Jeffrey Donovan Fans

‘Burn Notice’s’ spy guy: A talk with Jeffrey Donovan

Interview by Maureen Ryan for the Chicago Tribune

Below is an interview with “Burn Notice” star Jeffrey Donovan, who plays ex-spy Michael Westen on the USA Network series, which returns July 10.

Below, Donovan talks about the quirks of his witty character, Michael’s new handler, Carla (Tricia Helfer), his fellow burned spy Victor (Michael Shanks) and his manipulative mother (Sharon Gless). Donovan also talks about why he thinks “Burn Notice” will be overlooked at awards time and why he thinks his show is every bit as good as “Mad Men.”

Here’s an edited version of the interview. And by the way, here’s a recent interview with “Burn Notice” creator Matt Nix.

MR: Michael is someone who could go off and sell his skills and do something else to make money. Why is it so important for him to figure this out?

JD: I think Michael Westen is a character with incredible amounts of integrity and honor in a very dishonorable world. I think that’s why he fights so hard to find out why he was burned because of the injustice of it all. He served his country perfectly and did everything that was asked of him. Trying to get back into that world is not necessarily [about] wanting to work for a secret agency again, but more to clear his name because that’s all he has.

MR: I was talking to Matt Nix about this, and he was saying that there are huge sacrifices that people in this field make, the people who really do this. All Michael really gets out of it is his honor.

JD: That’s pretty big to him. There’s not much out there that people are fighting for that leaves them with nothing but honor. That’s not something that [most] people are going after. But with this character, that’s a big thing for him. Michael left his home and enlisted in the Army and then went on to work in the CIA. He sought this lifestyle out.

MR: Was it because he is patriotic, or just wanted to be part of something bigger than himself?

JD: There’s either fortune or the flag, one or the other, and I think Michael is interested in the flag. With his upbringing, with his father never around, I think he was looking for that structure and that sense of duty. I’m sure that any type of character who gets involved in this type of work has to make grey-area decision, but I think what’s interesting about the show, is that it puts a character who lives in a grey world in a very black-and-white job of helping someone or not helping them. I think that’s kind of his dilemma.

MR: But he’s always helping the weaker party, the person who’s had some wrong done to them. He’s not helping a drug dealer get back his kilos of cocaine.

JD: He’s helping the person who is experiencing an injustice. Which is what he is, [he’s endured] the injustice of being burned and having served his country fairly and constantly.

MR: Matt Nix and I talked about the idea that someone who may be good at the spy profession – those skills may actually may make regular life harder for them. We see again and again with Michael that his family background makes him a good spy but it also stands in the way of him being …

JD: …A full human being. Oh yeah. I’m very aware of that. Ultimately his family, his mom, Fiona, Sam and his brother Nate, are the only vestiges of humanity that are left in his memory. When he left home, he divorced not only his family but feelings attached to family. Feelings out in the field will get you hurt. As far as trust, you can trust only so much when you’re in the spy business.

I found a fascinating thing in my research, and it’s really unbelievable if you think about it…

Spies can’t have friends who approach them. So of all the people you’ve met in the last 20 years, you couldn’t be friends with any of the ones who introduced themselves to you. Can you imagine that?

MR: No way. That’s very weird. In a way, does he keep his family around and go to visit his mom because he wants to be a human being? He wants to have those bonds, he doesn’t want to be without any ties – you know, the perfect spy.

Donovan2 JD: I would agree with that. First of all, what is the perfect spy? Is that someone who gets the job done with a disconnect or is it someone who can live a life, go do the job, [be] disconnected, and then come back? What’s interesting about Michael, the exploration is, this is about a guy who isn’t a spy any more.

That’s something that Matt and I are constantly trying to explore – what does a guy who is so highly trained in espionage do when that world no longer employs him? While he’s trying to get his honor back and that classification back, he has nothing to do but to explore himself. And that’s what’s being revealed with every case – why should I help this person? What comes with that is our own baggage.

It’s Michael’s journey to figure out whether he’s going to get back into that [espionage] world. Let’s face it, being down on South Beach, helping an old lady who’s been conned is not the espionage world that he used to have.

MR: Is that his goal, to get back into that world, or is it to stay in Miami?

JD: I don’t think he wants to stay in Miami [laughs]. You know, you go where you’re comfortable and life isn’t comfortable in Miami with the family. He was always comfortable on a job because he could disappear and no one knew who he was. He wants his name restored so he can disappear.

MR: So he wants to leave and be that guy again.

