Robert Knepper is best known for his role from TV series Prison Break, where he plays T-Bag - a racist pedophile, who infiltrates himself into a plan for escaping a high security prison. He is currently working on a parallel project - the movie Hitman, directed by Luc Besson. Knepper is shooting in Sofia and took the time to talk to SNA editor Petya Sabinova about his current projects and his feelings about Bulgaria.
Q: In season 2 you had to play basically the whole season without one hand, was it hard to get used to it
A: My father is a veterinarian in real life, T-bag goes to a veterinarian to sew his hand back on. I grew up with animals and I am fascinated by medicine. I think if I wasn't an actor I would have become a veterinarian or a doctor. One of my favourite subjects in school was anatomy. We had this cat we had to dissect throughout the year. So I am fascinated by the fact that I get my hand cut off and the fact that I get it sewn back on.
I thought what nerves would still work, would I have full power, would I have any power, would any nerves function. So I thought it would be better if it just didn't do anything. It's this struggle. Your brain says "C'mon fingers, move" and then it became this thing, this limp hand, like "What the heck is with this thing" [Bangs his hand against the table], "it's pissing me off, it should be fixed." Little things like that' I'd play in my head, but the real trick was not to move it involuntary. When I was doing the scenes I was like "Don't move, please don't move, cause that will give it all away."
Q: Did you move it?
A: There were a couple of times when I caught it doing a twitch, but then I heard that that can happen too, that there is some kind of nerve memory, that the synapse of the brain is so strong it comes all the way down into the end and there is a charge so much that there is a memory and it may cause twitches.
Q: Did it take long to control that hand?
A: So the thing I loved about any show that's long running but particularly about that show is that you really have the time to explore it, you don't take it like it's one episode of a series, you take it like it's one fraction of a movie. So I shot one 22ndth of a film and the next 22ndth will be a little bit more about that character. So I think I learned how to do it over several episodes. And then the writers were thinking "Well what are we doing?" Do we let this hand atrophy and fall off and then I play it like the old pirate thing where I pull the sleeve over it. I can't do that because you can see the knuckles.
But then they came with the great idea of T-Bag seeing this veteran soldier playing pool and he's got a fake hand and T-Bag's like "Uuu I want that hand." And he has to kill the guy and take the hand so we made a mold of my hand and it's like a glove that I put on. It's great because I can't move my hand in it
Q: Who made the glove?
A: That's the bad thing about it. Instead of the original glove being made by special effects in the movie, it was made by an actual prosthetic company in Dallas working for foreign veterans and they're busy right now, because there are a lot of soldiers coming home without a foot or a hand. So they took a mold of my hand and they made me a hand but they made it the same size of my hand. When I put on a glove, the glove's slightly bigger, but this is the exact size of my hand.
Q: Was it painful?
A: I have two problems with it - when it's cold outside, which it was during the winter, the PVC material shrinks. When it's hot my hand swells up and the glove doesn't. So I would say the second half of the second season it wasn't too hard for me to act like I'm in pain because I could literally only wear this thing for like 10 to 15 minutes and then I'd have to take it off. And when I'd take it off my fingertips would be white, because the pressure is so hard on my fingers. And I'd have to pretend I didn't feel that, because I have no hand. So that was a challenge.
Q: Being here in Bulgaria, have you had any time to walk around, see the city? Your hotel is more or less downtown?
A: I love the Crystal Palace. It's a very sweet hotel and it's got that great park in front of it. I decided to bring my family with me. My boy is almost five and I walked through the park and thought how much he'd love it, to climb up that little hill there, and the great playground and everything.
Q: Was this what you expected from the country?
A: To be honest, I didn't know what to expect of it in general. I was in Romania in 1985.
Q: You were there at some interesting times.
A: It's interesting because on the surface everything look great, everyone was always watching over their shoulders and it was like a tea-kettle about to boil over. Without any release the steam couldn't get out until he [Ceausescu] was killed.
Q: How did you end up in Romania in 85?
A: I was with the Actors' Theater of Louisville, which is one of the best regional theaters in the US, because they honour new playwrights and they honour new plays, they mostly do new plays. And every summer the USIA (US Information Agency) uses them basically as propaganda to highlight American theater. And any city in the world can buy this exhibition, and within this exhibition they represent the New York theater, the Broadway theater and the other thing that is quintessentially American, which is the regional theater. Within that whole exhibition there's a little tent where people come in throughout the day with headsets, watch a play and simultaneously translate it. I was one of the actors that summer.
