Life on Mars star Jason O’Mara talks to Taragh Loughrey-Grant about his big Hollywood break and life on Steven Spielberg’s new time travel blockbuster, Terra Nova.
The big TV news this week is the launch of Steven Spielberg’s prehistoric time travel adventure series, Terra Nova. And the best part? There’s an Irish actor playing the lead role.
We last saw Jason O’Mara in the US version of the hit BBC drama series, Life on Mars, in which he played Detective Sam Tyler. The Dublin-born actor, who studied at Trinity College, started his TV career on this side of the Atlantic in Peak Practice, Soldier Soldier and The Bill, before moving Stateside in 2002.
Once there, Jason appeared in CSI: Miami, Grey’s Anatomy and In Justice, as well as in the film Resident Evil: Extinction. However, the role of Jim Shannon in Terra Nova must surely be his big break: “I like to keep my expectations low and my aspirations high, in my career and my life. That way I'm pleasantly surprised, more often than desperately disappointed. Last year, I did a play at the Donmar Warehouse in London, a film with Katherine Heigl called One for the Money in Pennsylvania and the pilot episode of Terra Nova. It was the first time I worked in all three media in one calendar year. A very exciting time.
“I’ve never got a show to a second season. In Life on Mars, I had the most amazing cast and I was ably supported in that, In Justice was a great show but I don’t think we were able to make enough noise to break through but with this, I’m really not sweating because it’s about whether people are ready for a show like this and we believe they are.
“Steven Spielberg’s presence is one of the selling points, dinosaurs are a huge aspect of all this and so we’re hoping people come for these reasons and stay because they’re enjoying the world we’ve created and the dynamics between the characters. I really feel like it’s out of my hands; I’ve done my work and it’s a question of how much of a hit it’s going to be. I think we could really be on to something.”
Does the Irish-sounding Jim Shannon have any links to home? “No, but I really enjoyed getting to know Jim Shannon, I'm hoping the audience do too. I come from a very close family and would like to get back to Ireland more often but things are busy for me right now and I wouldn't have it any other way. I am very lucky and very grateful to be doing what I love.”
Hailed by some critics as the new Lost, the estimated €68 million budget is certainly the biggest since that high concept hit show. Others have hoped that the CGI is not a repeat of the questionable special effects of Land of the Lost but with the Jurassic Park director on board, it’s unlikely.
Of course, Terra Nova has a high concept of its own and O’Mara describes it as a show about a family who get a second chance to escape their dying world of 2149 by time travelling to a prehistoric utopia. Naturally, that utopia isn’t everything it seems, not least because it’s filled with hungry dinosaurs. How did O’Mara find himself in this world? “My agent told me that Steven Spielberg is highly involved in the casting [of Terra Nova] and while I hadn’t got an offer or anything, they were checking my availability . . .
Then I was walking down the street in New York [where he lives with wife Paige Turco and their seven-year-old son David] and I got a call from my agent saying ‘Steven Spielberg has been in touch and he wants to watch some scenes from your work’.
“I sent some scenes from Life on Mars . . . and then I didn’t hear anything for about 48 hours and I was sure that I wouldn’t get this. Then I got a phone call saying ‘They want you to take the role of Jim Shannon on Terra Nova’ and would I be interested! I said: ‘It has Steven Spielberg, it has dinosaurs and it’s one of the most ambitious TV projects of all time – sign me up!’”
As well as the big budget, Terra Nova has become synonymous in the TV industry with delays, however, that’s down to external factors – who could have planned for massive flooding in Queensland, for example? “It’s been well documented how difficult some of the shooting days were due to the weather. As if it wasn’t hard enough trying to create as ambitious and complicated a show as this is to make, we had to contend with that. There were days when I opened my trailer and walked down into a pile of mud. They were the days that you think ‘we’re not going to shoot today’ but they were able to do great things back in the studio with the dinos while it was raining cats and dogs outside.”
Speaking about the challenge of working with green screen, O’Mara says, “Technically, the green screen acting can be difficult because there’s something worse than a tennis ball on the end of a stick; it’s an Australian visual effects assistant running around a field with a cardboard dinosaur head on the end of a stick while wearing sandals. You’re supposed to look intimidated and scared, but he’s a very sweet guy. It’s hard to be really scared of something when all you do is burst out laughing! You’re really at the whim of the visual effects guys and the editor when it comes to that stuff.”
Judge for yourself just how scared Jason can be; Terra Nova starts on Monday October 3 on Sky 1.
