Interview - Alan Dale
Alan Dale plays Himself/John Priest
'In Moving Wallpaper I basically play myself - well he has the same name as me, is as good looking as me but I don’t know whether I would do or say the things he does. Despite that, it was great fun and it’s quite a challenge for me because I was trying to play myself and I kept thinking, “how would I feel about this or that?"
The main thing that attracted me to the role was watching the first series. The producers sent me four episodes in LA and I laughed an enormous amount. So when they made me the offer I said, ‘Sure, I’d love to do it!’
Despite me coming into the second series and working with a very tight cast, they were all lovely and very accepting. They are all very talented. The actual work however, was hard. They had me working six days a week, 14 hours a day. I got no time to play - which was probably just as well!
Coming up in my life, I’m appearing in the new series of Lost, where I play quite an unsavoury character. However, I would really like to do another series in England.
The best anecdote I have from filming is from when we were doing the flamethrower and zombie scene. I had to come out from behind the pillar and approach them from behind. The next thing I know I smell hair burning... The flames were flying back at me and I lost all the hair off my hands!
In Renaissance I play a character called John Priest, a recent divorcee. He’s an engineer by trade, who spends much of his time working overseas and he never really built the relationship with his kids he would have liked. Like most weekend dads, he was finding it difficult to keep them amused, so when faced with the prospect of having them for two weeks in the school holidays, he made the decision to take them to Disneyworld in Florida to solve the problem. Unbelievably for John and his family, a zombie apocalypse happens while they’re flying back and when they land their plane is taken over by a hoard of the un-dead. Simple as that!
The one thing I don’t want to happen in Renaissance is for my character to be killed off. In nearly every show and film I’ve been in recently my character suffers a grisly demise! Heart attack, shot in the head, poisoning - you name it I’ve gone through the bloody death sequence!”
