Thomas Gibson knows he’s lucky. He’s a good actor, too, but so are many unemployed ones. It’s a long-standing cliché, but everyone working in Los Angeles is an actor: the pizza waitress, the barman, the valet.
Even the guy who took me on a tour of the Kodak Theatre (the venue on Hollywood Boulevard where the Oscars are held) explained that he was an actor who did the guide job to keep himself in corn.
The reality is that only a tiny minority of actors in Tinseltown earn a living from their craft, so you can imagine just how much smaller the percentage of them is who actually get to star in a hit TV show.
It’s third time lucky for Gibson, who established himself as Daniel Nyland in the 1990s’ medical drama Chicago Hope, then became Greg Montgomery in the comedy Dharma & Greg, before landing his current role as Supervisory Special Agent Aaron ‘Hotch’ Hotchner, the Unit Chief of the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) team in the highly popular drama, Criminal Minds.
We meet him on the show’s set, which is in an industrial estate, and as about as far removed from the perception of Hollywood as you could get. But sets aren’t glamorous places; they’re places of work. The glam is something that’s added on later. Having said that, Thomas Gibson arrives looking as dapper as ever. Dressed in character, he looks every inch the sensibly suited, married-to-the-job federal agent Hotch. It can’t be easy, playing a rather humourless guy who’s dedication to the BAU nearly got him killed several times, broke up his marriage, and ultimately led to the death of his former wife, Haley, killed in season five by a serial killer out for Hotch.
Telling him that his character has been through the mill only makes him smile. “Yes, he has”, he says. And likely to suffer a little more? Now the smile becomes a grin. “I don’t know how much . . . how farther down things could go”, he wonders, “but I think he’s latched onto the job as an opportunity to get up in the morning and also there’s his son. So those two things keep him going, and I hope that things get a little better for him.”
Does he see Hotch as a man whose scars are too deep for him to open up to anyone again? He concedes, “that’s something I don’t think anybody ever gets over, but I think it’s something that he could hopefully overcome to some extent.” Of course, Criminal Minds isn’t just about Agent Hotchner and last season, what went on behind the scenes seemed more bizarre than any of the show’s storylines: the sacking of AJ Cook (Agent JJ Jareau), the killing-off of Emily Prentiss (played by Paget Brewster), not forgetting the spin-off Suspect Behavior which, despite the presence of Oscar-winner Forest Whitaker, was a disaster and got pulled after one short season.
Now, both Cook and Brewster are back on board, while exec-producer Ed Borneo is gone, as is Rachel Nichols, who played new character Ashley Seaver.
There was a lot of tension on and off the set, and as Gibson concedes: “It was a tough year last year.” Speaking frankly, he adds: “I think we’ve all been in projects on television and movies where suddenly you say, ‘What happened to so-and-so?’ They say, ‘They’ve been replaced’, you wonder why, and then you make the best that you can . . .
“For example, when AJ left . . . we did all talk about it because I think it blindsided everyone, including our head writer. I think it was something that was just sort of handed to him as a fait accompli, you know. And I think we all had each other to at least commiserate with because there was nothing to be done about it, and yet none of it made any sense.”
But with two such important members of the team back on board, perhaps this season Criminal Minds will get back to doing what it does best: keeping us glued to our TV screens on Friday nights.
Criminal Minds
Friday, Sky Living
