"A look back at Highlander: The Series featuring conversations
with Jim Byrnes, Gillian Horvath, Donna Lettow and Peter Wingfield,
part II"
by Abbie Bernstein
Eon Magazine
Issue 8.0
1 September 1998
[excerpt]
... Then there is Methos, the oldest known living Immortal, who
admits to being 5,000 years old and looks a shade under 30. Played
by Peter Wingfield, he was supposed to be in a single third-season
episode, "Methos." Instead, he evolved into a figure whose popularity
is arguably second only to MacLeod's.
Wingfield, a Welshman presently living in Vancouver, says by phone,
"My agent said there was this job, it was one episode in a TV series
that I'd never heard of, and it was four days' filming in Paris.
They sent me half a dozen pages of a script and I went in and did
those onto videotape with the casting director. About a week later,
they rang up and asked me if I would do the scenes again, but with
slightly different thoughts behind them. I have this feeling that
what they wanted in the second one was to see more vulnerability
in the character, but I really can't remember. It's four years back
now. The possibility was mooted that the character would be brought
back at the end of the season, which was Season 3, and have his
head chopped off, and that was that. What I've been told was the
response of the production team, after they watched the first day
of rushes... That was the stuff under the bridge with me and MacLeod
fighting and me letting him win and saying, 'You must take my head
and take all my energy and experience, and all that stuff should
go to you and not to the bad guy.' Apparently they watched
that and immediately decided that they shouldn't kill the character
off."
"Basically," Horvath confirms, "David and Bill saw the dailies
and went, 'We're not doing that story where he dies.' And I said,
'Hey, it's a good story!' And they said, 'We're not doing it.' "
When we first meet Methos, he is using the persona of a mortal,
Adam Pierson, who is not only a Watcher but actually assigned to
research the "mythical" Methos, insuring that no other Watcher will
find out more about him. Not since Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner concocted
their 2,000-Year-Old Man has a figure so old been quite so pragmatic
and funny, though what Wingfield responded to initially was Methos'
fear.
"There's a line in that very first episode where he has decided
that MacLeod should kill him, but he says, 'Do you think I want
to die?' I connected with that very much, that even though intellectually
he'd decided that this is what he should do, he was still really
scared, and that the fear of dying hadn't gotten less in 5,000 years.
And why should it?
"I think they had a fundamentally good instinct when they wrote
the character," Wingfield continues. "Just because you've been around
for 5,000 years doesn't mean that you'd have any answers to anything.
Not to the really big questions. You still wouldn't know what it
was like to die and what came after death, whether there was God,
whether there was a creator of the universe — you still wouldn't
know. The other idea that I really liked was that a fighter, in
the end, is going to come up against someone who either is a better
fighter or simply gets lucky one day. So a big fighter is not going
to last 5,000 years. The person that's going to last 5,000 years
is someone who avoids fighting whenever he possibly can and someone
who blends in with whatever is going on at the time. So just because
you were born with the Egyptians or the Chinese or the Greeks or
someone, doesn't mean that you'd still be carrying that with you.
What he'd be is very contemporary. And he's sitting down with a
Walkman on, eating takeaway pizza and drinking beer. This guy looks
like everybody else. Because that's how you survive."
Wingfield, Horvath and Lettow agree that small details in his performance
suggested new plot twists to the writing staff. "I mean, I never
sat down with the writers and discussed where the character would
go," Wingfield relates. "But in a more ethereal sense, [I had] a
very great deal of input, because the way the character grew was
through them coming up with an idea and writing it, and me taking
things from that idea and making them live, making them whole, and
also throwing in little bits and pieces of stuff that I thought
were consequences of those ideas. I kind of thought that what would
be useful for the character was if he seemed enigmatic. And if he
seemed that there was a lot going on behind his eyes, but that he
wasn't letting on everything. The image that I had was — do
you remember Roddy McDowall in Planet of the Apes? Every
time somebody asked him a question or said something to him, he
would tip his head slightly sideways and look up to the sky and
look as if he was thinking a lot of things, and then his answer
would be maybe only a word or a sentence, but you had the impression
that there was an awful lot going on. And I thought that that idea
had some mileage in it for Methos, and I look back at the stuff
I filmed in Season 3, and it doesn't seem to be there anywhere at
all," he laughs, "but internally, that's kind of what was going
on."
One of these consequences was a fifth-season double episode, "Comes
a Horseman" and "Revelations 6:8," that dealt with Methos' past.
It wasn't that he had always avoided fights; back in the Bronze
Age, he was one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, slaughtering
thousands upon thousands. It was a development that allowed Duncan
MacLeod — who normally whacked such villains but now owes Methos
his life — to agonize over issues of loyalty, justice and trust
like never before. It was also a twist that Wingfield didn't expect.
"You're damn right I didn't," Wingfield laughs. "The writers would
be the people to talk about this, because I only know from them
saying as much to me, that the 'Comes a Horseman' flashback came
from a perception they had that Methos was hiding something shameful,
that there was territory that he didn't want to go back and look
at. I don't know where specifically they got that, but they picked
up an edge from him."
Horvath points to the episode "Chivalry," in which a centuries
old flame of MacLeod turns murderous. "We had pictured Methos as
being rather bemused by the whole Kristin situation, but when we
saw the dailies, we saw that he'd chosen to play it more angry than
we'd expected, creating the impression that Methos had some agenda
he wasn't telling anyone about, and earning him the nickname of
'Agenda Boy.' This reinforced our feeling that you don't get to
be 5,000 years old by being a nice guy all the time — this
had been set up by the line, 'Why would I tell the truth?' in the
'Finale' episode and by lines in 'Chivalry'. It was out of this
that the Horsemen stories grew."
"There were a couple of phases in the playing of it," Wingfield
says. "Methos has been hiding for a long time, and he appears for
a couple of episodes and then he's gone again, and then he appears
for really quite a long time. And I felt that that had to reflect
that he was being drawn back into something that he found appealing,
that he knew it was risky living close to MacLeod and being caught
up in fights again, but it was kind of exciting, and he liked it.
And then after the 'Comes a Horseman' back story bit, I just thought,
'Okay, well, this is all out in the open, there has to be a kind
of toughening-up of him, he is reacknowledging that he lived this
way, that he has this brutality within him and that just going back
and tasting it again, and finding that there is a part of him that
liked it. I thought after that, it was time he toughened up again
and became more involved, pushed MacLeod more, laughed at him more,
and was more openly attacking of him. Because the relationship between
him and MacLeod becomes very edgy after that."
Even though he was not in every episode, playing a character through
four seasons was new for Wingfield. "I've never done more than two
series of anything, and I've usually only done one series, because
I get very bored, very quickly. My experience generally is that
in the first season, all the ideas go into the first episode, and
the rest of the season is replaying that same story in slightly
different detail. By the time I got to the end of the season, I
just felt, 'This is it, they have nothing more to say about this
character and I don't want to go back and just replay the same tape
again and again.' It's like doing an office job. But the thing about
Methos is that he's never got into that thing of just replaying
the same story, because they keep throwing in these bizarre [developments]
— from being a sort of kind of cutesy, wisecracking sidekick,
suddenly, you are one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse —
that's great! So it's never been like playing the same character
every week and certainly not playing the same story."
Wingfield says he likes the response he's gotten from fans. "It's
very flattering to be recognized for something that you think is
good work. I have great affection for Methos. I like the character
and I have fun playing him and some of the best work I've done in
my life has been on this show, so it's great to have that recognized
by people."
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