Billy Campbell's etonline Interview

From divorced dad to Moses, BILLY CAMPBELL is once and again happy to be in front of the cameras.

ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT: Do you know what's coming up for the second season of "Once and Again"?

BILLY CAMPBELL: No, I don't. I really enjoy coming to work and getting the script and not knowing ahead of time.

ET: Will we get to see the family dinner that was starting at the end of last season's finale of "Once and Again"?

BILLY: You don't see that, but what you do see is actually really canny. What you get in the first episode (of the second season) is another dinner, which is the one to take place after the one (you didn't see) which was an unmitigated disaster. So what's even better, you get us trying to have dinner again after already having had a disaster, instead of just having a disaster. That's my theory and I'm sticking to it.

ET: The last episode was fairly focused, but there were a lot of subplots that weren't resolved. How much more do you know about those sorts of things?

BILLY: I don't. I make it a point not to try and know what's ahead. It is fun for me to go to work and not know where things are going. If I was on another show in which I did not have as much faith in the guys that be, I would actively want to know where it was going to go and what was coming down the pike. But I have such faith in ED (ZWICK) and MARSHALL (HERSKOVITZ) that I really don't feel the need.

ET: Are you happy with the way "Once and Again" is scheduled with the season split with "NYPD"?

BILLY: I don't spend any time thinking about scheduling. There are people far smarter than I am that are responsible for that stuff. Anything I could say about it would be flapping my gums.

ET: What did you do during the hiatus?

BILLY: I went to Morocco, Paris, Stockholm, Helsinki and Montreal. I did a mini-series for NBC in Morocco called "In the Beginning" and then Paris, Stockholm and Helsinki was a press tour for "Once and Again." Montreal was for "Tales of the City."

ET: Is "Once and Again" popular in Europe?

BILLY: Quite popular. They love it in Europe. The show is more European than it is American -- the pacing, the depth of story and the degree of character.

ET: Have you had a chance to see yourself dubbed in different languages?

BILLY: I saw something hilarious -- an image of myself speaking Finnish. I was really impressed.

ET: The buzz before 'Rocketeer' was released was that it was supposed to launch your career in a major way, but that didn't happen. How has the success you've found now changed your life and is it better that it happened later rather than earlier?

BILLY: It is undoubtedly better that it happened now than sooner. There is no question of that. If it had happened earlier, I would have dealt with it, but I am not sure I would have dealt with it very well. I am more than a decade older and, hopefully, a few minutes wiser. I am very grateful that it is happening now. I am not sure anybody would have pegged me as Moses ("In the Beginning"), if I didn't have this show. I am not sure why they did. The show has made opportunities and, I hope, it makes more of them.

ET: Did you immediately connect with Billy? Is a lot of him you?

BILLY: I think so. A fair amount of that is me. Marshall and Ed like to write from life and a lot of it is like me.

ET: Are you a parent?

BILLY: No. I am not.

ET: How much of a pipeline is there between the people who make the show and what shows up on the screen.

BILLY: It is about three feet long and it is big enough to drive a truck through. That is what they are all about. Ed and Marshall write from life -- their own lives and the lives of the people on the show. They write straight from what is happening to paper.

ET: Is there any pressure from outside the show to ratchet it up to a melodrama?

BILLY: No. I think that is a network type of pressure and these guys don't do a lot of kowtowing to the network. They do their own thing.

ET: Is there ever a concern that the show is too real?

BILLY: The struggle is always to make it more real. You don't ever want to seem as if you are doing scenes on a TV show. God knows if we are all the time successful. I feel the more real the better.__etonline.com (August 18, 2000)