One of the things that marks the popular TV show, Castle, is the excellent chemistry between the characters — the mystery writer Richard Castle (Nathan Fillion), his partner and now wife Kate (Stana Katic) and his daughter from his first wife, Alexis (Molly Quinn). “Let me tell you a little something about Molly Quinn,” Nathan says on the sets of Castle in Los Angeles. “She is really great. It is really nice. I get to spend a great deal of time with Stana. So it is actually no mystery that we are able to work together, but Molly and I don’t get to spend that much time together.
“This episode, we’ve been together every day. It has been nice. When I am not at work, I am asleep. So I don’t have the time to visit people on the show who are not on sets. Two weeks ago I had dinner with Susan Sullivan (she plays Castle’s mother, as Martha Rodgers) it is the first time I saw her in ages because she hadn’t been on the show very much… So it is really an effort to go to hang out with people. This week I finally got to hang out with Molly and it was nice.”
Molly, who practically grew up on set, echoes Nathan when she says, “The first thing I think about when people ask what has it been like growing up here, is how wonderful the crew and the cast have been to me. I think a lot of children when they start out in entertainment have really bad experiences because the crews are little salty. I think how we communicated with each other and how that translated to the screen really influenced our success. So I guess the short answer would be it has been wonderful.”
When asked to comment on the direction the story would take now that Richard and Kate are married, Nathan says: “I would take a wild stab… they would now have to start dealing with things that married couples have to deal with. I guess speaking from the perspective of the single guy, when I am dating someone, I have to remember that I have to include them in my decision making process… I am just guessing. This is really not my department.”
On the mystery of Castle’s disappearance before his wedding, Nathan says: “Without spoiling too much, we get into that a little bit before the end of Season 7. We start to discover at least where he was and the kind of things he was doing and why he was there. We haven’t accounted for the entire two-month span that he was gone.”
Though Nathan plays a mystery writer in Castle , he says his all-time favourite books apart from theGame of Thrones series is Max Brooks’ World War Z . “I’ve read it four times. I get nightmares every time I read it and I won’t stop reading it, what does that tell you? I have not had a lot of time to read in the last seven years. As Castle, Nathan got to play poker with popular mystery writers. Nathan describes the experience as “a lot of fun. I am trying to remember which one of them said it. It might have been Connelly who said, ‘as an actor I am a great mystery writer’!”
Saying the poker games lent realism to the idea that Castle is a mystery writer himself, the 44-year-old said, “When you play this mystery writer on TV and you bring these real, popular writers in, you hang out with them and they all talk to Castle like he is a real mystery writer, it lends a lot of truth to our illusion.”
Having played Castle longer than he has played any other character, Nathan says on the plus side, “It gets easier all the time. There is not as much character preparation because you were there for all the character building over a period of seven years. So you get to know the character very well.”
The downside according to Nathan, “The only thing you miss out on when you have a steady gig is variation. There is a cost that comes with getting to do different jobs all the time. You have to try and get those jobs. I am very fond of saying an actor’s job more than acting, is actually looking for a job.”
Watching Nathan on set, one is struck by how similar his personality is to Castle’s. “My brother sometimes gets upset with me because he says ‘you are not getting paid to act, you are getting paid to act like yourself’!”
Castle Season 6-7 airs on Star World, Monday to Friday at 11PM from April 29