By Alicia Rancilio
Standing 6-foot-2-inches, Idris Elba's size helps to sell his characters. As a detective in " Luther," he often averted protocol and went rogue. On "The Wire," he played a shrewd, intimidating crime boss in the drug world. In the 2022 movie " Beast," he protected his daughters from a ferocious lion while on holiday in South Africa. But, in his new Apple TV+ series " Hijack," it's his mental strength that helps him navigate a crisis, not his build.
Elba plays Sam, a passenger on a flight from Dubai to London that turns into a hostage situation. The first two episodes of "Hijack" debut Wednesday on Apple TV+, with one new episode released weekly.
"I'm used to being cast as a big man," said Elba. "In this situation Sam is vulnerable. He isn't there to fight."
Sam's strength here is that he works as a corporate negotiator, and his ability to assess high-stakes situations like mergers and acquisitions, serves him well. "It's all a bit of a psych game," he said. "Pitting one against the other and figuring out what your weak spot is. And then, of course, being able to make people feel comfortable, not threatened,"
Space — or lack thereof — was an integral part of filming. The set was an actual plane which Elba said "really helped" the look and feel of the scenes.
"We thought about builds and then we thought, 'What if we just bring a plane in and shoot within what we've got?'" said Elba, who was also an executive producer on the show. "You've just got the space that you've got… It felt a little bit like a play and the camera could only go so many places."
The seven-episode series also unfolds in roughly the same amount of time it takes to fly from Dubai to London.
"It's difficult to to make that happen because you shoot things out of sequence, but each minute of every episode is important," said Elba. The show cuts between what's happening in the air and on the ground as officials try to piece together what they're dealing with and how to react.
"It just made sense to get these real time decisions as a way to propel the narrative forward rather than sort of jump out of time sequence," said Elba, adding that the two perspectives are "really reflective of each other the whole time."
"It was very intense," added Archie Panjabi, who plays a counter-terrorism official. "As the series progresses, the tension multiplies and so did the number of people in the room." In the end, Panjabi says there was a feeling of resolution that was freeing. "I should tell people I spent six hours on screen saving your butt," she tells Elba to laughter.
Elba felt his own kind of relief at the end of six months of filming, in part because his adrenaline was often running high even between scenes.
"You stay keyed up. You go to your trailer or whatever, chill out, but you can't undo your mindset. Your body does not know it's acting."
In NBC’s “Brilliant Minds,” Zachary Quinto Plays Doctor–In A Role Inspired By Physician/Author Oliver Sacks
There's a great moment in the first episode of the new NBC medical drama "Brilliant Minds" when it becomes very clear that we're not dealing with a typical TV doctor.
Zachary Quinto is behind the wheel of a car barreling down a New York City parkway, packed with hospital interns, abruptly weaving in and out of lanes, when one of them asks, "Does anyone want to share a Klonopin?" — a drug sometimes used to treat panic disorders.
"Oh, glory to God, yes, please," says Quinto, reaching an arm into the back seat. The intern then breaks the pill in half and gives a sliver to the driver, who swallows it, as the other interns share stunned looks.
Quinto, playing the character Dr. Oliver Wolf, is clearly not portraying any dour, by-the-rules doctor here — he's playing a character inspired by Dr. Oliver Sacks, the path-breaking researcher and author who rose to fame in the 1970s and was once called the "poet laureate of medicine."
"He was someone who was tirelessly committed to the dignity of the human experience. And so I feel really grateful to be able to tell his story and to continue his legacy in a way that I hope our show is able to do," says Quinto.
He's a fern-loving doctor
"Brilliant Minds" takes Sack's personality — a motorcycle-riding, fern-loving advocate for mental health who died in 2015 at 82 — and puts him in the present day, where the creators theorize he would have no idea who Taylor Swift is or own a cell phone. The series debuts Monday on NBC, right after "The Voice."
"It's almost as if we're imagining what it would have been like if Oliver Sacks had been born at a different time," says Quinto. "We use the real life person as our North Star through everything we're doing and all the... Read More