Falling Skies Interview with Colin Cunningham: Don’t Worry, Be Colin

Colin Cunningham is the happiest guy in the world. It’s the giant, boisterous voice that hits you first. Like some strange vocalized adaptation of the Twentieth Century Fox fanfare that overwhelms you with its epic volume of pomp and circumstance. Add to that the joyful exuberance of a twelve-year-old boy discovering girls for the first time and you have a pretty assured image of Colin Cunningham. This guy could get excited about a Ke$ha concert (and no, I’m not Slander-beeking his name; he’s the real McCoy). All things considered, Cunningham has plenty to get jazzed about: his robust career includes stints in comedy, work with Arnold Schwarzenegger (we didn’t touch on if he was groped by the Governator, but I’m gonna go out on a limb and say “no”…), short film director, and his most recent endeavor, the epic, aliens-just-rocked-the-shit-out-of-our-way-of-life Dreamworks extravaganza Falling Skies. I sat down to talk with Colin about aliens, surviving in Hollywood, and finding soul in cool-ass explosions.

A southern California native, Cunningham was late to take the dramatic stage, but when the bug bit, it bit hard. “I wasn’t much of a student in school,” he admits. “It wasn’t until I was about twenty that a buddy from Los Angeles Valley Community College dared me to audition.” Cunningham put his money where his mouth was and landed a role and the rest, as they say, is Easy Cheese. “It’s something you can never master because it’s constantly changing. No day is the same as the one before it and I love it.” Cunningham’s most visible roles have been in genre pictures like The Sixth Day and Elektra, but he’s an equal opportunity film lover. “I’ve been blessed to be able to do so many types of genres. I like to just put on the rubber noses and wigs and hats. It’s about not being me.” Digging deeper into the minutiae of acting method and process, Cunningham chuckles recalling a story in which prickly peer Mickey Rourke once called the proximity of a camera while shooting “an invasion.” “It struck a chord with me,” he recounts. “It still does.”

So how, then, does he contend with the invasion of his newest project, both of the docile camera equipment and apocalypse-inducing alien kind? “Holy Crap, this is NOT CSI: Miami!” Cunningham exclaims, still in awe. “This is nothing remotely close to anything we [actors] have ever worked on before.” He paints a picture of an obliterated Toronto landscape (doubling for the east coast of America) where, in the remains of a Walmart parking lot (Yes, they STILL exist. Sigh), cars and semis are overturned, burning red with fire. Military personnel reinforce the resistance, protecting hundreds of refugee civilians huddling against oil drums for warmth outside of a two-mile stretch of highway that has been totally shut down and wrecked. It’s a scene that would be at home on any multiplex screen, but instead it is conveniently showing up on your TV.

Falling Skies hopes to pull back the curtain of human nature and, when push comes to shove, find out the real lengths people will go to in order to outlast the alien threat. It’s a thought that Cunningham savors. “It’s basically every man for himself, so the remaining civilians have banded together with the military to try and survive,” he says. Survival is a skill that needs to be razor-sharp in this business we call show and no one knows this better than Cunningham. When a filmed presentation he directed for network TV didn’t make it to pilot, he sent it out to festivals around the world. Quickly, Centigrade started to snatch up awards and found itself on the short list for an Academy Award nomination its year of release. Later, it found further success on iTunes, charting higher than any other short film at that time. Survival, it seems, is in Cunningham’s blood.

Thankfully the spectacle of Falling Skies is not the only thing in the show’s bag of tricks. Like The Walking Dead before it and even Mad Men, the beating heart of this series is the characters. “These other movies and shows lose their soul [in CG], but the great thing about working with Spielberg is that it is always about the people.” It’s this reason that Cunningham and the rest of the Falling Skies troupe were able to overlook the arduous gestation process of the series and realize how special the project was going to be (it was a full year between shooting the pilot and starting the series and another full year since wrapping that it is finally airing). Cunningham’s niche in the ensemble is the character of John Pope, one of the few remaining human survivors after an alien holocaust has wiped Earth clean of the human race. Though he is the leader of a motorcycle gang, don’t let that fool you. There isn’t a whiff of Sons of Anarchy to be seen in the show. “He’s a very intelligent guy. He has an appreciation for Tom Mason (Noah Wyle) and they reach an understanding over the course of the show,” Cunningham explains. “He’s an opportunist, but he does end up helping.”

Though the series has yet to air, the writing team is about to pounce on storylines and episode scripts for season two which is, at the very least, positive forward momentum for the show. “You have to take it one day at a time, but you just cross your fingers and remain grateful for what you have, which is how I live my life,” Cunningham says. Take note, thespians: you need not mask insecurity by gunning for that number one spot. Just go with it. Or, at the very least give yourself a piece of Colin Cunningham’s perspective: “A bad day on set is better than my best day working!”

And that’s coming from a guy who has aliens trying to make him explode on a daily basis.

Don’t miss Colin Cunningham in Falling Skies, Sundays at 9 p.m. EST on TNT.

For more articles by Keith Kuramoto, click here.

Images of Colin Cunningham courtesy of Nathaniel Taylor Photography

Stills from Falling Skies courtesy of Dreamworks/TNT/IMDbPro