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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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