Interview – David Alpay of “The Lottery”

Imagine a world, not too far from ours, where women have mysteriously stopped giving birth. The topic is sure to hit home for some; for others, it seems highly unbelievable.

I was lucky enough to be able to sit down with David Alpay (The Tudors, The Vampire Diaries), one of the stars of Lifetime’s upcoming TV series, The Lottery, and picked his brain a bit on the show and some of his geeky obsessions.

GEEKPR0N: How did you get into acting?

DAVID: Right here at UofT, just around the corner. I was in first year at UofT, someone wrote a one act play and there was a one act play festival and I thought it would be fun and completely different from what I was studying too. I thought it would be a nice exercise for the other part of my brain and get outside and meet people. We did this play and then I did another play, all at Hart House; after my second year at UofT, I auditioned for this movie that was being filmed in Toronto and directed by Atom Egoyan (Ararat), I did well. After that, I went back to school and finished my degree and just kind of threw myself into it head on.

GP: Can you briefly tell me a bit about what the show is about?

D: The Lottery is set in this dystopian future but it’s not a future unrecognizable from anything we would consider normal now with the exception, we don’t know why, women have stopped bearing children. It could be the men too, but we don’t know. What’s interesting is that for 6 years, no child has been born on earth and everyone’s frantically trying to solve this problem. They fertilize 100 eggs, so they’ve got 100 viable embryos, and it’s a huge breakthrough. Then it becomes a question of who owns these embryos? Is it the people who donated the eggs and sperm to begin with, the government, the state or is it the lab? Who’s going to house these embryos? Who’s going to bring them to term? That becomes the lottery of the title, it’s a surrogate lottery. They decide, in a gesture of good faith, that they’re going to open this up and make a transparent effort to get women involved and the country [US] involved to see who’s going to carry those eggs to term.

GP: Tell us about the character you play.

D: I play James Lynch, a scientist — an embryologist. He’s an interesting character. On the one hand, our main protagonist Alison Lennon played by Marley Shelton, they’re colleagues, they work together in this lab, they’ve had an affair in the past, they’ve had a personal relationship that kind of bleeds into and forms their professional dynamic. At first glance, he appears to be a company man. He’ll just do whatever he needs to do to stay under the radar and not get fired. But this changes over time; he sees things, he sees behind the curtain and he sees what’s going on and it changes his attitude towards the higher ups. And I think they bond in a very deep way, him and Allison on this journey they’re on.

GP: How did you get involved in this project?

D: Well I saw the script for the pilot back in October, I was working on a movie in Romania. I said, “Okay, I gotta audition for this thing.” But I couldn’t get back to Los Angeles, it was too tight with the filming schedule that we had in Europe. So I put myself on tape for it and they had me come to LA two weeks later and I met up with the director and producers and then I was doing publicity for another show I was on in London and I made my way over to Montenegro and I got the call, “Okay they want to work with you. Fly back to Vancouver tomorrow.” Flew to Vancouver, shot the pilot and we just did some reshoots in Montreal and we’ve been going ever since, so it’s been non stop that we’ve been working on this show.

The amazing thing is, it’s only a ten-episode series. It’s gonna be 10 episodes, we want to tell the first season in 10, we don’t want to do 22, 23 episodes cause people lose the thread, they don’t know where they are anymore and you spend half your show recapping what happened in the past few episodes. It’s 10 episodes, it’s concentrated, it’s a burst of energy. We’re filming episode 6 right now; by the time episode 7 airs, we’ll have finished shooting the show, so it’s very close to the bone. We’re shooting very quickly.

GP: What drew you to the role?

D: What I love about the role and what I love about the show is that it’s not so inconceivable that these things might happen one day. I love that it’s science fiction but it’s very digestible, very understandable, very talkable science fiction. We can talk about these issues because it’s affecting people that we know right now. Maybe not on a global scale, like everyone is infertile, but it’s happening in our neighbourhoods and communities and our families. It’s cool to be able to discuss these ideas with that kind of sci-fi, it’s safe and we can talk about it like it’s a faraway distant thing but it’s familiar too, it’s a familiar world. I like that about this show, it doesn’t use science as a prop. It’s a character on this show as much as the human characters or as much as the spectre and paranoia that persists throughout the storyline.

GP: And you originally went to school for science. Is that another thing that drew you to the show?

D: Yeah, I liked that science was being used in an intelligent way and not just as a funky prop that doesn’t make sense. I don’t know what it is but I can’t get behind zombie stories, movies or TV shows. It makes no sense to me. Then they try to make it sciencey and say “It’s a virus.” For me, this is a show that circumvents that and uses science to its greatest effect and when we talk about it, it’s the real stuff that we talk about. We have great writers on the show, great science consultants on the show. It just makes it more believable and it makes it more realistic and more plausible.

GP: How does your character compare in contrast to Mark Smeaton (The Tudors) and Professor Atticus Shane (The Vampire Diaries)?

