With Runaways returning for a second season on Hulu and Syfy UK, Greg D Smith sat down with star Julian McMahon, who plays Jonah in the show, to talk about his character, what it’s been like to work with Marvel so often over the years, and just what it is that excites him about a role.

Walking into a hotel room with Julian McMahon in it is an odd experience. I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who exudes star quality in quite the same way. Dressed in a smart casual ensemble, including fairly colourful socks and a loosened tie, I caught up with him at a little before 11am, by which time he’d already been being grilled for several hours but looked for all the world like he’d been relaxing with his feet up, recharging. There’s also something about that gaze – when McMahon looks at you, there’s no sense he’s looking through you; rather he engages, fully and enthusiastically, as he talks with energy and passion about his work. I opened with polite enquiries about how he was enjoying London, only to be regaled with his love of the place – he lived in the UK for several years as it turns out, but he’s never been in London this close to Christmas before, and he’s smitten by just how special the place feels – before we got down to brass tacks, starting with a subject I was genuinely curious to see his response to.

So, after effectively working with Marvel through two ‘ages’ – from Fantastic Four to the present with Runaways – what differences do you notice, if any?

Firstly I thought that the first Fantastic Four movies were – and this is my own opinion –a huge success. I thought they were great movies for what I interpreted as the comic book and the cartoons, you know what I mean? I just thought the qualities were awesome in that. I know that it’s developed into what it’s developed into now, but I kinda feel you have to go through what you have to go through to get where they are now.

And also, it was a space that they didn’t really know, they were putting things out there that hadn’t been done before. I think maybe early-70s you’d had a couple of Supermans and a couple of Spider-Mans and whatever else, but that whole genre, that space, had not really been explored the way that Marvel was starting to explore it when we did the first Fantastic Four movies, and had the potential to become what it is now.

So it’s been an extraordinary journey when you think about it. I mean they’ve taken the whole business, in a way, and made it into what it is today. And that started back in the days of the Fantastic Four so that was kind of the premise and the precipice the whole thing took off from, so I think it was really cool to be a part of that. Plus it was a comic book and a cartoon I was an avid fan of.

And then you go through to the Red stuff [based on the DC Wildstorm comic]. Red to me was pretty extraordinary, that you could just get all those people [in the cast] in the same room together. That was just fun just for that, so it’s almost like that’s its own thing to me. But then you have the success of Marvel and that’s where Marvel starts to take a hold of the whole business in a way, and now it is what it is.

The difference, probably is that now it is just such a massive business, such a massive undertaking to employ all of these comic books and put them on the screen in whatever format it’s in, whether it’s television or film. So, you can look at that as a journey, and it’s been really cool to be a part of all those steps.

Moving on to Runaways specifically, how do you yourself see the character of Jonah, because from an audience point of view he’s quite an enigmatic antagonist?

In Season 1 when we were trying to develop this character, because of the way the scripts come out, and because of the way that they’re developing things, you were really only getting bits at a time. So it was really important I think, to accomplish something in each scene that said something about who he was.

Whether it was a scene with a couple of the characters, like in the prison stuff that we did, or if it’s with Leslie, or the first time he meets Karolina, or like at the end of season one where we get to see him with all the kids, you’ve got to get something different out of each one of those a little bit, because then you’re starting to spread the breadth of who this character is.

And then we get to Season 2, that had to develop too, because the writers are quite particular about how much information they give out at a time. What I wanted to do with Jonah was set him up as a particular person by the end of season one where you thought, ‘okay I know who that guy is’, that’s that kind of person, right? And in Season 2 I want to completely turn that on its head and as an audience, you go, ‘Wait a second, I thought he was like this’ or ‘I thought he didn’t care about that’. What I wanted to do over Season 2 was break down the alien part of him, and bring in more human qualities. We do a lot through the relationship that fractures between him and Leslie, and then the development of what I think is the love that he finds with his daughter, Karolina.

Given they’re quite protective with the scripts and feed you them a bit at a time, did you speak to the writers at all about how you felt the character should progress in Season Two? Was there a collaboration there?

Oh sure we talked a lot – if there was something that was written a certain way, you start to develop things instinctually as an actor as you start to learn about your character. If I got something and I thought, now look here’s an opportunity for us to see him in this way, I’m very open with the writers.

They’re great guys, Josh and Stephanie. We really had a lot of conversations about stuff and if I felt like there was something we could bring into it that allowed me to explore a particular part of his character a bit more then we went for that. And that happened pretty much scene by scene. Each episode I get, I go, ‘Oh I love that and I love that but I think we could do a little bit more here, can we end this thing like this instead?’