JD: I think so, but I don’t know if he’ll succeed at it. And whether that’s good for him or not is another decision. That’s the conflict that goes on in this season. He has to face the fact that he has a past that he ran away from. Unless he confronts that, it is just going to be a source of pain. That’s why the therapy has started with his mother. And the stakes now have to get higher with Carla.

MR: So the situation with Carla, is that just giving him a migraine, the fact that she’s on the scene now?

JD: My take on the Carla situation is this: What you and I consider normal situations are abnormal to him. And conversely, what’s normal to him is abnormal to us. He’s usually being manipulated, he’s usually being followed, he’s usually being shot at. Those situations for him are a normal day at the office.

The frustration is not that these things are happening again. The frustration is that I have to take on a life of exploration with my family, and these people who need my help and who can’t go to anyone else are coming to me. That’s frustrating for him – having to do these jobs. He doesn’t mind helping people, because that’s what he was doing before, he was helping his country. His frustration comes out of the things we think of as normal.

Like, going to his mom’s and helping her take out the trash, that is like a secret operative mission that he does not want to take. If someone said build a sniper rifle out of a toaster and a two-by-four, he would be like, “Yes!”

MR: So going to therapy with his mom is like you or I going to a really dangerous country to do a mission.

JD: Yes, except that [therapy] is at least on a playing field where people are trying to extract information. He understands that. His mom, whom he considers one of the great manipulators of all time – that’s an adversary. He does care for and love her though so he’s not going to try to brainwash her in front of the therapist. [laughs]

MR: But after one difficult session, it does seem like he gets a kernel of real truth out of her.

JD: Well, [at the session, Michael] knew the reaction she was going to have before she did. That’s the bane of Michael’s existence, that he knows human behavior better than people know their own behavior. When he presents something to someone, he knows the reaction and he has to depend on knowing the reaction so he can win, so he can solve his problem or someone else’s problem.

MR: She does try, as far as she can, to be truthful with him, at least some of the time.

JD: Absolutely that’s why he constantly forgives her. He sees her heart.

MR: With Michael’s dad, is that something where you really want to know every part of that backstory, is it important for you to know that when you’re thinking about how to approach the character?

JD: I would say, when you take the El, and you’re sitting there, do you think about how your dad raised you and how that affects how you sit on the train? I don’t get into that kind of stuff because I don’t think it’s useful – it’s more informative for the audience. So if there’s backstory being presented to you by me or someone else, it’s more so the audience can go, “Oh, that’s why he’s acting that way.” I don’t necessarily go into this [acting] thing of, “Oh, the dad must have been like this, so Michael must be like that.” It’s not a sense memory place, but a practical [thing of], “What job is ahead of me that I need to get accomplished?”

MR: But his past with his father seems to be a touchstone of everything he became. It’s a big part of the reason he’s good at his job

JD: Yeah, you are a product of your upbringing and whether you parlay that upbringing into something positive is really up to your own will. That’s true of everyone of individual ability.

MR: So Michael will meet another burned spy, Victor, this season. Matt said he’s pretty different from Michael?

JD: Yes [laughs]. Victor is what Michael would be if Michael had rabies.

MR: How does Michael react to having this mysterious handler, Carla, that he can’t get a read on?

JD: He’s always going to have a handler no matter what organization he works for. But that it’s Carla and that she’s threatening my family, that’s a little higher stakes than threatening to shut me out of my 401(k). So that I take personally. Michael is going to – and I haven’t seen anything [in the scripts along these lines] but I’m sure, he will exact the utmost revenge on her if he ever gets the chance.

MR: Matt talked about how so much of Michael’s job is about different forms of seduction? Would he ever go that route with Carla, maybe even in a literal sense?

JD: I agree with Matt, every tack [Michael takes] is a type of seduction, but I’d take away any connotation of implied sexual intention. Because you can seduce in many ways.

The thing with Carla is, she is incredibly bright, she wouldn’t be in the position she’s in if she wasn’t. So when Michael has an adversary like that, and Mike knows the reaction before he asks a question, he has to ask five questions in a row to lead that person down a road to a response which they think is the response Michael wanted, so they’re giving it to him knowing it’s not information that’s not valuable. But what they don’t realize is that Michael didn’t want the answer, he wanted to see the defenses that person used for next time.

MR: It is really interesting how this show is really about solving a problem. You know who the bad guy is in the first act. It’s more, how do we fix the situation for the client?

