Doug Hutchinson, best known as The X-Files' Eugene Tooms, played Elroy-L, an AI apparently originally created as a humour model who gradually turned his social skills and sick humour to productive use as a torturer seeking information from captured Marines. Kathleen Toth spoke to him shortly after he filmed his third and final Space appearance ...
Dreamwatch: Were you cast
in Space because James Wong and Glen Morgan cast you as Tooms, and said,
'We've got another weird guy, let's call Doug'? Doug Hutchinson: Basically, yes" They had been trying to get me on the show and had sent me a couple of scripts . not just for weird guys. The second episode had a marine who had been abandoned on this planet forever and he's losing his mind. They sent me the script and it was a very good role, but something inside said no. Then a couple of months later they called me in for a character called The Torturer. There was no script available, just three pages of a scene, and something went bing. I told my agent this was what I wanted to do. That got Morgan and Wong excited, so they expanded the role and turned it into Elroy-L. By the time I got a whole script, The Torturer had a lot of meat in that first episode. I was really pleased with what they gave me.
Dreamwatch: Did you know at that tiime that this was a recurring character?
The thing about the android characters - the Artificial Intelligences - on the show is that there are so many models of us running around that there couls be thousands of Elroy_Ls out there. Glen Morgan called me and said: 'No escalator'S going to chep you up this time - we can#t kill you!' I just shot a third appearance a couple of weeks ago, picked up for another season I think we will be seeing Elroy-L again. I've given up trying to understand the networks, there's no rhyme or reason to their madness.
Dreamwatch: I know fans of the show complain that the schedule has been so disrupted that it's hard to be sure when a new episode will be on.
All you can be sure of is that in the end it comes down to money. I understand there is a plan to possibly show the last five episodes in front og The X-Files and see how popular that proves to be. Of course, I've heard that the slot before The X-Files is called the Death Slot, so, I don't know if that's the greatest thing in the world!
Dreamwatch: They have has a hard time finding something they like at that hour, but putting Space on at 7pm on Sundays never made any sense. It needs a later time, given the action and the language.
I think Glen and Jimmy would be ecstatic, if they could get a later time. It revolves around the military and ther eis a lot they cannot do in that time slot. You can't show blood, point a gun at someone's head ... The language is another problem.
Dreamwatch: Probably as violent
as they could get is in your second episode where they start pulling Elroys
insides out - but it doesn#t matter because you are just a machine, and
a nasty one to boot! Exactly. He can't feel real pain, so we'll just dismember him. The third episode I did [Pearly] was interesting. I suggested to Glen that there might be a way, that the Marines could mess with Elroy's programming - turn him into someone useful to them, but he would remain this mischievous presence and be someone you could never entirely trust. What if one of the characters started getting flowers from Elroy-L because he's fallen in love? I asked. Well, I got this script for the episode I just shot, and Elroy had gotten some sort of android virus which was making him fall in love with the android Felicity-OH. He was quoting Shakespeare to her and it got rather surreal. She, of course, wanted nothing to do with him.
Doug Hutchinson, thank you very much.
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