Prison Break Archives

Wentworth Miller on his sudden fame: "It has been an adjustment.  Everywhere I go, I run into someone who’s a fan of the show. And that’s a good thing. You want people to love your work because you want to stay employed. At the same time, I’m a very private person. I try to lead a very low-key life. And sometimes you just want to go to Chili’s and have a margarita and some chicken fajitas and not have the experience wind up on a Web site somewhere."

On spending a week in swim camp at the University of Texas: "Of course I only saw the inside of a pool, so I didn’t really get to explore what Austin had to offer. I’m really looking forward to having some time to check out Dallas. I’ve heard great things about the food, the culture and the JFK museum. There are a lot of things on my to-do list."

(Be careful, spoilers lurk ahead!)  Here are the first pictures fresh off the Prison Break set in Dallas via geniass!  According to TV Guide, "We’re going to get a glimpse of Bellick’s home life in the second episode, and it ain’t gonna be perty. The second episode will also mark the end of the road for a series regular." And here are the captions: (Top left) Makeup Nanette New sprays "sweat" on the brow of Wentworth Miller. (Top Right) Actors Wentworth Miller and Amaury Nolasco continue their dash to the train. (Bottom left) Wentworth Miller picks up his chair as the cast and crew sets up for the next scene.  (Bottom right) Sarah Wayne Callies gets touched up by makeup artist Megan Moore before giving an interview in her trailer.  More and bigger pictures in the gallery!

• Vomit-inducing couple Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy dance the dirty tango with each other’s tongues.  Eeewww!!!
  
• Free underwear!!  Grab your free Calvin Klein Underwear and/or free $250 Victoria’s Secret Gift Card.
• Inside scans of Jessica Simpson’s Maxim Magazine spread
• Harry Potter’s Emma Watson loves her drink!  Here is partying and downing some more beer.
• Find out how you can listen to a snippet of Britney Spears‘ new song "Rebellion"
• Tom Cruise promotes MI3 solo in Tokyo
• Nicole Kidman has a pre-wedding birthday bash… BORING!  But then she and hubby-to-be Keith Urban delivery beer and water to paparazzi camped outside her home.  How sweet of them!
• Jennifer Aniston’s bare butt scene from The Break-Up.
• Paris Hilton’s and Tori Spelling’s frozen radiance

• Wentworth Miller and the entire cast of Prison Break will throw out the first pitch, and Rosario Dawson (Rent) will be the batgirl during Reebok’s celebrity baseball game this Saturday, June 24.
• Keira Knightley tells InStyle that Johnny Depp isn’t a bad kisser and that Jack Nicholson didn’t hit on her while they sat next to each other at the Oscars. "It’s actually kind of embarrassing that he didn’t."  Awwww, shucks.
• Ex-Lost star Ian Somerhalder will headline a new marine adventure TV series as Venetian traveler Marco Polo in "Marco Polo"
• Brittany Murphy will be the first-ever voice for Tinker Bell, in a direct-to-video Disney film slated for release next year.

"Next season is chaos, man."

This is what Paul Scheuring says when I ask about Season 2 of Prison Break, which begins shooting today in Dallas.

Chaos? How so?

"We scatter these guys to the four corners of the country," he says, leaning forward, eyes widening. "They are all free. We have let guys literally out of a cage to do what they want to do. And they all have their various end-games which we established in Season 1."

We’re in an interview suite at the Banff World Television Festival, which concluded yesterday. Scheuring is wearing a blue shirt. He has short-cropped brown hair, a deep voice and intense gaze which makes him seem more like a military officer than a TV show runner.

This season concluded, recall, with Michael Scofield (Wentworth Miller) and the escaped cons sprinting through a field. Police sirens wailed. The cops were getting close. But, as Scheuring explains, breaking out of Fox River Penitentiary was the easy part.

"Comparatively, they were very safe in the prison," he says. "Now they are behind enemy lines."

Fans who were enthralled by the first season can expect to be shocked by what awaits. (Warning: if you want nothing spoiled, do not read after the jump.)

(Continued before the jump)

"The audience will be amazed," he says. "Our main characters are going to start falling by the wayside. We kind of say this in jest, but it’s true. Season 2 is like our American Idol season.

