Getting An Eye On Scott Porter

Cyclops, heartbreaker, music maker. He's all of that.

The star of Friday Night Lights, Caprica and the new X-Men anime on G4 talks Cyclops, Pop! music videos and coaching Taylor Kitsch into Gambit's boots. The self-professed nerd backs up his claims with some geek-cred of his own.

GeekChicDaily: You've had a lot of variety in your roles. What's your approach to choosing characters to play?

Scott Porter: Hollywood likes to try and pigeonhole you and I was in such weird dramatic roles the last few years, I didn't want to keep going back to that well. Jason Street was a hero, I played a terrorist on Caprica for a year, Blake was completely soulless and now I'm back to being the good guy.

GCD: You lived in Japan for a while, right?

SP: I got an offer to go to Tokyo and beatbox and sing & dance at Tokyo Disneyland. I could have just stayed home and stayed safe. I said, I don't want to do that. I want to go and take a chance. I went to Japan and lived in Tokyo for a year. It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life. Probably one of the most important decisions I've made as a performer because when I came back, someone had seen me over in Tokyo who was putting a show up in New York, and called me and asked me to fly up. That began my New York acting career which led into Friday Night Lights.

GCD: What made you want to work on Friday Night Lights?

SP: It's not about working for work's sake. It's more about telling a good story no matter where it takes place and where you have to move. No matter what position you put yourself in. Friday Night Lights, I knew I wanted to do from the moment I read that script, and I was in New York, It was my first pilot season, it was the second pilot I had ever read, but I knew that I wanted it. I went in, just got lucky and guess I knocked it out of the park and ended up on that show.

GCD: And then came Caprica?

SP: That was something in the Battlestar Galactica universe that I wanted to be a part of. Battlestar was such an amazing show, I really wanted to be a part of that canon and be a part of that universe. I basically beat down their door and they were luckily fans of the show [Friday Night Lights]. They offered me a role and I jumped in. The Good Wife came off the tail end of that. I've been lucky.

GCD: How did you end up getting into the X-Men anime?

SP: I think there is something to staying satisfied and not getting bored with what you do. Jumping into Hart of Dixie at the end of that string of things was important to me because I wanted to get back to where I had started, and that was a little bit in the world of comedy. I'm a nerd. I want to do cool things and geek out. I wanted to do something for me. There's a saying, you do one for them and you do one for you. I did a movie, it was a big budget kind of drama, it was a smaller role with a great director. I came off of that and said, "I want to take a month and really try to do voice over stuff." I ended up with Activision doing the X-Men: Destiny video game and Jeph Loeb called me out of the blue for this X-Men anime and offered me a role. It was exactly what I wanted to do, so i kind of worked on these projects while I was shooting my other ones. It was a great relief for me. You go to work, you work on somebody else's project and then you kind of go into a studio and have ownership over a character like I did with Cyclops in the X-Men anime and it's very refreshing for you.

GCD: The first scenes of the X-Men anime are pretty traumatic for your character. Did you work up to those or did you record in order?

SP: That was my entrance. My entrance into the cartoon world was that scene. Luckily, with my film experience I have played some dramatic situations and I was able to pull from that a little bit and put it into the voicing of Cyclops in that initial scene. I was really nervous going in and in a way it broke my fever right away as opposed to keeping my nerves up for the entirety of these first couple of episodes. Trial by fire, you're in it. You've delivered the biggest scene you're going to have to deliver for the next few episodes and it's out of the way and the nervousness drained out of me. The tightness in my voice went away. It allowed me to settle into Cyclops quicker than I would have. These guys are pros. The guy that voices Wolverine, you've heard him before and Beast, you've heard him before in so many different projects and they're so fantastic. Then here's this first-timer voicing Cyclops. I just hope I stand up at the end of the day.

GCD: You have a reputation for being a big comic book guy. Did that add some weight to what you were performing?

SP: Having read the Dark Phoenix saga and having read all of these tales, even Morrison's run on the X-Men, you've seen Cyclops lose Jean a couple of times and you've seen just how fractured he becomes when these things happen to him. I had a pretty solid understanding of where he was emotionally and what he has invested, which was everything, in her. She was his rock and his ground. I've come out of this cartoon with a much stronger appreciation of Cyclops, I was never a Cyclops fan. I was always a Havok fan. I was always a fan of the hotheads and the loose cannons; more of the smart-asses like Iceman. Or the quirky, out-there characters like Nightcrawler. Those are always my favorite X-Men.

GCD: What did you think of Cyclops before the anime?

SP: Cyclops was such a boring boy scout. In a way he was a stick in the mud. Going back and rereading some of those books and his origin and just how powerful Cyclops is, he's lopped sides of mountains off with an optic blast. At the end of the day he could level entire cities unless he is in control all the time. If he ever really cut loose it would be so catastrophic. Understanding why he's so reigned in, why he's so in control, why he has to be that way, gives me a much greater respect for him. What differentiates him from Superman, who always has to be in control of himself because he's so powerful, is that Cyclops is a human. He's a human holding all of this power in and he's also trying to reign in all of these other distinct attitudes and loner sensibilities with Wolverine and people who have been persecuted their entire lives. I'm now a big Cyclops fan. I wasn't going in, coming out the other side of it I am. 

GCD: You mentioned a love of Havok; what did you think of Lucas Till as Havok in X-Men: First Class?

