JONNY LEE MILLER TIMES ELI STONE INTERVIEW


By George! It’s Jonny Lee Good in Eli Stone
October 4, 2008

George Michael is a celestial herald who sends messages of spiritual salvation via his songs. No, it’s not what the former Wham! star said to the police officer who arrested him in a public toilet earlier this month for possessing Class A and C drugs. It’s the premise of Eli Stone, a new American TV series starring the British actor Jonny Lee Miller as a San Francisco lawyer who is visited by said herald, played, in a splendid casting coup, by the wayward Michael himself.

Eli Stone is the archetype of strutting corporate hubris, a shark in Armani with a hot fiancée (Natasha Henstridge of Species), a vertiginous apartment and a handsomely remunerated position at Wethersby, Posner and Klein, a law firm that you won’t have heard of “unless you own a huge company that’s screwed over a little guy”.

Then he finds George Michael performing Faith on his coffee table. Nobody else can see or hear him, of course, but the experience anoints Eli as a modern-day prophet and triggers a journey of philanthropic self-discovery that includes nods to Buddhism, Judaism and Christianity, a defection to the side of the “little guy” in one of his firm’s cases, and a pilgrimage to the Himalayas to scatter the ashes of his disgraced father.

If that sounds a little hokey, then it is. But the wholesomeness is leavened by smart banter and Ally McBeal-style fantastical interludes, as the corporate machine (boo!) does its best to reclaim Eli at every opportunity. Plus, it has George Michael in it, performing a string of songs from what Miller describes with a crooked smile as “his canon”.

Immaculate yet boyish in Eli’s suit and tie, Miller is sitting at the head of Wethersby, Posner and Klein’s vast boardroom table during a break in shooting at the Disney studios in Burbank, California. Next door is a full-scale courtroom and an apothecary shop belonging to Eli’s Chinese mentor. In here it’s a gleaming palace of chrome, glass and marble – just like a working office, except that the marble is actually polystyrene, the phones don’t work and the skyline is printed on to an awning.

Michael, Miller thinks, was “nervous about coming out of his comfort zone, but he turned out to be really good”. Miller had his own concerns about returning to “the cutthroat world of US TV”. His last series, Smith, was cancelled after seven episodes. “It’s not like at home when you make a whole series and it goes out. Here you are usually only a few weeks ahead. They’re not going to waste all that money if they’re going to pull something off the air.”

No such worries thus far for Eli Stone, which is midway through a second season featuring guest appearances by Sigourney Weaver and Katie Holmes. If it continues to pull in the viewers, Miller could be committed to staying in California for several years. He shrugs: “I pretty much had one foot here anyway [he lived in Los Angeles in the 1990s during his marriage to Angelina Jolie], and I wasn’t working as much as I’d have liked back home.”

Hitherto Miller has mainly been a film actor, but, judging by the nonchalant takes he will deliver in an office scene later today, the transition has been a smooth one. Both on screen and off, his understated magnetism – what his co-star Sam Jaeger calls his “strange charisma” – is palpable. The American accent is impressive, thanks in part to a sharp-eared dialect coach who barks at him through his earpiece. “Suddenly you have a voice asking you to watch your o’s or your r’s.” He has also had to adjust to the “huge pace” of television production: “It’s 14-hour days, but you get used to it, and it’s not like it’s one take and then move on . . . sometimes you get two!”

The schedule is tough, but the show’s frequent flights of fancy have kept him going: “The great thing is you’re not stuck in an office. We did a huge number on the Paramount back-lot with about 50 dancers and 200 extras, and another time we ended up on a Second World War battlefield. Which breaks it up quite nicely.”

Indeed, the series was conceived as an amalgamation of styles. The creators Marc Guggenheim (Law & Order) and Greg Berlanti (Dirty Sexy Money) had been planning to write a law series together, but Berlanti was also working on a project about a prophet, and they decided to combine the two. “It actually made a lot of sense,” Guggenheim says. “The word ‘prophet’ comes from the ancient Greek word for a spokesperson, which is exactly what a lawyer is. One of these days we’ll figure out how to get that into the show!”

Its influences include LA Law, The Singing Detective and Spider-Man, but Eli Stone’s most distinctive trait is its willingness to tackle spirituality without toeing the Bible Belt line. “Over the past eight years a lot of Americans have been made to feel that unless you’re a conservative Christian you’re not religious,” Guggenheim says. “Greg and I wanted to return the discussion of spirituality to the masses.”

So where did George Michael come in? “We wanted Eli to have a muse from his childhood, someone who’s synonymous with the Eighties but not really exposed right now.” The use of “exposed” is unfortunate, and it must be stressed that this interview took place two weeks before Michael’s recent arrest. “In England, George Michael has probably never left the spotlight, but in America he’s been very low-profile for the past 20 years.” Finally, Guggenheim adds, “George’s music speaks to the themes of the show. He writes about love and faith and dreams and hopes, so it fits perfectly.”

And how does he link in with the spiritual theme? “Well, if you look at the Bible, God makes his presence known in big, dramatic ways: a burning bush, sending an angel. And it struck us that George Michael would make a pretty good angel.”

The Metropolitan Police might disagree.

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