How does it feel to move on from the CSI world to another crime franchise with Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders?
I had a lot of good fortune with the CSI series. When I travel around the world, I'd go to all these different countries and discover that the show was very popular everywhere. People seem to enjoy seeing it every week, so when the idea of going into another successful franchise came around, it seemed really interesting to me. I just hope that the audience is going to want to see another series with me in it (!)
Your character in CSI: NY, Detective Mac Taylor, was something of a workaholic. How similar is Jack Garrett to him?
Mac Taylor was a great character to play. He was a detective and a very professional guy - and those are the only similarities between that guy and this guy!
On TV, you quite often see law enforcement characters that are broken. They are dealing with a lot in their lives because they work within such a dark world, so there are always multiple divorces and they are going through a lot of pain in their own personal lives. We wanted to show somebody who was able to balance home and work, even though he's dealing with a pretty dark world.
How does it feel to represent crime fighters on screen?
I've really enjoyed playing these heroes. They deal with very challenging issues, cases, people and events - and I think we're lucky that we have a lot of people that want to do this kind of work. It's a privilege to be able to play them and to try to show off how qualified these people are. It's good to show how grateful we are that we have people out there that are doing this dangerous work.
Do you actually get to travel the world for Beyond Borders?
To be honest, we don't travel far. LA stands in for a lot of different countries in the show, so I get to pretend I'm travelling a lot - but we don't actually go overseas to shoot episodes.
However, that's one of the interesting things about this show; that every episode takes place in a different environment where there are a different set of rules. We see a lot of different countries with different cultures.