"Because we start with eight guys on the run and slowly one guy gets popped, and one guy gets popped, and one guy gets popped. Pretty soon there’s only one guy left standing."

He takes a deep breath.

"It’s going to be strange for the audience. They’re going to go, `My God, they’re all gone! They killed that person!’ And we’re really excited about that because they’ll know we’re not pulling any punches. We’re not doing anything for commercial reasons."

This year, he says, the biggest challenge was: "Would the audience swallow the whopper that we served, which was this guy had tattoos on his body to start a prison break."

The other problem, he says, was wondering if viewers (especially female) would watch a show set in "the milieu of prison." But when the pilot was shown to a test audience, women actually scored higher.

Scheuring attributes this to the show’s web of mysteries, to the emotionally resonant relationships and, most important, to the casting of Miller: "manna from the heavens."

Miller, he says, is "like catnip to women." And he got the role only after producers had seen about 200 other actors in L.A.

"None of them were right," Scheuring says. "They were all tired, boring, `actor’ guys, and not true ciphers and mysteries and enigmas that we needed for Scofield. I had never heard of Wentworth Miller. But he just walked into the room that day and I said, `We got him. We got the guy.’"

Given the show’s gritty backdrop and, at times, the brutal situations, was there anything Scheuring could not do or show this season?

"We didn’t get to say `Jesus Christ’ ever because we were censored," he says. "We could cut off toes and cut off hands and we could do various things like that. But we could never take the Lord’s name in vain because, I guess, Fox was very worried about angering the religious right."

In addition to Prison Break, Scheuring just completed a movie script about the Yucatan journals of the late actor Steve McQueen. He will also direct an indie film in March.

"If you have some success in Hollywood — if you have any kind of product that sells and connects with an audience — all of a sudden the networks and studios and everybody think, `They must have some magic.’ That’s debatable. But when people are throwing projects at you, you don’t dive out of the way."

As for Prison Break, which will be renamed this summer, Scheuring says he’s already mapping out the third season even though his initial concept was for two years.

"We have found a way, in principle, to have a reinvention in Season 3 with some of the same characters, but a very different milieu and very different tone.

"So it will go on."

[The Star]

"The word I’d use to describe Wentworth is egoless.  When you’re the star of a hit show, nominated for Golden Globe, it would be easy to think it was all about you.  But Wentworth refuses to be like that.  I have seen girls go crazy for him — they say they want to have his children.  He handles it with profound grace.  It’s the same with his acting.  He doesn’t have to do a lot to convey a lot.  For example, in one scene [my character] Sara lets it slip that it’s her birthday, and Michael says ‘Happy birthday.’  When we shot it, Wentworth chose to say it at a moment when I wasn’t looking at him.  I didn’t realize what he’d done until I watched it.  He conveyed so much tenderness, it was so poignant, because she missed it all.  We were watching the episode together, and when I saw that I turned to him and said, ‘Awww.  I might have a crush on you." — costar Sarah Wayne Callies, TV Guide June 19-25, 2006

UPDATE :: Added one more picture!  Enjoy!

Toronto, Canada :: Prison Break’s Wentworth Miller was spotted yesterday morning at the CanWest Global Upfronts at Massey Hall in two outfits: snazzy in a suit and casual in a tee (John Deere Kelly Green T-shirt by A&E Designs) .  Wentworth, who plays Michael Scofield, had a bit to say about the upcoming PB season: “What we’ve got (in the) second season is a real reinvention of the show which is, I think, bold and ambitious and something quite new… The show now takes a hard right turn and everything that made us a success to begin with, the prison specifically, we leave behind and the question becomes do you care enough about these characters to follow them outside the walls to continue on their separate and communal journey? …Mostly I hope that what we see is a continuation of the relationships we really worked hard to develop. It would be a shame to leave those by the side of the road just because we’ve now escaped from prison… I think we’ll be flipping back and forth between the cons on the road and the scene back at the prison, at least for the first few episodes.”  Bigger pictures in the gallery!

Prison Break Robert Knepper and Wentworth Miller joined
ET Canada host Cheryl Hickey in Toronto yesterday to
announce Global’s lineup for next season.