JD: How many TV shows have you seen where you meet the client, or the person who needs help, and the person gets shot? In our show, we’ve done 17 episodes and I think 2 people have been shot, as the solution to get out of a problem.

That’s why, I just read the cover [piece of] the New York Times Magazine about Matt Weiner and [why] “Mad Men” is the best show on television. People need to wise up about how brilliant Matt Nix is and how hard it is to write “Burn Notice,” [create] its A and B [stories] and intertwine them, and no one gets killed. It’s unbelievably difficult and you won’t get a bigger fan than me.

MR: And no one is really doing this particular combination of dark and light.

JD: That’s why I said to Matt and the other actors, that’s why I think we’re going to be overlooked in the awards realm — not because we don’t deserve it, but because no one knows how to categorize us. All we can do is take pleasure in the fact that the work that we’re doing isn’t like anything else out there. And as long as 5 million people are tuning in every week at a cable station at 10 – that’s pretty amazing.

MR: I think the problem is when the end result, when the show itself, looks too easy, if you will. There are some shows where it’s like, “Yeah, that looks hard to do.” Other shows don’t get the attention, maybe, because what they’re doing actually looks easy but it’s not.

JD: It’s one of the most difficult jobs I’ve ever had. I know this because when guest stars come on the show, we rehearse the scene we rehearse it and rehearse it and they’re not getting it. They go, “It looks so much easier on the show!” And that’s a compliment.

And I know how hard it is for the writers write this thing and then have to deal with me! [laughs] It is impossible because I have to be Michael Westen and because you’re a fan of the show, you know what that means to me. It’s a big burden to my shoulders, to flesh him out so you believe what he’s doing.

That is the number one goal, you have to believe that this character can do this stuff. How many shows do you watch where you go, “Oh, I don’t really believe this, I just watch it because it’s fun to watch.” Michael doesn’t have superpowers, bullets don’t bounce off him, he can’t use any police stuff and he can’t call a lawyer or a judge.

MR: When you do have script concerns or issues, what sort of stuff is that? What do you typically bring up?

JD: This is a mantra that every writer hears from me: No matter what you wrote, no matter what the director set up — when the actors are actually there and it’s a warehouse and there’s a staircase there, but it was written for an alleyway with a big hole in the ground, what would we really do? So you adapt on the fly. I try to put myself in Michael’s shoes – what are the resources that are available to me? There’s a staircase over there, there’s a garbage can over there, there’s water coming out of there and an electrical outlet, so I can use electricity as a weapon. If this guy was as good as Michael Westen is, how would he think it through? The stakes are always, “He could die.”

Jeffreybruce2 MR: What does Bruce Campbell [who plays Michael’s friend and colleague Sam Axe] bring to your scenes together?

JD: Bruce brings an incredibly energy and an incredible sense of joy to the set every time he works. I couldn’t ask for a better co-star. Every day he asks me, how am I doing, do I need anything? He’s been a true joy. And that energy you see and that loyalty [from Sam to Michael], it’s like that off-screen as well.

MR: What’s the hardest thing about this job?

JD: It’s a combination of everything. I work 14 hours a day, five days a week, I’m in almost every scene. As much as they’ll let me I do my own stunts and I do all my own fighting. And then I have to make an atomic bomb out of a toaster.

Then in between scenes I go to the soundstage and go into a booth and record the voiceovers for the episode. That’s just on the clock – off the clock, I have to stay healthy and in shape. Three months prior to the show, I worked out six days a week with a trainer, doing weight training and mixed martial arts and Brazilian jujitsu. Now, because of the schedule I can only hit the gym maybe twice a week. Some mornings I get up at 5 a.m., work out for an hour, go to work at 6 a.m. and come home at 9 p.m.

MR: So what do you do in your free time?

JD: [laughs] As you can probably guess, I sleep.

MR: What’s the most fun about it?

JD: The humor. I love bringing the humor and that’s why I got the job. Matt told me, “You’re the only guy who brought humor to a dire situation.” And that’s our goal, every episode — in the middle of this high-stakes espionage spy-world stuff, this James Bond, Jason Bourne stuff, I can be funny, but you still can believe I’m pulling this job off.

We don’t want to second-guess our audience. We go from a premise of our audience and our fans [being] as smart or smarter than we are — we don’t have to talk down to them, they can catch up. We believe the audience is out there for a really smart television show that doesn’t dumb down because [people] want some Cro-Magnon to get it. Our audience is smart and we just want to stay one step ahead of them.