I am so excited about tonight’s series premiere of The Lottery on Lifetime, and was lucky enough to chat with star David Alpay about the series and his role at the Lifetime Canada offices in Toronto. Read the interview below, and be sure to watch tonight at 10/9c on Lifetime and at 10pm ET on Lifetime Canada.
I really liked your work on The Vampire Diaries so I was excited to see that you’d been cast on The Lottery.
It’s amazing the reach of [The Vampire Diaries]. That character, Shane, to me was like they put me in a forest, a blindfold on my eyes, pushed me and told me to run. We’d go to conventions and people would be like, “Are you a bad guy or a good guy?” and I’d be, “I don’t know.”
I think that [my work on The Vampire Diaries] will bring in a younger crowd, and that’s great because I want younger people to be watching this show specifically because it’s about them. Girls who are 16 or 17 years old now are going to be 27 years old in 10 years and who knows what the future is going to bring. But this isn’t that far off. The stuff that we’re doing on this show, this is not sci-fi. Only in the sense that it’s set 10 years in the future and only in the sense that we don’t have a word to describe the kind of work that we’re doing on this show besides sci-fi. It’s more like extrapolatory-fi, taking things that are happening right now and teasing them out a little bit. There’s a lot of infertility happening currently. There are couples who want to have kids that are 30, 32 years old and have to do six treatments before anything happens. And you’ve got all of these other species that we don’t think about because we’re top of the food chain, we’re king of the castle. We don’t think about what’s going on with bees, with the starfish this year, we had a mass extinction event. These are telling events. If mammals are next, humans are mammals. That’s the science we’re dealing with.
Are you attracted to playing characters that we’re not quite certain where they stand?
That’s what I do. Even bad guys are motivated by good. On the inside, they think they’re doing good, they just go maybe a step further than you or I would. They make a bargain with themselves and take that leap. Maybe they have more faith in what they do and there’s some sort of miscalculation in their mental chemistry. But I don’t know about James. Is he a good guy or a bad guy? He’s a scientist and he’s working on this project that’s really important. He works with Alison, they’ve got a very tumultuous relationship. There are hints here and there that they’ve had this personal affair in the past, but ultimately, they are enamoured with each other’s minds and they work together and they’re top of the game here, working on a very high level on a very important problem. Does he make alliances with other people, or is he true to his friend and colleague? This is something that we’re going to tease out over time.
We see early in the first episode that siding with Alison could put James’ life in danger.
Nobody’s sacred on this show. I think the audience is going to like that, too. The great thing about [The Lottery] is that things happen quickly, and it’s going to keep the audience engaged. It moves pretty fast. It’s not a strict procedural in the sense of CSI although its pedigree is kind of CSI because we have Danny Cannon who directed our pilot and executive produced it, but Tim Sexton who wrote this also wrote Children of Men and most recently the Cesar Chavez biopic that Diego Luna did, so he’s got a very good sense of how to tell a human story, and that’s what the show is about really — the interpersonal relationships.
The series definitely has a more cinematic feel. Is that something that you notice from your perspective as an actor?
Absolutely. There’s been a brain drain from movies to television, and that’s where all of the best writers are going now, they’re going to television. And I think the audiences have been sufficiently abused by film. In 90 minutes, there’s only so much character development that can happen, so you’re bombarded with explosions and a laser light show. The best stuff that’s happening entertainment-wise right now is happening on television.
In our show, instead of 20 episodes, you’ve got 10 episodes with a very concrete beginning, middle and end. You tell a story in 10 episodes, you don’t lose people’s attention. You nail it and the story doesn’t drag. It’s got an arc and that’s very important to retaining your audience. I think the best series right now are happening in these discrete chunks like this. List any of the best shows of the five best shows of the past ten years and they have been of that model. People respond to that more, and because you have time, you can really get into who these people are. Each episode, you turn that diamond a little bit and admire a different facet. I think that’s really important.
I’ve noticed that TV networks are reinventing themselves in a way, and this is a bold move for Lifetime. What is like for you being a part of this changing tide?
It’s great. It’s like being a part of the next step, which is exciting as an actor, as a performer, as an interpretive artist, as a creative artist, you want to be constantly moving forward and trying something different. This is very different but I think it’s going to be successful. It’s going to pull in an existing audience and it’s going to bring in younger men and women, and people who are interested in science. There are so many brilliant science-minded women who I think, hopefully, will be attracted to this and tune in to check it out. And men as well. I think all of the characters are compelling. It’s post-gender, and it’s really just about telling a really cool story in an interesting format at a very high level of execution. We have amazing writers on the show, an incredible roster of producers. Besides Danny and Tim, there’s Rick Eid who did Hostages last year, and Matt Olmstead who did Prison Break, which was groundbreaking in its time. You’ve got some good brain talent behind this pushing it forward and kind of experimenting with it.
What can you share with us about James’ upcoming journey in this series?
It is kind of creepy. We see him siding with the other guys toward the end of the [premiere]. Stuff happens later on in the series that kind of pull him and push him towards and away from Alison. It gets good. It gets action-y. Stunts happen. When they created this world they wanted it to not be so far-fetched and superficially futuristic. It’s very urban and kind of recognizable. They wanted things to look very real. When you said cinematic that’s what it made me think of, too. It looks like we’re on the ground. A lot of it is very gritty and that especially plays out in later episodes.
There’s a definite mood set and a specific look and feel in creating this world.
We play a lot with colour on our show. Props goes to our production design team. It’s just incredible. You walk into their office and it’s like a vision of the future with shapes and colours. Everything’s intentional on this show. A lot of the stuff that we do in the lab is very blue, teal, white, stuff outside can be warmer or darker, but yes, it’s a very dark show.
What’s funny is we’re coming into a landscape where the past twenty years, there have been these biomedical type TV shows — starting with E.R. and all the way up to the CSIs, where they get into the nitty-gritty of the science — so it’s not like the audience is going to be thrown off by anything that we give them. It’s a variation of something they’ve seen before. As for us, we have technical consultants on the show who are there whenever we need them.
In my experience, in my former life, I came from the sciences. I was studying human biology and zoology at University of Toronto. It was kind of like a 12 year detour and then finding myself here in this familiar role. It’s interesting working in a lab again, but now it’s heightened and there’s a surreality to it that wasn’t there when I was doing genetic tests. This is kind of fun and kind of cool.
Can fans look out for you on social media during the premiere or perhaps future episodes?
I’m going to try. There’s a good chance I’m going to be working on Sunday night when we’re airing. If I can find myself a television, I will try to live tweet it. I think that would be a lot of fun. The fans have been super responsive.
Photo Courtesy of Lifetime
