Lee Jung-jae, Adam Scott, Noah Wyle, and the best of our Emmy Drama Actor interviews

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2 days ago

Over the past two months of Emmy campaigning, Gold Derby has spoken with several contenders in all categories. Now with voting underway ahead of the July 15 unveiling of the nominees, we have compiled 13 interviews for stars vying for Best Drama Actor, including: Charlie Cox (Daredevil: Born Again), Jon Hamm (Your Friends and Neighbors), Aldis Hodge (Cross), Lee Jung-Jae (Squid Game), Diego Luna (Andor), Zahn McClarnon (Dark Winds), Gary Oldman (Slow Horses), Harold Perrineau (From), Eddie Redmayne (The Day of the Jackal), Adam Scott (Severance), Billy Bob Thornton (Landman), Charlie Vickers (The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power), and Noah Wyle (The Pitt).
Read on for highlights from each interviews and links to watch our full video Q&As.
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Cox started playing lawyer Matt Murdock, aka the blind superhero Daredevil, back in 2015, and he's figured out his two priorities for every action scene, based on the character's superhuman abilities and his emotional primacy.
'One, be clear-minded about how emotionally relevant this scene is to Matt,' Cox explains about the Disney+ character. 'Sometimes we have a scene where he's just trying to garner information, and to get that, he needs to go through people. So make sure that the action is appropriate for that, so that he's not unnecessarily violent or brutal, because it doesn't require huge physical emotion. Then there are scenes where he's fighting someone with whom there's a history, or the person has been in some way involved in something that Matt feels very strongly against. So that fight becomes emotional, and it is more brutal, and probably more unnecessarily violent, and all those things. So to be clear and tell, in the simplest ways, the emotional story of the action.'
Watch our complete interview with Charlie Cox.
Hamm stars as the morally questionable Andy "Coop" Cooper, who turns to stealing from his wealthy neighbors to keep up appearances when he loses his high-paying hedge fund job on the Apple TV+ series.
He says, "What I really liked about his journey in the first season was just how much it settled on him when it was looking very dire in the last few episodes where he was going to have to really kind of come-to-Jesus about what he has gotten himself into and how that not only is going to affect his life, but also the people he really truly cares about, his children, his ex-wife, his sister. The collateral damage of all of this, I think, was something that he was really confronting in the last few episodes. It's a wonderful scene with Amanda Peet, where she says you've got to fight, you can't give up. Are your kids going to be the kids whose dad is in jail for murder? If you didn't do it, figure it out. That was a really lovely, important scene, and I think it really resonated with Coop, and it really hit home. And he really had to double down on figuring this out."
Watch our complete interview with Jon Hamm.
For the Prime Video series, Hodge's performance as Det. Alex Cross is the perfect combination of cerebral and physical, swaggering and sensitive, and tough and gentle that the role requires.
"I think every actor has to maintain independent individuality when they approach any character, right? That's the artist's process," Hodge tells Gold Derby. "So I just thought about the honest foundation of his desires, his wants. What is his current situation as a man? Where can I connect to those things personally with my own life experience? And then it becomes a really easy process from there. When you focus on the nucleus of a character's honesty, it eliminates so many other factors that would serve to only deter your creativity. So really, you come up with your own version by not even trying to come up with your own version. You don't focus on that. You just focus on the character's honesty."
Watch our complete video interview with Aldis Hodge.
The Emmy winner plays Gi-hun, who is seeking revenge in Season 2 after winning the game for the first season. The cast and creator behind the Netflix show joined us for an exclusive interview.
He says, "For Season 1 it was really about the competitive world that we live in. For Season 2, it's more about the democratic voting system. Does it really work? Because are taking sides, grouping together, clashing against one another. So there's that added layer of political message to it. And then Season 3 will come to you with another message. And I think these social and political messages were resonant not just in Korea only, but through the entire global community. It's things that we have to deal with, with all our might together. … And I loved how there's that virtual cycle of us bringing questions to the table, and people would think about it, they would talk about it after watching Squid Game, and then those conversations will circle back to us, the creators and cast, and we can add that to our next season."
Watch our complete video interview with Lee Jung-jae.
The second season of the Disney+ series wasn't merely the completion of Luna's own years-long trek to tell a story of how Rogue One's Cassian Andor became a hero of the Rebellion, it was part of a greater, game-changing transformation of the overall Star Wars universe.
He says, "I'm very pleased. This has been a very long journey for us, but I wouldn't change anything. I think the challenges we went through, the complexity of the production and the executing of this — we went through COVID, we went through strikes, shooting far away from home — all of that paid off because this is a show that represents me as an artist, and as audience too. It's something I would like to see as audience, and I am proud to be part of something that is connecting like the show is connecting with audiences."
Read our complete interview with Diego Luna.
The Hunkpapa Lakota actor stars as Navajo Tribal Police Lt. Joe Leaphorn, who in Season 3 is navigating the effects of moral gray areas he entered during Season 2 which have landed him in the investigative crosshairs of an FBI agent.
'Authenticity is very important to us,' McClarnon told Gold Derby. 'The books are written by Tony Hillerman, and we as Native people are just trying to add a little different perspective, kind of recontextualize the books a little bit, and bring these characters to life — real Natives bringing these characters to life.'
Read our complete interview with Zahn McClarnon.
The newly-announced knight and Oscar winner Oldman plays abrasive MI5 boss Jackson Lamb, the rude, crass, and often drunk department head with a bracing panache on the Apple TV+ series.
