Thomas Doherty sits down with friend and former Tell Me Lies co-star ahead of the season finale of 'Paradise.'
reboot, where he played Max Wolfe with the kind of camera-ready confidence that makes you assume he was raised on set. He wasn’t. The Edinburgh-born actor came up through musical theater before moving to L.
A. and learning the ropes of on-camera acting. Iffeels like a graduation. The 31 year-old actor is back in New York now, where he just finished a run inDOHERTY: Always.and I’m obsessed with it. I literally finished the last episode of season one a few days ago, and then I checked my phone and there was a text to do this. It was crazy timing.VAN PATTEN: I have to ask, did you feel like you were seeing double?when it first came out, and I was like, “Oh my god, that’s Shailene Woodley.” Then I went onVAN PATTEN: I think your whole career should be going back and forth between us.VAN PATTEN: Did you watch the show before you got the part?DOHERTY: That’s so interesting.DOHERTY: What really helped me was moving to New York.VAN PATTEN: I’m from there, and I find it’s so much easier to be lonely in L.A. DOHERTY: I lived in L.A. for three years and it was so hard for me. Granted, it took me so long to even know the difference between an agent and a manager. I was learning from scratch and it was hard to do it from the outside. But L.A. is a city where you can just float. That’s why New York’s been so good for me, because of the energy here, and the proximity. Sometimes, if I don’t have anything to do I’ll just go for a wander, or I’ll go for a coffee, because the probability of bumping into someone you know is— That makes me sound so sad.VAN PATTEN: I know what you mean. You can walk out your door and there’s always something going on. There’s constant energy. DOHERTY: I don’t know if this is true, but apparently Manhattan is on top of the biggest quartz mine in the world.DOHERTY: Yeah.DOHERTY: Yeah, honestly, Grace, working at Paramount Studios—like being from Edinburgh and then driving under the arches. VAN PATTEN: Those studios are the one thing that has stayed the same since the beginning of movies. Did you feel like an old actor, driving to work?DOHERTY: The Paramount lot has been really good at trying to preserve as much as possible.DOHERTY: A trailer on the lot, which I prefer. It gets me into the mindset, you know?DOHERTY: They’re tiny. I think I’m a third of a trailer still. I don’t think I’ve made it up to half yet, but I’ll get there. But even the sound of the ladders walking up to the trailers is so specific. And the smell, and they all look the same, with weird brown wood. Then you have your food come in, and it all tastes the same. I love that side of my job. When I get asked if I prefer theater or film, I say I love the two hours when plays or musicals are happening. You never came to seeVAN PATTEN: Just do another one, please.VAN PATTEN: You like the nostalgia and the routine, it seems?VAN PATTEN: You like the connective tissue between each job?VAN PATTEN: I like that too. It seems like you’re a creature of habit. DOHERTY: You don’t know if you’re going to have it all week, or maybe you’ll have it on Monday and then Friday, but that’s still enough routine for me. Whereas with theater, it’s too structured.VAN PATTEN: Yeah, it ruined me. In the best way. It’s so scary, and so much when you’re doing it, but I’ve never felt more fulfilled than when I was done.VAN PATTEN: I genuinely felt so proud of myself for just doing it. Like showing up every day. Also, you cannot hide when you’re doing a play. You can’t do another take.VAN PATTEN: Yeah, and you get to fix it in real time. Did you shoot season two before or after you did the play? DOHERTY: Before. So I did season two from March to August, then I had a week off, and then I went straight into the play. I needed more time off.DOHERTY: Yeah. I had to learn the music in two weeks. Honestly, the lines were the harder part for me. There’s dancing, there’s puppetry. You’d have known if you came to see it.DOHERTY: I think doing a play would be a wee bit different than a musical, because a musical is physically so taxing. I was playing against time with Seymour , and the only way I could convince myself that I was this character was to energize it. When you start the show energized, you have to keep up that consistency. You have to go to the theater at 5pm, but you don’t get home until 11pm. You don’t fall asleep until 1am. Then the next day you’re tired and you’re trying to save your voice and stuff.DOHERTY: I think I’ll be a lot more grateful. I mean, theater life is rough. Mentally, emotionally, physically. You suck it up because everyone else does. Whereas we’re kind of pampered on sets.DOHERTY: We’re afforded so much time and space. It’s a different kind of hard. But energetically, it’s not as demanding. I had to find a composure within that energy. So now I can bring that composure into a much more relaxed environment. And with that, there’s a