Behind the scenes of Morgan and Wong's controversal episode, "Home"
Three mutant brothers managed
to accomplish what a whole planet of war-mongering aliens couldn't: they
killed off Tucker Smallwood for the first time on television. "I've died
a lot on stage, but I've never gotten to die on TV before," Smallwood laughed
about his guest role as Sheriff Andy Taylor in the X-FILES episode
"Home," written by Glen Morgan and James Wong. Ironically, his Commodore
"Boss" Ross had survived plenty of battles during the first -- and only
-- season of Morgan and Wong's Space: Above And Beyond, but it took
only one brief, but relentless assault in "Home" to mark this first for
the actor, who in his own life had experienced real brushes with death during
the six months he spent in Vietnam as a military advisor, before being wounded
himself. Smallwood's experiences in Vietnam, and his lengthy recuperation in the hospital, led him to reflect on his life goals, and as soon as he was able, he moved to New York to study acting with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse. He has been acting steadily since, in theater, television (he was intelligence agent David Endawi in BABYLON-5) and film (THE COTTON CLUB, PRESUMED INNOCENT, THE ROCK and this past summer's sci-fi spectacular, CONTACT). One of his inspirations is actor Dick Anthony Williams, who played Mulder's former boss, Agent Reggie Pardue, in the X-FILES episode "Young at Heart."
In "Home," the viewers didn't actually see all that much during the attack on Sheriff Taylor and his wife Barbara (played by Judith Maxie), but the scene was sickening in its impact, thanks to Smallwood and Maxie's carefully realized characterizations, the drawn-out suspense created in the editing room, and the insistent "thwack, thwack" of the baseball bat wielded by the murderous Peacock brothers on the Taylors. This scene, part of a story about rural inbreeding between a horribly mutilated mother Mrs. Peacock - and her three monstrous sons, prompted Fox to award the episode the first parental warning ever to THE X-FILES. Within hours of its broadcast, the online fans were debating hotly the ethics of presenting such personalized violence during primetime.
Smallwood himself had been astonished by the script when he first read it, but he was so delighted to work again with Morgan and Wong that he declined two other acting offers that conflicted with the episode's shooting schedule. Shortly after his arrival on the set, he asked crew members if they remembered anything like this before in an X-FILES episode. "They said, 'This breaks whole new ground. This is awful even for us. We haven't seen anything like this. This is really, truly dark.' "
But there was much more to Sheriff Andy Taylor -- yes, he is the namesake of the immortal Andy Griffith character -- than just becoming a victim. Smallwood (and Maxie, in the short screen time alloted her) crafted a thoroughly believable character, a loveable, modern-day Tom Destry who keeps the peace by force of personality, not guns. Sheriff Taylor's first appearance at the episode is at the crime scene, a field next to the Peacock home, to brief Mulder and Scully about the discovery of a deformed baby's corpse. He is as friendly and folksy as the other Andy Taylor, although you won't ever find this particular set of circumstances on The Andy Griffith Show. "I wanted Sheriff Andy to be a man of decency and of compassion," Smallwood said. "I wanted him to be a professional. I didn't want him to be a wuss, I didn't want him to be a pacifist. I wanted him to be a man who had made a choice to defend and stand up for his jurisdiction in this way, rather than running around with a lot of weapons and being a hard ass. What was nice about the role was that Andy was a man with a family. I tend to be cast in iconoclastic roles -- lone men, authority figures whose lives are their work. They don't seem to have a great deal of life outside of their work. And I was grateful to Jim and Glen that they allowed me to manifest a relationship with someone else."
On Smallwood's first day in Vancouver, he and Maxie spent several hours together at a park, having their photos taken by X-FILES staffers. The finished, framed photos, which decorated the set of the Taylor home, would serve as important props to Smallwood's conception of the sheriff, although he felt the specific role they played in his character's choice to keep his gun locked up, despite his suspicions about the Peacocks, may not have come across to the audience. "I decided the reason I didn't carry a gun around, aside from the fact that crime is very low in the town of Home, is that I made an agreement with my wife. I'm not going to be that kind of sheriff. It's not going to be that kind of town. That's why we don't live in Philadelphia or Washington, D.C., or those other places that I describe. I see the wretched things that happen there. This is a beautiful town and there is a pact, and the pact is that Sheriff Andy doesn't carry his gun around. However, there is a moment when I realize that the shit is generally about to hit the fan, and I need my weapon, because I am going to stand up for my wife and myself and whatever has to be done here. So I go down to get the gun I keep locked up, when I'm talking on the phone to Scully. I take the gun out of the box, and at that moment, I glance at the photo and I'm reminded of the pact that my wife and I have. The way it was edited, they didn't cut away to the photo, so the audience doesn't understand why it is that Sheriff Andy isn't sleeping with a .357 and maybe an Uzi or two under his bed."