SP: I was so jealous of Lucas. He's a young kid, he's like 21. He's got a great voice for a 21 year-old. Watching him do Havok, I thought he was great. He was perfect. 

GCD: Did you coach Taylor Kitsch on getting the role of Gambit in X-Men Origins: Wolverine?

SP: Before he went to test, he called me and just asked me a bunch of questions about Gambit. "What's his real origin? Where did he come from?" As an actor in this new age of the internet and spoilers and people hacking in to steal scripts, It's become very difficult for an actor to go into an audition and be fully prepared, because they don't give you anything. They give you sides... For Wolverine I think they were calling Gambit Mr. Yellow. You have no idea what character they're actually talking about. So he called me, "I'm going in for my screen test for the new Wolverine movie. What character is this? Who is he? What's his background? Anything you can tell me." First of all, he looks like Gambit. They made the decision, in the movie process, to not give him a Cajun accent, which is a little weird to me. But it said it in the script, "Bit of a southern drawl, almost non existent" And that's just the direction they wanted to go with him. Why? I have no idea. But I made sure to tell Taylor, you know this guy is a thief, he and Storm are best friends, these are his stories. I told him everything I could; I was the go-to nerd on the set of Friday Night Lights. 

GCD: You played Rex Racer in Speed Racer and have now done voice over for an anime. Did your time in Tokyo lead you to want to do that type of work?

SP: I grew up in Nebraska; I was born in Omaha. My parents were in a rock 'n roll group, but I grew up loving hip-hop, kung fu and anime and all these really out-there types of interests. I think it played into allowing me to appreciate these types of films and these types of projects a little bit more than normal Americans definitely would. It puts you in this small group of people that really have that huge appreciation for this type of stuff.

I would watch Bruce Lee movies, Big Trouble in Little China, listen to vinyls of Slick Rick and LL Cool J before he hit it big and Will Smith when he was still the Fresh Prince. I also loved everything about Japan before I got to go there, which was a big impetus for why I moved my life over there for a year. I wanted to go there. I wanted to experience it.

GCD: How do you view the Speed Racer film?

SP: I personally loved Speed Racer, I think Speed Racer was ahead of it's time. I think if you release Speed Racer in 2010, instead of 2008,it does much better as far as box office numbers go, but I think also, people have gotten used to the idea of post-Avatar film world. I think the thing about Speed Racer I really got is that Japan has always been that big, over the top animated style. With Speed Racer, post-Avatar, it has a much bigger place in the world as far as theatergoers checking it out. It came a little too early. It was two years ahead. It was really well done. I think it knew exactly what it was, and that's important to me, that a project knows what it is. The Wachowskis - many people who want to slam them, but they are brilliant, they have entire worlds just in their head and they are so in command of the worlds they create. I defend that film and I will continue to defend that film. 

GCD: You have a brief but memorable scene in Music and Lyrics, how did that come about?

SP: I had just gotten back to New York from shooting the FNL pilot and my agent called me and said "They're doing a recast on a movie, I know you don't want to sing and dance anymore, but I think you should go over." Originally Colin Thompson, the character I played, was an older actor who was going to come back later in the movie, but when they started trying to shoot the music video they were realizing that he just couldn't cut it to make him look young enough. They could do it with Hugh Grant, but they couldn't do it with the other guy, so they decided to take Colin Thompson out of the rest of the movie and make sure they made the video as strong as possible. So I went in and sang some Phil Collins in an audition

GCD: And you had to audition again for Hugh after that?

SP: The next day they called me back, put me in all white. A white dress shirt, white skinny jeans and white shoes. They walked me into a room where Hugh Grant is shooting one of the dinner scenes from later in the movie. They had me sing and dance in front of a room full of people. The crew, Hugh, everybody and he stood up and just looked at me and asked, "How old are you?" At the time I was 25 and I told him. And he said, "F**k me." And walks out. I thought for sure I had lost the gig. But then he walked back in the room and said he was kidding and welcome aboard. That was it. We shot the music video in two days and they let Hugh and I just do whatever we wanted to.

GCD: Do people call you out singing, "Pop! goes my heart?"

SP: Not many people recognize me from that, because the next time they saw me I was in a wheelchair on Friday Night Lights. It's so funny from a viewers standpoint how hard it is to connect the dots when two characters are so drastically different. But it's still to this day one of my favorite things I've ever done. A lot of people haven't seen it. I like to wait a couple of weeks into a project and then just put it on.

GCD: As a huge comic book geek, why haven't we seen you in a superhero movie yet?

SP: I tested for Captain America and made the final four of that cut, I tested for the Justice League movie that fell apart with George Miller, I've made it to the final stage on two huge superhero projects and I hope someday I can break it. There's nothing else I would love to do than be a superhero on the big screen.

GCD: Is Chris Evans your arch-nemesis?

SP: He kind of is. I like to call him my fake rival, because he has no idea I exist. Sunshine, by Danny Boyle, was the first big movie I ever got a callback on and had a solid chance on, didn't get it. Captain America, clutched it out of my grasp. Now that he's doing Captain America, he can only do so much right? Maybe I'll just jump into Johnny Storm, maybe I'll take his place.

You can hear Scott as the voice of Scott "Cyclops" Summers on X-Men, which premieres tomorrow night on G4 at 11pm.

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