This season will be remembered for how Castle found its groove, with Nathan Fillion as the always-engaging mystery writer Rick Castle and Stana Katic as his detective muse, Kate Beckett. But it's not just these two will-they-or-won't-they crimefighters who make the show work.
Veteran theater actor Seamus Dever is just as genial as his character on the show, Det. Kevin Ryan. In an interview just after the second-season finale, Dever assesses the immediate (and a tad hostile) reaction to Castle and Beckett going their separate ways, and lays out the ingredients that make Castle a satisfying Monday night recipe.
Will Castle and Beckett Be an Item?
AH: People were hostile? Why would that be?
SD: Well, a lot of people I think really thought they were going to get together. I thought the writers did a nice job of balancing it. You know, I think they’ll eventually get together, but I think at this point they’re trying to suss out if they can have a good working relationship as well as a personal relationship. And they keep missing each other along those lines. They were being adult about it and moving on.
A lot of people are mad at Castle, which is hilarious to me. That they choose to be upset at Castle, as if he was the one who did her wrong! It’s sort of funny. I thought it was a great way to do it, because it was a very adult, realistic way.
AH: So are you a proponent of them getting together?
SD: Oh, I don’t know! I guess so. I don’t know how that would work. It’s sort of funny, because it’s like personally they’ve always been hostile to each other that I can’t even see what that would be like. I can’t even see her being sort of nice to him. I don’t know if that would ever happen. It would be interesting.
My wife is a big proponent of it. She says no, that would be neat. They’re a crime-fighting couple, they’re very much like that Thin Man series, where they’re in a relationship but they solve crimes together and they feed off each other personally and professionally. I can see it happening. I think that the show would be a little different though if that were to happen. But who knows. I’m sure it will at some point!
Looking Back at Season 2, Looking Ahead to Season 3
AH: Thankfully we have another season to figure out what happens from here. Obviously a lot of shows have been put on the chopping block lately. What’s the best thing about being renewed for another season?
SD: The best thing is that we have time off to plan and we have time off to rest. There’s not a fear that I have to find a new job now. So we all have some time off to rest up, because it was a long season. We had 24 episodes.
A lot of shows they have little breaks they’ll go on, like a mini-hiatus for a week or something like that. Our show never had that, because we had always been trying to catch up. We had a very long season. I know it’s especially grueling for Nathan and Stana, because they’re there every day. A lot of the episodes I was there every day.
A lot of stuff happened. We all bought houses, so we were trying to negotiate those things at the same time as we were shooting. I had to put my dog down at the beginning of the season. That was really tough. I had to do it at a lunch break, actually, back in Episode 1 of Season 2. It was so hard.
I broke my ankle back in January [laughs a bit], so a lot of stuff happened to me. People constantly getting sick, and then getting better, getting other people sick, and all those things. But the best thing about it is being able to rest and plan ahead a little bit more. Whereas last season we didn’t know we were coming back, so we couldn’t plan ahead as much. So it’s nice to have that cushion.
AH: From looking at the ratings week to week, the show has really picked up momentum in Season 2 and the audience is growing. What do you think changed from Season 1 to Season 2 as far as more people tuning in?
SD: Well, I think people wrote our show off in the beginning as a copy of a lot of other shows. Maybe that’s why they didn’t tune in necessarily, because they thought we were another Bones. I can see that, but I think people started tuning in, and the ratings from week to week – the fact that we were getting higher ratings for our reruns than almost any scripted show on ABC, in fact – it really showed we were getting new audience members.
What was the change? I don’t know. I think the writing really blossomed this season. Things started developing a bit more, and our writers were given a little bit more freedom. In the beginning, Rob Bowman was talking about this, one of our executive producers. He was talking about how, in the beginning, we were locked into a genre. We were a crime genre.
And then we started expanding a little bit more with things like our Halloween episode, where there was a bit of mystery in there of a supernatural sort. It wasn’t just someone shot someone. There might be some supernatural spirit at work, or maybe a vampire, or maybe the Wolf Man did it, you know?
Someone called our show a mysteramedy, like a mystery-drama-comedy all wrapped up in one. There’s not many shows that can do that. I think that’s what started happening with Castle this season. It’s very interesting to watch.
Alex Hoffman - Alex Hoffman is a graduate of the University of Kansas' journalism school whose credits include Midwest Commercial Journal, Lawrence ...
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