Chicago native Paul Adelstein, who can currently be seen as Agent Paul Kellerman in “Prison Break,” has been cast as one of the male leads in the upcoming “Grey’s Anatomy” spinoff, which centers around Seattle Grace Hospital’s Dr. Tim Daly (“Wings,” “The Nine”) and Taye Diggs (“Day Break,” “Kevin Hill”) have also been cast in the unnamed spinoff series (which some fans have semi-jokingly dubbed “Montgomery’s Ward”). The pilot for that show, which has Montgomery thinking about leaving Seattle Grace, will function as the two-hour season finale of “Grey’s Anatomy” in May.
And as it happens, the woman who plays the flame-haired neonatal surgeon Montgomery is an old friend of Adelstein’s, with whom he waited tables at Bucktown's Café du Midi all those years ago. “I had a nice conversation with [Walsh] last week, we had a good laugh,” Adelstein said in a recent phone interview. “It’s bizarre enough to be a working actor, but it’s such a dream to be around someone who was there essentially at the beginning, and someone who I like so much.
“I said to her, ‘Do you remember that time I was driving you to a voiceover audition, it was 2 degrees and there was no heat in my car and we were late for a shift at the restaurant and you couldn’t pay the rent?’” Adelstein said. Both actors did workshops with John Cusack’s New Crimes stage troupe and at Evanston’s famed Piven Theatre Workshop; Adelstein and Walsh even appeared in the same episode of the Chicago-set series “Cupid,” which starred Jeremy Piven, but Adelstein said they didn’t have a scene together.
The actors kept in touch when they both moved out to L.A., and used to live so close to each other that Adelstein would sometimes ask Walsh to go over lines with him when he had a big scene or audition.
“It’s going to be so great to be able to look across the room at her and think, ‘I’ve known her for 15 years,’” added Adelstein, who said that shooting begins on the “Grey’s” spinoff in a few days. Over those 15 years, Adelstein has gone from being a respected Chicago stage actor with credits at Steppenwolf and elsewhere to a busy film and TV actor, racking up roles in everything from “Scrubs” and “Without a Trace” to “Memoirs of a Geisha” and “Be Cool.” But it’s as “Prison Break’s” wily Kellerman that he’s gained the most notice of late, and Adelstein’s new gig raises the obvious question – what happens to Kellerman, especially if the “Grey’s” spinoff becomes a full-fledged series in the fall?
Adelstein was diplomatic and would only say that things would end “on a cliffhanger” for Kellerman at the end of “Prison Break’s” current season. In any case, Adelstein says he can’t believe his good fortune” in nabbing a role on the new ABC show, which is being written by “Grey’s” creator and University Park native Shonda Rhimes. Adelstein wouldn’t say a word about what his role is or what happens in the two-hour pilot – Rhimes is well known for strictly enforcing a cone of silence around her projects – but he would say that the pilot for the new series is “character driven.
” “I think with even some of the strongest writers out there, you could swap out the dialogue between characters on the show,” but that isn't the case with Rhimes, said Adelstein, who noted that he and his wife, Liza Weil, who plays Paris on “Gilmore Girls,” are big fans of “Grey’s.” “Shonda not only writes great dialogue, she writes great characters. It’s all very specific.
She’s got a very strong voice, it’s funny and truthful and three-dimensional, which is great fun for an actor and rare.” “She’s able to write realistic yet outrageous situations that can be funny too,” he said. “It’s all there, that’s what makes it human and that’s what makes you empathize with the characters.
” Photo: Paul Adelstein as Paul Kellerman on Prison Break. in Grey's Anatomy, Prison Break | Permalink | Comments (21) MediaWeek reports that the network is leaning toward running “Prison Break” without a 4-month break this season. There will be breaks for the holidays and other special programming, but after that, “it will run straight through,” a Fox executive said.
in General television, House, Prison Break | Permalink | Comments (3) Continue reading "Getting out was the easy part: Season 2 of 'Prison Break'" in An interview with...
, Prison Break | Permalink | Comments (3) Prison Break” keep warning the cast that it’s only going to get worse. “One guy told me, `You should take your daughter outside and fry an egg on the cement,’ and I was like, `You can really do that?’” Williams said with a laugh.
Williams and his wife had already enrolled their daughter in the British School on the city’s North Side, and Williams expected to keep pursuing fiddle lessons when he came back to Chicago after a short hiatus that began in March. But the show’s producers decided a couple of months ago to move “Prison Break” down to Texas for logistical reasons. Now that the prisoners, led by Michael Scofield, have busted out of the joint, “Prison Break” needed all sorts of locations, many of them rural, and the cost of transporting the cast and crew far from Chicago just proved to be too high.
For the show’s first-season finale, Williams said, hundreds of cast and crew members were transported to the far northern edge of Illinois to film post-escape scenes. “We filled three hotels up there,” Willams says. Many of the locations that “Prison Break” will be using in Texas are a half-hour or so outside Dallas.
Despite the shorter commute, Williams said he and his family greatly regret leaving Chicago’s dining scene, its architecture, its neighborhoods and their friends. Watching “The Blues Brothers” on a plane recently, he said, got him “all misty.” “We were just heartbroken” by the move, he says.
But he added that the “Break” team has one souvenir from the Windy City -- lead camera operator Bill Nielsen Jr., whom the “Break” cast successfully campaigned to bring from Chicago to Texas. Bellick is not so much heartbroken as really enraged, Williams says.
“He’s already got a shell in the chamber” of his shotgun, the actor jokes. “Now the prison is not going to be Joliet, it’s going to be the outside world,” Williams says of the show’s second season, much of which involves the hunt for Charles Westmoreland’s hidden cash. The escaped prisoners “are still not free.
They’re in the open, running, but they don’t know who to trust. In a way, maybe prison was a safer place - they knew the rules.” in Prison Break | Permalink | Comments (1) Chicago native Paul Adelstein, who can currently be seen as Agent Paul Kellerman in “Prison Break,” has been cast as one of the male leads in the upcoming “Grey’s Anatomy” spinoff, which centers around Seattle Grace Hospital’s Dr.
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