Michael O’Neill stars as ISEA Director Alan Sparks in Extant, the new science-fiction series that premieres on CBS on Wednesday July 9th at 9/8c in the US, and on Amazon Prime Instant Video in the UK from Thursday July 10th. He sat down with TVWise to talk about the show, his character and working with such a high-powered team.
Executive produced by Steven Spielberg and written by Mickey Fisher, Extant is set around sixty years in the future, in a world where NASA has become a private agency. Halle Berry plays astronaut Molly Woods, and O’Neill plays her boss. As he tells it, Sparks is a former NASA astronaut and a holdover from the era of public space exploration who was brought in to run the new private agency because of his deep-space experience.
He is Molly’s boss, friend and mentor, O’Neill says, but also a man with a good deal of corporate intrigue swirling around him, someone operating “a bit behind the curtain.” Asked whether Sparks has a darker side, O’Neill allows that the character is more dangerous than he first appears, while adding that, given the chance, he would still try to do the right thing.
As for what drew him to his first major science-fiction role, O’Neill keeps it simple: Spielberg, Berry and an extraordinary script. He also has the second season of SundanceTV’s Rectify on the way, in which he plays a nefarious Southern senator, following his recent turn as Nick Ford on A&E’s Bates Motel.