"As the seasons go on and incrementally more is revealed of Jackson, you as an actor are forming a more complete picture of him. And then of course we have Season 5, and that pulls back another layer of the onion to his character and really why he is the way he is," he says about fleshing out the why behind his grouchy, ill-tempered exterior. "It works in a way as a defense mechanism. He's not gonna let you in. You're not going to really get to know him. And that really is part of his skill also, because by doing that, he has an edge over you. I mean, we've said it before; people around him are playing checkers and Jackson Lamb is playing chess."
Watch our complete interview with Gary Oldman.
Perrineau plays Sheriff Boyd Stevens on the MGM+ horror drama set in a decaying old ghost town in middle America that appears to be under the control of an unknown malevolent force that traps anyone who arrives.
Director Jack Bender goes, 'here's what we're going to do, kiddo, we're going to have her over there and we're gonna put the camera on you, and we're gonna let it go," he explains incredulously. "That's when you have to dig in, and put images in your brain that you know you don't want to be there forever and but you have to," he says. "That's the great part of it, and if I can let it happen, then I've gotten something out of it. And then, therefore, hopefully, the audience did too. I've gone to a new place in my own self where I can allow this to be, and don't have to be scared of it or anything like that. It was pretty wild shooting it," he recalls.
Watch our complete interview with Harold Perrineau.
The Oscar winner plays the title character for the Peacock series. By day, he is a quiet assassin, exacting and economical with his kills, a man of few words and a master of disguises. By night, he returns home to his other life in Spain, as Charles Calthrop, who is married to Nuria (Úrsula Corberó) and father to their son Carlito.
"The thing that I found most challenging was ... there's something that is incredibly kind of refined and economic and ruthless about him, but that economy, weirdly, takes quite a lot of work," he says. "I'm the most flappable person imaginable and this character is deeply unflappable. So it was weird because it meant that I had to prep. I like prep anyway, but I had to prep, like, I would say fivefold to how I would normally, just on silly things. I remember there's a moment in the opening scene [in] the opening episode when I sort of dismantle this suitcase and turn it into a sniper's rifle, and I wanted it to be like a dance. And I wanted it to have that sort of cathartic satisfaction of everything fitting exactly in its right place. It took me weeks. I would just put classical music on I was sitting in the in the bedroom at the hotel I was staying at and just go over and over, trying to make it as fluid as possible. But that economy was the hardest thing."
Watch our complete interview with Eddie Redmayne.
The second season of the Apple TV+ series is about a near-future, retro-tinged dystopia where people could separate their work selves from their personal lives. The team behind the show, including Scott, joined our recent group discussion, where she discussed her approach to playing the innie and outie versions of her character.
On playing both versions in the same scene, he says, "It was something that had been talked about all season and that I was honestly dreading because it sounded hard, and it sounded like something that I could screw up any number of ways. Shooting it was something I was freaked out about. We started really workshopping and going through it and massaging it pretty early on. Dan and the writers were changing it as we went. When we got on the set, we started really going through it with a fine-tooth comb and trying to figure out exactly what the conversation should be. We had to start shooting it on a Monday morning and we were changing it right up until, what, Friday night? And then we had to stop because I had to memorize it at some point."
Watch our complete interview with Adam Scott.
Thornton stars as Tommy Norris, an abrasive straight-shooter petroleum landman who takes charge of the lucrative and often precarious oilfields of West Texas for M-Tex, a giant oil corporation, for the Paramount+ drama.
"I've had a lot of life experience. I've been around some pretty weird things. So you just kind of draw on those. If you've got a pillowcase over your head and people are dumping gasoline on you, it's not hard to imagine if somebody struck a match, even though it's not gasoline. It's claustrophobic. So the situation itself kind of puts you in the frame of mind," the recent Golden Globe nominee and past Oscar winner explains, referring to scenes in the season premiere and finale where the titular landman is tied to a chair and is being beaten while a pillowcase covers his head.
Listen to our complete interview with Billy Bob Thornton.
Vickers explains that he shot several episodes of the Prime Video Season 1 without knowing that his character, Halbrand, was actually the dark lord Sauron in disguise. And for Season 2, he also plays Sauron's new form called Annatar.
Halbrand feels distinctly human, a 'low man' who works with his hands. By contrast, Annatar is ethereal, regal, and possesses a calm command of any room he enters. 'He's a Maia, which means basically he's a demigod,' explains Vickers, 'So you're going from playing a regular guy to this guy that is larger than life. So I had to learn a whole new way of moving.' Within the actor's physicality is a simmering power that Annatar dare not show. 'He's a lot more still and a lot more controlled and contained,' says Vickers, 'it is quite fun to play with the potential of this energy that is within him.'
Watch our complete interview with Charlie Vickers.
The star, executive producer, writer, and director plays Dr. Michael "Robby" Robinavitch. His team at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center would go on to have a stressful, chaotic day, capped off with a mass casualty incident.
He says, "The line of demarcation in healthcare can be drawn in 2020 before COVID, and we're living in the A.D. of it all. And I think, in some ways, that reset the clock on what modern healthcare looks like, and that became the focus of the show. How do we do a show that's more practitioner-centric, less patient-centric, and has a fidelity not just to terminology and to procedure but to the emotional truth of the compounding aggregate experiences that practitioners shoulder and don't have a lot of opportunity to offload?"
Read our complete interview with Noah Wyle.
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