“Smallville was interesting,” he reflects. “It was definitely a little bit stressful, because when they announced they were bringing Doomsday in and word got out…. Well, people looked at my picture and said, ‘He doesn’t look anything like a 6-foot wide, 8-foot tall creature with bones coming out of his head.’ The fan reaction was quite negative, so I was walking into a situation where everything I read on the Internet was, ‘Who is this guy and why is he coming into our beloved franchise?’ The good news is that once we started airing episodes, the opinion changed and that was really heartening. You work on it for a while and you don’t know if people are going to like it, but you have some notion that maybe it should go in a certain way. It’s really rewarding when people respond to it.
“We worked really hard to not just do our own thing, but also honor the source material,” he continues. “The important thing is that we weren’t negating what the comic book said, we were just adding a piece of mythology to it that might be interesting.”
The role, he explains, came out of the blue. The producers began telling him about the character of Davis Bloome, an EMT who’s suffering through black-outs. He’s considered a great guy and morally upright, but then he learns that during these black-outs he’s hurting people.
“By the end of it,” Witwer continues the scenario, “you find out he’s Doomsday. I had just seen the animated film Superman: Doomsday about two weeks earlier, and my response was, ‘You want me to play THAT guy?’ I didn’t think I was right for it, but they did.”
One question is whether or not the actor thought the ending of his arc on the show worked, where Davis, who has been tried to maintain his humanity, abruptly turns dark and homicidal.
“You know what’s funny?” asks Witwer rhetorically. “I said in one interview that I didn’t necessarily agree with the ending, and the next day I was quoted all over the Internet with, ‘Sam Witwer hates the ending.’ I want to say this respectfully, because as an actor it’s not my job to do anything but what I’m given. Having said that, I hope that when people watch that they see I’m kind of going for it with what it was they wanted me to do. But my personal take was, I thought it would end differently for that character. I’m going to be completely honest with you – yes, there are many valid ways you could end that character. I wasn’t sure that the way we ended the character was something we’d earned. I think you could have done a few different things that would have made more sense, considering that he was sacrificing himself. He even tried to kill himself at one point. He did some bad things, but he was mostly trying to do the right thing. Even when he would murder those criminals, he was doing that to protect whole city blocks, realizing that he couldn’t die. He was completely aware of the fact that he was impervious, so what do you do? The bad things he did, he really had no choice. The lying, the dishonesty, was really preferable to giving in and killing everyone in the entire city. So my take on it was that until the very end, this is an honorable man put in a terrible situation, and I think the audience responded to that. At least I hope they did. I think we needed to stick with what was established. I’m not saying we can’t deviate, but if we’re going to turn him into a maniac at the end, we should set that up a little bit. But it’s not my place. Please emphasize that point: it’s not my place to fight it. Did I raise concerns when the script came out? Yes, I did, but my job is to do what they’ve given me as well as I possibly can and bring it to life in a way that creates, hopefully, a dramatically satisfying moment.”
The premise of Being Human, which begins airing on Syfy in January, is that a vampire, werewolf and a ghost share a house, attempting to hold on to as much of their humanity as they can while dealing with what they really are.
Unable to talk about the show too much at this point, he does share some info on his vampire character, Aidan. “The fascinating thing about this guy is that he’s 200 years old and you would imagine that a 200 year old guy would have a certain amount of wisdom and he wouldn’t be easily impressed,” Witwer reveals. “He might be very internal or sort of a dark, broody character who needs to prove nothing to no one and doesn’t say much. But the fun about Aidan is that we tried to humanize him a lot more than that. This guy has been hiding who he really is for 200 years, and because of that he’s become a fantastic mimic and chameleon, and also an expert liar. He doesn’t want to be, but it just comes with the whole territory of having to hide who you are. There’s also the element that he’s been a practicing vampire for 200 years, and now for only two years has he decided to kind of quit. So we’re dealing with a guy who is totally off balance and I think that’s the fun of the character.
“I think,” he elaborates, “that if he was just this guy who was in control and always knew the answer, he would be boring to play and you wouldn’t want to watch him. But the fact that he’s totally off balance and dealing with emotions that he probably hasn’t felt in the 200 years since he died, that’s interesting. We play the vampire thing as a cross between heroin and sex addiction, and if you think of the vampire as being on hardcore drugs for years, well, their emotional world is kind of stunts. While Aidan has this wisdom, he does not know when to anticipate his own emotional reactions, which is really kind of the fun part of the character. The guy hides things well, so he could be in the midst of despair one moment thinking about something bad that’s happened, and someone could walk in and say, ‘Hey, Aidan, how you doing?’ and he’ll be, like, ‘How you doing?’ and immediately turn into a normal guy. But what’s going on with him is he’s dealing with sobriety, he’s dealing with all this emotional junk that he has not put to bed, and it’s all coming out at once.”
Witwer is excited about Being Human, and very specifically credits Smallville for a lot of the positive changes in his career. “I wouldn’t be where I am today on Being Human without it,” he says candidly. “To this day I don’t know what they saw of mine that caused them to call me. It seemed like a very random call, though, oddly enough, they were set on me playing that role. I didn’t know it at the time, but they had made up their mind. I don’t know who saw what and said, ‘That’s Doomsday,’ but I’m very grateful and lucky that it did happen.”