real sailors?
“That would never happen,” Baldwin says. “They get a little more advance warning than that. If all of a sudden there’s an emergency in the Balkans and they have to be deployed to the Mediterranean, they’d take us back to shore and let us off, I think. They would go, but they would drop us off first. Or they would helicopter us to shore, because they don’t need us – we would just be in their way in a war zone. Unless it was a guy like me, who can pull his own weight, know what I mean? [laughs] Just kidding.”
To change the subject for a moment, how does Baldwin feel about the end of CHUCK’s five years? “We had our run and it was a blessing, again, for them to allow us to even finish the run. We were going to be canceled after one season, but we had been there for five and they gave us an opportunity to rightly close, and the arcs of all the characters had finished up, and I think it was time. I miss the family atmosphere – I miss Zach [Levi] and Yvonne [Strahovski] and [Joshua] Gomez and all the Buy More-ons. You miss them, but hey, we’re circus performers. We move on.”
There was also a gigantic ten-year FIREFLY reunion at ComicCon in 2012. “That was great,” Baldwin says. “We had heartwarming remembrances together and I love it, I miss those guys, too, but everyone’s moved on.”
At this point in Baldwin’s prolific career, how does he judge professional success? Is it projects that have a dedicated following like FIREFLY, is it a sense of personal satisfaction, is it getting to do something he’s never gotten to do before …?
“Yeah, that’s one of them – getting to do something I never got to do before,” Baldwin acknowledges. “Running around on a Navy ship is one of them. My goal is to have fun, work hard and meet new people, and hopefully the audience we will find and they will embrace us. It’s a crap shoot, though, but I’ve seen the pilot of THE LAST SHIP and it’s great. It’s one of the best pilots I’ve ever seen. It’s fast, action-packed, it’s got some laughs, although there are places where it’s like gallows humor, but it’s endearing and sexy and it’s cool.”
What would Baldwin most like people to know about THE LAST SHIP right now? “THE LAST SHIP honors the Navy and the United States and loyalty and some kickass adventure. We respect the Navy and we respect the United States military and we are a pro-military, pro-American show.”
Interviewed by Abbie Bernstein