calmness, where I think authentic choices come to you.VAN PATTEN: It sounds like you’re trusting yourself more. DOHERTY: Yes, I really do. I’ve done 10 years in the industry, and I always refer to that as my apprenticeship. But now I’m in spaces where I feel like I belong, and like I can have a voice. I’m taking ownership and possession of my work more. For a long time, I was just drifting. But then I had to really look at things and ask, “Do I want to stay here or do I want to do more?”DOHERTY: I’m not trying to prove anything either. That’s where you can be the most honest with your work, because your ego becomes diminished.VAN PATTEN: I want to know what you actually did to prepare for this role. Did you learn survival skills? Your character is named after a character inDOHERTY: I was in L.A. on a Thursday for casting, doing final chemistry reads with Annie , and by Friday I was in L.A. filming. The first scene I did was with Shailene. She cries, I cry, we’re crying. VAN PATTEN: Oh my god, that scene was gorgeous. I could feel how pent-up these two people who haven’t been touched in years were. I can’t believe that was the first one. DOHERTY: I’ll be honest. In the first take I was just watching Shailene act, and I was like, “What the fuck is going on? This is my life?” Then I was like, “Okay, lock in Thomas.” It was just like working with you. I never had to act. You’re so, so real. And Shailene’s the same. And doingwith Madeline Brewer as well. All three of you girls, I could work with all of you for the rest of my career.DOHERTY: But with Shailene, all it required was vulnerability, and that is so scary. I talked about the whole drive into Paramount. All these things are really big moments in an actor’s career, but you can’t bring them onto set. It’s kind of hard to leave it in a third of a trailer, but when you’re working with really good actors, they lock you in.creator]’s brain. Because you know what it’s like when you get onto a show. They’re still writing the last episodes, so they don’t even really know who your character is. You have to beg them for as much information as possible.DOHERTY: You know what it’s like. It takes you a beat to find a character. And then once you settle in, you’re like, “Oh, thank god.” I just tried to personalize as much as I possibly could in a short period of time. Personalization is a good way for me to—DOHERTY: Yeah. I think when you endow it with emotion, it comes to life more. VAN PATTEN: I obviously know how goofy and silly you are, and how much you love to have fun. I love seeing little slivers of that in your performance. I’m like, “That was a Thomas laugh.”DOHERTY: Yeah, if I’m doing an American accent, I still laugh in Scottish. It’s my giveaway. It’s time to get an American laugh.VAN PATTEN: Of course you were.DOHERTY: That’s a hard question, Grace. What would yours be?VAN PATTEN: You’d be the laughs, and you’d keep everyone’s energy up. DOHERTY: That’s really sweet of you. I’d like to think so. Honestly, I would love to be like Link. Maybe not with the responsibility of leadership.DOHERTY: Stressful. The show touches on this for sure, but when it’s about survival, people change so quickly and fall back into a very primitive mode which is void of morality, almost. I mean, we’re seeing it today already in the world.DOHERTY: But Sterling and Link show that you always have a choice. The takeaway from the show for me was that you can choose to be a good person. VAN PATTEN: I love that. You’ve just done so much. You’ve done comedy, you’ve played musicians, you’ve been a vampire.Tell Me Lies . And now you’re a survivor in the end of the world. There’s so much variety. Is that a thought-out thing, or are you just drawn to what you’re drawn to? DOHERTY: It’s a bit of both, honestly. But I’ve always had this 10-year apprenticeship idea in my head. Because I never did any film, it was all musical theater, I was like, “I need to learn the camera.” I’ve been very fortunate, and I have an amazing team behind me. I couldn’t have planned it better myself. Some nights I would’ve gone to bed earlier. But we had fun, Grace. We had fun.DOHERTY: I want to work on bigger productions, with different directors and different actors. I want to keep growing as a person and also as an actor.VAN PATTEN: I was going to ask, “Who’s your top five dinner guests that are alive?” But I’m going to do itstyle. If you could choose five people to be in your group for the end of the world, who would you choose?DOHERTY: And—oh, god, this is a hard one. Honestly, probably Shailene.DOHERTY: Do you know how many Americans have said that to me?VAN PATTEN: I’ll change it to, if you had to pick four characters you’ve played, who would you choose?VAN PATTEN: So is yours. Okay, it might be a trio. It might be you, Shailene Woodley and Eckhart Tolle.DOHERTY: Grace, you’re such an angel, I love you.Grace and Anna Van Patten Are Hollywood’s Hottest Sister Act
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