Cut off your hair. Get a hit. James Spader did.
As Raymond (Red) Reddington on NBC’s “The Blacklist,” the 53-year actor looks like some beaten-down midlevel bureaucrat rather than the criminal mastermind he plays on the show. And the frumpy character looks miles away from the sensitive types he played in the early days of his 35-year-career.
Right now, his shorn head feels “wonderful,” the actor says from New York City, where he shoots the series. And why not? After two episodes, “The Blacklist” has been a critical and ratings success, something that the network desperately needed. The show is smartly positioned after one of NBC’s few bona fide hits, “The Voice.” But it likely would have found an audience anyway.
The series works on an edge-of-your-seat premise. Spader’s Reddington is a former FBI agent who went rogue some 20 years before, putting him on the agency’s most-wanted list. In the first episode, he turns himself in, promising to help catch the worst criminals. His only condition is that he work directly with young agent Elizabeth Keen (Megan Boone).
Spader, who will be the title villain in 2015’s “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” says playing Red as rumpled and nearly bald was the “right choice” for the character.
“It just seemed to fit his lifestyle,” he says. “He’s someone who has to move — travel lightly and move swiftly — and it seemed eminently practical for him.”
“The Blacklist” dangles a lot of questions at its beginning, including the relationship between Red and Elizabeth, which has been compared by some critics to Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling in “The Silence of the Lambs.”
“I can see where people would raise the comparison because of the pilot, with somebody shackled to a chair in a big containment cell and this young FBI woman coming in,” he admits.
But Spader notes that the show is quick to evolve past that, pointing to the second episode, which ran last week, in which Red is allowed to move more freely after reaching an arrangement with the FBI.
Spader’s career began in such films as “Pretty in Pink” and “Mannequin.” He then gained acclaim in “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” and later won three Emmys for playing the character Alan Shore in two series, “The Practice” and “Boston Legal.”
After “Boston Legal” ended in 2008, the actor was away from television for three years. He took a role in David Mamet’s play “Race,” and then played a strong-arm lobbyist in Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln.” What was to be a one-time appearance on “The Office” in 2011 turned into a season and eventually led to the offer for “The Blacklist.”
“He seemed like he’d be great fun to play and he would sustain over the course of the season and even over multiple seasons,” says Spader about his character, Red.
“There are so many unanswered questions about him, and it felt like it would take a long time to answer the questions. And for me, just from a completely selfish point of view, that was enticing because it opened the door to all sorts of surprises as time goes on.”
Some have wondered if “The Blacklist” would just become “catch the super bad guy of the week” instead of an ongoing thriller, but Spader believes there is room for both.
“I think it makes for a show that is pretty unique to me in that episodes can stand alone and yet they also feed a greater story. For people who stay with the show, I think there’s much more satisfaction than just a straight procedural,” says Spader.
Spader admits he wasn’t much of a TV watcher before working on the series.
“Then, I got the feel what it felt like to be a viewer — I was so anticipatory about the next script,” he says.
But like the viewers, he’s still waiting to find out how much of the show will develop.
While he knows Red has an intimate knowledge of Elizabeth, who has a mysterious past herself, Spader isn’t sure what their relationship really is. Some have speculated that he is the father of the young FBI analyst but Spader doesn’t think so, though he concedes he doesn’t know — and wouldn’t tell us if he did.
“It seems too easy,” he says. “But, you know what? Maybe it’s a very circuitous route back to the simplest answer of all. So we’ll have to wait and see.”
He also will have to wait to see if “The Blacklist” is picked up for a full season, though there seems little doubt of that now. If it is, Spader says he will be packing his bags in the last days of production to get over to London and start shooting the “Avengers” movie.
Spader had talked to Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige a while back, mentioning that he was interested in joining the comic-book world when “this opportunity came along.”
“I talked with Joss Whedon, and he said he really hadn’t considered anyone else. It’s a chance to step into another place that’s completely foreign to me.”
As for his nearly bald head, Spader has no regrets. Red does wear a fedora, which helps with the New York weather.
“It’s still early autumn here. So ask me again in January,” he says with a laugh.