So you get an active role in shaping who the character gets to be?

Yeah, that’s kind of the fun. Obviously they need to accomplish their mission overall, so you’re not trying to take away from that, that needs to be part of your thinking. But at the same time if you can try to accomplish what you would like to as a performer, that’s kind of cool too.

How did you come to land the role of Jonah, and what first attracted you to playing him?

They just called me up and asked me if I would be interested in playing it, and then I got on with Jeph and Josh and Stef – Jeph from Marvel and Josh and Stef who created the show – and they didn’t have that much they could tell me, so to all my questions they were like ‘Well…’ I said, ‘Well is he this or is he that?’ and they said ‘Errrr’. When they said ‘Well, are you interested in this?’ one of my things was, ‘Are you open to discussing this as we go?’ and they were like, ‘Yeah, we love that.’ That’s an interesting way to work. So it was really about those three people that inspired me to sign on, more so than just the Jonah character.

I really enjoyed the conversations we had and it seemed like we could have this open dialogue consistently. I’d seen their stuff before so I know what kind of qualities they like and also how creative they can be. So that was the thing, more so than anything else because you had to hand that over to them and say ‘okay, I don’t know really what I’m doing, but I’m signing on because I’m interested in you guys.’

What’s the most challenging part of playing Jonah?

Sometimes, particularly in television you just go on, back to back, shooting and shooting. I didn’t want to drop the ball on him, because if I dropped the ball at any point in time I’d miss an opportunity to do something that I really wanted to do.

So, it’s not like you could just read a script and say, ‘OK, I learn my lines on Tuesday, shoot it on Wednesday and Thursday,’ [as you would on a movie]. I really had to concentrate, all the time. Because I really had specific things I wanted to do. Say you’re on episode six and then you had to go and reshoot something from episode two, you don’t just go and reshoot it, you go, ‘Okay, what did we get out of it?’ So I would go, ‘Right, can I see what you’ve got? And why are we putting that bit in?… Okay cool, now, in regards to what I know of him now, is there any way we could do this?’ So really the challenge was to just not get lazy with it, or not feel comfortable with it at any point in time but to constantly be questioning and challenging and finding an opportunity.

The ending of episode 1 of season 2 intrigued me massively…

And then it like takes off – episode 2 we take off right from that moment, and you get to see some really cool stuff there.

You do seem to play a lot of characters that are either a little bit damaged or just flat out villains/bad guys. Is that a choice you’ve made over your career or is that something that casting directors tend to approach you for?

I think most of the characters I play are damaged, everything from Doctor Doom, Christian Troy [his character in Nip/Tuck, right], probably even Cole [his character in the original Charmed] Interestingly, I just played a villain in a movie, I think it’s a horror-thriller thing, (Monster Party – currently in post-production). That was the first time that I would say that I played somebody that was just a villain, out and out a nasty human being.

Funnily I got asked to do a series which was for SyFy America a couple of years ago that was called Hunters, which only lasted a season, a really fantastic show. But they asked me to play the lead, who was a nice kind of guy and I read it and I was like, ‘Uhhh, would you be interested in me playing the bad guy?’ And they asked why. I said I just really connected with him, he seems really interesting.

So there’s a quality to me that is attracted to that stuff. You can’t get around that, that’s just all there is to it. And I just find it interesting, it just speaks to me in a way that I can see myself performing it. And having fun with the part. So  with Jonah, what we get to explore with him in this second season is we get to add all these things, like all that flaky stuff. He starts to literally get torn down, as a human, and as a spirit and as this kind of energy thing – whatever he is and wherever he came from. It all just gets torn apart and you really get to see the disintegration of an individual – and that was really fun to play. We get to do all the prosthetics, and I get to really get into the meaty kind of torture of it, and that’s the fun of all those kind of parts to me.

And with that, my time was up, and Julian had to get ready to speak to the next journalist. As I switched off my recorder and packed away, he continued to elaborate on his love for villainous characters, citing Anthony Hopkins’ performance as Hannibal Lecter as one of particular interest – a monster who the audience knows is a monster, but roots for anyway. That’s the sort of character he likes, and obviously the kind he likes to play. It couldn’t be further from this somehow unassuming but powerfully overwhelming character I’ve just met…

Runaways Season 2 starts January 2 at 9 pm on SyFy UK, and all episodes will be reviewed here on Sci-Fi Bulletin

Thanks to Felicity Beardshaw and Molly Wyatt for their help in arranging and illustrating this feature.