So a CIA guy came and briefed us all, very seriously about what to expect in Romania, about what we could do and what we couldn't do. You can't take drugs, you can't take pornography, you cannot converse one on one with a Romanian anywhere alone, it would have to be in public. And he said at the end of the briefing, he said "The only country in the world that is worse than Romania right now is Bulgaria."
Q: Harsh. So how was it to be an American in Romania at the time?
A: It was an amazing summer. I was 25 years old, I was very very young and met all these people, like a young man I met, who was very very young, who had written this incredible orchestral symphony. We stayed in Bucharest for two nights, but then we went up in Transilvania in this beautiful small little town of Cluj where the exhibition was. And his piece was commissioned by the Romanian National Orchestra and was playing in Cluj and I went to see it. It was this amazing symphony of people crying out for freedom.
Everything as long as it was cloaked in a metaphor was okay. It was just an amazing outpouring of crying out for something different in their lives and I loved it so much and was moved by it so much that I tracked down the guy who wrote it, and I invited him to see the play I was in. We had lunch and he was always looking over his shoulder. And he said to me in a whisper "Don't you see, don't you see that communism doesn't work?" He was telling an American that, and I'm thinking "Well, of course I know communism doesn't work, I grew up with people telling me so, communists were our enemies for years."
Q: You said the kettle was about to boil over?
A: The first night I was in Bucharest we went to see a production of the Romanian National Theater, it was One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. And we were sitting in the first row of the balcony and Chaushesku was sitting right next to me. I think there was a bodyguard between us or something, but he was pretty close. When the main character pulled that sink out of the wall and threw it through the window so they all can escape, in the movie it's a beautiful climax, it's like "Yeah, we're free, we're gonna run," and they don't know what to do with their freedom. They're like "shit, we broke out now what do we do, we're all crazy."
In the play he pulls it, pulls it, pulls it, throws it through the window and the audience just started this slow monotonous clap for about, I swear to God for about five minutes. In America, you see this in the movies, but we don't clap like that, we all clap in different rhythms. But there everybody clapped as one in this deep thump thump thump rhythm. And I looked over and I saw a little bit of sweat just coming down the side of Ceausescu's face. And down in the isles there were like these pimply faced teenage soldiers carrying this AK-47s like looking around saying "What do we do, boss, what do we do?"
Q: Do we shoot?
A: Do we shoot, do we do something else... you could feel that it was starting to brew four years before he was actually killed. One of my favourite movies as a kid was Doctor Zhivago and the idea of this love story in the midst of this revolution that was about to happen. It was the same kind of feeling as when I was in Romania.
Q: Is that why you had doubts about Bulgaria?
A: When I knew I was coming to Bulgaria I said to myself "I've been there, I know what it's like, I'm expecting repression, I'm expecting the same thing maybe that happened in Russia where I shot a film in Moscow in 1996-97". The same thing that I'd heard happen in Romania, which is suddenly this country is free and kind of like the inmates of that insane asylum, they get free and they don't know what to do with this freedom. So the mafia gets big, corruption gets big, people are still unhappy, they actually wish that they had what they used to have, which was nothing. They didn't have freedom, but they had order. I remember a cab driver in New York, this was when Gorbatchov was first coming into power. I said "Why doesn't Russia have a revolution, why don't they revolt against what they have?" and the Russian cab driver said: "Because in Russia, we have a loaf of bread on our table, and we'd rather have that bread than nothing at all."
And now all of a sudden, you have everything, not just the loaf of bread but a car, you can do anything. But how are you gonna get there, you need money. Money, money, money, money, money. So all these memories of Romania and Russia, I was thinking I would find here in Bulgaria.
Q: What did you find?
A: It's not that way at all. It feels very European, it feels like people are hopeful, young people especially don't seem to care about that shit in the past, they want to learn and they want to get a job and want to do well. They are like "yes, I wanna do well, but I'm not gonna sell my soul to the devil to do it." That's my impression of people I've met, that they care. The city is growing and changing.
Q: That's a bit of a problem.
A: Yeah, every year you get more and more people and you think where are we gonna put all these cars, and how are we gonna drive in the streets. That is, really, a problem, or so it seems. But everything else I think looks like in any other country in Europe, it's great. And the people are so friendly and open, I'll be driving around and I'd think I'm home. This is home, people are the same everywhere. And then all of a sudden I'd be like "Wow, I'm in Bulgaria." I'll realize that I'm in this foreign country. It's been an amazing experience, really, it has.
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Photo by Yuliana Nikolova (Sofia Photo Agency)
