Lie to Me's Tim Roth Loves Crappy Movies

Thanks to the oh-so-snappy cancellation of Lone Star, we'll soon be seeing a lot more of Tim Roth and the Lie to Me crew: Even though the show's second season just ended on September 13, it'll be returning for Season 3 this Monday, October 4. I spoke to the surprisingly giggly Roth about his whirlwind week, what's coming up in the third season, and tweeting from the set.

What was the first thing that popped into your head when you heard that Lone Star had gotten the axe?
Well, I had been told that we would be possibly one of the things that could replace it... When they told us, I had mixed emotions about it, because we were planning to come back on the tenth of November. So we had a cushion and then suddenly we had to go into overdrive!

But you have to feel bad for the guys that are working on [Lone Star]. For anybody who gets involved in a show like this, it’s a huge commitment, and you really throw yourself at it. I mean, if you’re smart, you do. And I hear it was a good show and it got good reviews, but didn’t connect with the audience for some reason.

So I felt very sad for them. We were just the guys that were slated to come in and fill that slot, which is a good thing for us, but you don’t want to do that at the expense of somebody else’s upset. I know it’s a very talented group over there and hopefully they’ll find a home for that show. There... have been shows that haven’t quite connected on the networks that move into cable and connect there. Maybe that’s what they can do.

Season 2 of Lie to Me just ended just two weeks ago. Do you think that such a short amount of time between seasons will have any effect on the show?
The worry really would be that people don’t know we’re coming back. We’re doing our best to get it out there. But we’re ready to put the shows out. We have enough shows to air—we’re finishing episode six and starting seven today. We’ll see how that goes. [laughs]

You look pretty beat up in the new promo poster for Season 3. Why is that?
Well, it could be because Lightman is such a troublemaker. Actually, last season we were trying to think of a good concept, and Joe Earley, who’s the top dog guy there—very good on the promotional front—threw that concept at me. And I’d actually thought... it looked like he got the shit kicked out of him, because with the kinds of things that he does, that would happen. And so we came up with the Truth Hurts campaign. This is just going further down that road. We’ve done a lot of different ideas for that, and they’ll crop up during the season. It’s a nod in the direction of Night of the Hunter, you know, the Robert Mitchum character with the tattoos “love and hate” on his hands. I like that.

Does that poster set the tone for the rest of the season? What's coming up?
There’s some wild stuff coming! The guys that are running the show and the writers' room now, Alex Cary and Dave Graziano—one’s from London and the other’s from Brooklyn—the two of them know the kind of world that Lightman comes from and they write to that. For the first time, we're solidly in a place where the scripts really reflect the characters and the stories are fun and quite unusual. And as different as they may be from each other, one episode to the next, they have a consistency about them. They’re very, very character-driven and a lot of fun to play.

Date：2010-10-3　【Return】