Smallwood ended up spending five extra days in Vancouver, because his big scene, the attack of the Peacock brothers, had to be filmed twice, when the new director of photography, Ron Stannett, was fired after executive producer Chris Carter watched the footage. "I was told, 'You look wonderful, the physicality is great, but the bad guys were lit up like snow white,' " Smallwood explained. "Stannett was not secure enough to shoot with that little light, and Chris was unhappy with it, so I had to reshoot that scene. I was exhausted after that first night, because I was swinging a baseball bat, and I had to stop it with my arms. My hands and my forearms felt like I'd played 72 rounds of golf. They were just exhausted, aching, throbbing and twitching. I was not looking forward to shooting again. Physically, it took a lot out of me. People say, 'What's the big deal? You just hit this guy in the chest.' Yes, but you do it about eighty times, and your arms are tired, because it's not so much the swinging, it's having to sell the swing even though you have to stop the swing, because if I had really done it, the other actor would have had four or five broken ribs, even though he was wearing padding. There's a lot of trust. You trust each other as actors. And these guys who played the Peacock brothers were great. I avoided them that first day. I didn't want to have any eye contact with them, I didn't want to have any communication with them, I didn't want to have any relationship with them, because I wanted to be able to use their grotesqueness when we began shooting. I remember on Saturday I was in a little book shop and I heard, 'Tucker!' and I said, 'Who the hell knows me in Vancouver?' I looked up and there were these two big guys, well over six feet, and they were looking over at me. I had no idea who they were, but they came over, saying, 'This is Chris, this is Mike. We're the Peacock brothers!' I had never seen them as people, I'd only seen them in their makeup, so I had no idea what they looked like."
Despite the possibility of injury, Smallwood insisted on performing all his stunts himself; he enjoyed the idea of dying on television too much to let someone else have all the fun. But he soon found out that there are reasons why stunt men exist. "I got run over by the camera. I cracked my head on the floor, because at one point Chris [Norris, as Edmund Peacock] threw me, so I had to take a dive, and I had to sell it. But I forgot to tuck. Boink! 'Oh, by the way, put your chin on your chest when you fall backwards!' 'Oh, thanks for telling me!' My head was ringing. I said, 'You can defocus the camera if the shot is from my point of view, because I'm seeing double!' I remember laying in that pool of fake blood. I've laid in a pool of my own blood, and it's a totally different trip to do it in a film. It's cold and it's sticky, and it's like being covered with honey. Everything sticks to you, everything sticks to itself, and it's an awful, wretched feeling. And I was in it for an hour and a half. They had to give me sponge baths -- I liked that part," he laughed. "I remember that moment of, 'Oh god, I got to lay my head down in this and let my hand go splat! Apparently Jim and Glen had to go in and fight for that one shot of my hand falling backwards to signal that I was toast. The network censors were saying, 'Oh no no no, that's a bit much, I'm sorry, that's too much, we don't know what that is, but it looks awful.' But I thought they shot it quite tastefully.
Smallwood also felt that the script provided an understandable motivation for the Peacocks' actions, when they learn that Sheriff Taylor has issued an All Points Bulletin for the brothers. For years, Sheriff Taylor has been a partner in the unspoken agreement among the townspeople to leave those weird Peacocks alone, whatever suspicions he may have about them. "In their rationalization, I broke the pact, because I called in the heat, outside help, instead of handling it myself. Maybe it was just destiny. But a line had been crossed, something had been broken and shattered, and it wasn't ever going to be that way again. The reality is that they broke the pact, too, because they came out of their space, and they brought that transgression out. When the Peacocks arrived at the house, I couldn't avoid the situation any longer. I couldn't hide from it, I couldn't pretend it didn't happen. It had to be dealt with."
Smallwood's final verdict on "Home," which he didn't see in its entirety until it aired on television, is that "it was about what you heard, and what you imagined. And I think that's art. This is not a documentary, and you're supposed to allow the viewer to bring something to it." Smallwood's other genre venture this year is in the Jodie Foster sci-fi vehicle CONTACT, based on the Carl Sagan novel about Earth's first meeting with extraterrestrials. Smallwood played the supporting role of the unnamed "Mission Director," in charge of mission control when radio astronomer Foster blasts off to meet the aliens. "There are two launches, and in the second launch Jodie is going to be in a vessel which has been built based upon the design specifications we received from outer space. We don't know how it works, we don't know what it will do. We won't know for sure if it's going wrong -- we don't know. She's the sole occupant in it and I'm going to send her out into wherever she's going."
Smallwood was thrilled to work with two-time Oscar winner Foster, whom he found to be the consummate professional. "Jodie was about five feet away from me, on the other side of a pane of glass. She's in this isolation room, we're outside dealing with her. Jodie had something I'd seen before, but not in a long time; it's what we essentially call a thousand-yard stare. I've seen it on people I've worked with in the bush, but I've never seen it on a woman. The first moment I saw it, it sort of haunted me for a couple of days, until I realized, 'Yeah, you've seen that before a long time ago, Tucker,' but that's what happens to her visually when she is preparing. She's a pro. It's fun to watch her work, and it's fun to watch her reconnect and relax between takes, then suck it back up and focus and concentrate and get back to the next moment. It's always fun to be around people who know what they're doing."
By coincidence, the launch scene was shot right after Foster's own X-FILES gig, as the voice of Betty, the talking tattoo, in yet another Morgan and Wong episode, "Never Again." "Jodie came into the studio while we were finishing up my first sequence in CONTACT. For this sequence, Jodie's part had been pre-taped, because we see her only on camera, which made life very complicated because we're in this huge center with monitors everywhere. They had already filmed her, and then they rewrote a lot of my part, adding a lot of lines. It was a lot of pressure. It was mind-grinding work, since ninety percent of the dialogue for these two weeks of shooting was all mine. But Jodie came back into the studio the next to last day, because we were shooting a couple of scenes with her directly and she began talking about being on THE X-FILES. She came back and said, 'I've just finished playing this voice of the tattoo.' It sounded pretty dark and pretty funny. I was really tickled for her."
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