D: Mark Smeaton was a totally different guy. The way I saw him and this was the thing about The Tudors. The Tudors was set in that very specific time and place; in the mid 1500s in England, where the rules and the social norms were very rigid and proper and everyone had a certain role to play and there was a caste system, if you will. When Michael Hirst, our writer, sat me down he goes, “Here’s what I want you to know. Your character is a time traveller. He’s from the future. He doesn’t understand the rules of this 1500 society. He makes mistakes.” And that to me, said everything. I understood it like that. He was somebody who was unfamiliar with the codes and social norms. He’ll sleep with this person and that person, he’s having a good time. He thinks he spreading love and he’s a dance master and he’s a musician and he’s a bon vivant. And this gets him into trouble because he befriends the wrong people. He makes a friend that gets him into trouble and that’s his undoing and he doesn’t see it coming. He’s too naive.

Shane on The Vampire Diaries is this conniving, sociopathic; very sweet on the outside but completely possessed by this selfish agenda, which we don’t see it coming either. They save it for the very end and you realize he’s been teasing people on and spinning these stories and telling these lies the whole time in such a believable, conceivable way that nobody ever suspects him of wrongdoing or evil. And it’s not evil; ultimately he’s just trying to bring his family back from the dead. What’s wrong with that? [laughs]

And then there’s James, who is more than your average civil servant. He’s not government man, he’s not a company man, in that sense. He’s a scientist but he’s also complex and he’s a human. The way I’ve been trying to breathe life into him is just to think that he is a real person, this isn’t your stock character who works in the lab who talks science for 5 minutes then disappears the rest of the episode. I want to create something and being on the ground floor on a show like this and getting to be there from the first day, gives you a little bit more creative latitude instead of just an interpretative effect to your work. I get to be there to help create this character, who’s a little deeper, a little bit more interesting, who lives in a different kind of space than some of the other science characters that you see on TV.

GP: Without spoiling anything, what can we expect from the first season of The Lottery?

D: As the name suggests, there’s a surrogate lottery that takes place. So all of these girls are vying for this privilege and the honour of being a surrogate mom to these 100 embryos. Who gets picked? Why do they get picked? There’s a lot of this talk about what makes for a good mother: what qualities are we looking for? Some people might find it offensive, some people might find it encouraging, I don’t know. I think people are going to be drawn to this show to talk about the science issues that we discuss and all the political stuff, civics stuff. I think that’s what people can look forward to. Something that’s going to engage them and bring them in every week to watch the next episode.

GP: As an actor, what would your dream role be?

D: I don’t want to sound hokey but this is pretty close. What I love about television right now is that we’re doing stuff on TV that we’re not doing in movies. We’re telling these stories over 10 episodes, 420 minutes of TV for the first season. That’s a lot of room to tell a story slowly and to show the evolution of a character and show who characters are; we can’t do that in a movie. Already television seems to be where you want to be, as an actor. To get to play a character like James, who is not cut and dry, he’s not one way or another. There is a lot of ambiguity. He’s constantly battling with what he needs to do with what he thinks is the right thing to do. He’s somebody driven by passion, he’s driven by this compelling need to get this work done that he’s working on. He’s also maybe pining for this woman [Alison] that means a lot to him, that engages him on this cerebral level and emotional level. It’s great, it’s a character with a lot of inner struggle and complexity, and I love that. I think I’m exactly where I want to be right now.

GP: At Geekpr0n, we love to embrace our inner geek. What’s your geekiest obsession?

D: Back to the Future, I guess. And math.

I know it’s kind of weird. My apartment in Montreal, the kitchen table is covered in little math notes. People meditate, people do yoga, for me it’s solving equations and I was relearning how to do combinatorial analysis. I just love running numbers and doing things like that. I also do this trick where I can figure out the day of the week you were born based on your birthday.** There’s something really soothing about throwing numbers around in your head. I was never brilliant in math but it’s like a fun, very rational, very correct exercise. There is no grey area. In math it’s just a number, it’s very objective and it’s cool. Especially when your bread and butter is very subjective place, very amorphic.

**Note: David guessed Saturday for my birthday (November 12th, 1991) and I thought he was right (I was thinking of someone else’s birthday close to mine [??]) but it’s actually a Tuesday! Sorry David!

We had a bit of fun before the interview where I gave him a quick lightning round game of This or That.

HARRY POTTER OR LORD OF THE RINGS

Harry Potter

BATMAN OR SUPERMAN

Batman

COMEDY OR HORROR

Comedy

VIDEO GAMES OR BOARD GAMES

Board games. Favorite is Monopoly!

STAR WARS OR STAR TREK

Star Trek…but The Next Generation only!

GAME OF THRONES OR WALKING DEAD

Game of Thrones

When asked who is favorite Game of Thrones characters were:

I like Arya [Stark] right now. Who else do I really like? Hodor. The man has so little to say, but you know what? He means it when he says it and I can respect that.

His favorite House:

I like the Starks, obviously. I feel bad for [Theon] Greyjoy. That’s just horrible.

I’ve only seen up to episode 9 of season 4, I don’t want to watch it cause then I have to wait another year. [GP: I’m not going to spoil it] Cause not a lot happens in the last episode, it’s usually the second last episode where things happen.

The Lottery is written by Timothy J. Sexton (Children of Men) and stars Marley Shelton, David Alpay, Michael Graziadei, Athena Karkanis, Yul Vasquez, Shelley Conn and Martin Donovan.

Catch The Lottery when it premieres July 20th at 10pm on Lifetime Canada.