Jailbird: Sarah Wayne Callies on XY
Honolulu born Sarah Wayne Callies plays sassy Dr. Sara Tancredi in top serial drama Prison Break. If only being banged up could be this good in real life.
We’ve got Lost and Heroes and 24 and Prison Break – are we experiencing overkill with these kind of shows?
I think new shows might have a difficult time finding traction because people are saturated in terms of the time they have, but technology is affecting things in the sense that you can buy three seasons of a DVD and surrender a month of your life. It seems like there’s an emerging market for television that’s designed to be watched a certain way.
If you could star in one other programme what would it be?
Rome. It’s the best acting on television and it’s extraodinary – incredible.
How do fans of Prison Break react to you in public?
I think I tend to get off pretty easily because people treat actors as the characters they play. They respond to T-Bag and Wentworth in ways that are slightly stranger. They tell me they like the show. Sometimes people will come up with their own type of codes and they'll write to me and say ‘discypher this!' I have to say I haven’t had the time to discypher all of them.
Yourself (she obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree in 2002) and your character are really brainy. Do you believe men find intelligence a turn-on?
I think it goes in one of two directions. It’s either something they really value or something that just puts them off. In my case it landed me my husband!
On the floor of the death row cells was etched on the stone ‘there’s always time to mend’
If your character was killed off how would you like her to die?
In a blaze of fire! I want to go out fighting and I certainly don't want them to keep me on out a sense of pity or if it isn't the best thing for the story. The show shouldn't lose credibility for the sake of one character otherwise it just becomes like Friends where you see the same characters every week. That doesn't work for Prison Break.
What was it like shooting the first series in a real prison?
Three years beforehand it had been abandoned as a maximum security prison. I think the star of the show for the first series was Fox River State Penitentiary - it did a lot of the work for us. There were little details about it that if it had been built on set nobody would have thought to include.
Like what…?
On the floor of the death row cells was etched on the stone ‘there’s always time to mend’ – a little uplifting slogan that I thought was just so sick considering the men in there were going to fry. Also right across the street from us was a fully functioning prison for sex offenders who were considered too violent to release into society. There was a tunnel which connected the two which noone told me until I’d been there for like five months and then I refused to be left alone!
Are you for the death penalty?
As far as I know the state does not exist in order to kill it’s own citizens and while my opinion as an actor may not matter I don’t think the US is in terribly good company globally. I think it’s us Afghanistan and China who still have it.
