Prolific Pellegrino puts his mark on sci-fi roles

The Tomorrow People -- "In Too Deep" -- Image Number: TP102B_7516.jpg --Pictured: Mark Pellegrino as Dr. Jedikiah Price --
Photo: Jack Rowand/The CW -- © 2013 The CW Network, LLC. All rights reserved.
The Tomorrow People -- "In Too Deep" -- Image Number: TP102B_7516.jpg --Pictured: Mark Pellegrino as Dr. Jedikiah Price -- Photo: Jack Rowand/The CW -- © 2013 The CW Network, LLC. All rights reserved.

Apparently there is an unwritten rule in Hollywood: Mark Pellegrino must appear in every other sci-fi, horror and fantasy television show - and a good many such films as well.

During the past 20-plus years, the actor has appeared in Tales From the Crypt (1990), Prayer of the Rollerboys (1990), Knight Rider 2010 (1994), The X-Files (1999), Astronauts (2002), The Number 23 (2007) and Lost (2009-10). More recent credits include Grimm (2012), Being Human (2011-13), Revolution (2012-13) and the current CW series The Tomorrow People.

“It certainly does seem like that’s an unwritten rule, doesn’t it?” Pellegrino says, laughing. “Pretty much it seems to be the genre I gravitate toward. I think the genre likes me and I like it.

“Sci-fi and horror, it’s one of the few genres in which controversial ideas can be explored and, also, politically correct ideas can be explored with impunity,” he says. “I like that about the medium, that it’s powerful and a little bigger than everyday drama. The characters can be larger than life, and I think people are looking for that.”

The Tomorrow People is based on a British sci-fi show of the same name, which ran from 1973 to 1979. It follows a group of mutants, aka Tomorrow People, blessed and/ or cursed with the powers of telepathy, telekinesis and teleportation. The central figure, Stephen (Robbie Amell), only recently discovered his nascent powers and now uses them to protect others like him from a mysterious group called Ultra.

Pellegrino plays Dr. Jedikiah Price, the biologist who is Ultra’s enigmatic leader. He also happens to be the brother of Stephen’s uncle, Roger, the long-missing and most powerful of all Tomorrow People.

Pellegrino says that several questions are in the process of slowly being answered: Who is Jedikiah? What doeshe want? And to whom does he answer?

“Who he answers to is a big one for me,” Pellegrino says. “We just met a character who is apparently a partner of Jedikiah’s, but there’s more to that than meets the eye. Morgan [Carly Pope] is his lover, and she’s a Tomorrow Person. And he also does make references to people he answers to, people even above him who pull the strings.

“I think he’s a really complicated character,” the actor says. “He’s a scientist, a politician, and he truly believes, based on what he knows, that the Tomorrow People have evolved to eliminate humans.But I also think his philosophy is tainted - and fueled - by his enmity, his jealousy of his brother, for being overlooked by … God, I guess, by nature, and for being the lesser of the two. So it’s hard to know where he’s coming from or what he really wants.”

Pellegrino does not consider Jedikiah a bad guy. As an actor, he views any character he’s playing as a bad guy only if that character also views himself as one.

“Jedikiah has to do certain things for the general good, and individuals are going to suffer,” Pellegrino says. “And for people who aren’t privy to the bigger struggle, he seemslike a horrible, cold, exacting guy sometimes.”

The Tomorrow People recently received a coveted full-season pickup from The CW network, locking in the show for 22 episodes. Following a fall midseason break, The Tomorrow People will return with new episodes Jan. 15. Pellegrino carefully chooses his words as he previews the first two new episodes, “The Citadel” and “Rumble.”

“There are exchanges and breakouts [emergences of powers] that need to be negotiated,” he says, “and Morgan becomes a bargaining chip. And in ‘The Citadel’ you find that there’s a compound offsite, but affiliated with Ultra, that’s like a prison where we keep special Tomorrow People exclusively for the purpose of experimenting on them, using them as guinea pigs, in essence.

“From being on Lost, I’m so used to being secretive and quiet,” he says, “but with The Tomorrow People it’s just a crazy world with a lot of excitement. I wish my world was as exciting as that.”

On the original British show, Jedikiah was revealed to be a shape-shifting robot that went mad, which explained his hatred of Tomorrow People. The same fate might await this generation’s incarnation of Jedikiah - or it might not.

“They did set up, in the pilot, that the Tomorrow People’s powers can be latent and don’t express themselves in everybody,” Pellegrino observes. “With someone as powerful as Roger as my brother, I can’t help but think that it’s in me somewhere, and Jedikiah tries more and more to acquire powers himself.”

It remains to be seen whether Jedikiah can do that, but he’ll come dangerously close in Episode 14, which Pellegrino has read but not yet shot.

“His end goal, to me, is still a mystery,” says the actor, who’s due next in We Gotta Get Out of This Place and The Trials of Cate McCall, two non-sci-fi indie dramas. “He’s so multidimensional that I still haven’t discovered yet exactly where he wants to go. Does he want to recover his brother? Does he want to gain powers? Does he want to undo Ultra himself?

“Right now he seems like he’s in an organization that’s gotten away from him,” the actor concludes. “It’s like he started something that’s gotten bigger than him and he’s trying to keep up with it.”

Style, Pages 28 on 12/31/2013

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