Tony Almeida’s death on the fifth season of 24 was admittedly a very suspicious one. It felt like it came out of the blue, it didn’t seem to make any sense, and to make things more obvious, the silent clock was nowhere. Of course, fans thought that it was an off event, and thought it shouldn’t have happened (or at least should’ve been done differently)—so nary a complaint was made, at least from my perspective, when news that Tony is actually alive surfaced.
Then comes the other details: that, apparently, Tony (Carlos Bernard) is the bad guy, and that Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) should now find him and figure out what he’s up to, or else. With a lot of history between the two, no wonder it’s got so many like me waiting. Still, we’ve got questions. So what exactly is Tony up to? Why bring him back and all?
As it turns out, even Bernard asked that question himself. “I was suspicious all along that they might be bringing the character back at some point, not that I was sitting around waiting for it,” he said. “I was heavily into producing a project … [when] actually called me during the sixth season to pitch an idea to bring me back in the last episode. But it just felt very gimmicky. It didn’t feel right. And the question became, ‘Well, why do it? What’s the hook? What’s the story?’ And everyone eventually agreed that we shouldn’t do it. But that planted the seed for them to write a story that made sense for the Almeida character to be back.”
But being back on the 24 set was something he relished. “I love the action stuff,” he said. “It’s definitely physically demanding … But that being said, there are also a lot of very cool scenes between Tony and other characters. For me, it’s all about the relationships. One of the great things about this year is there are a lot of great stuff between Jack and Tony. There’s so much history between the two of them and it feeds into these scenes that we have together. … So the stuff that we get most jazzed about—I can say this for Kiefer as well—is the scenes between characters where it’s really personal, where there’s a real history between those two characters.”
Still. Is Tony now a bad guy? Of course he wouldn’t reveal much, but…
“I don’t really think of him as a good guy or a bad guy,” he said. “I think in terms of what’s driving him, what it is that he is after. This season, everybody’s saying, ‘Well, he’s a bad guy now.’ But in my mind, he’s not the bad guy. In my mind, he’s just doing what he needs to do.”
Fair enough, but we’ll still have to see how that exactly turns out. 24 returns, after a two-year (unplanned) break, with a two-night, four-hour premiere from Sunday at 8pm ET on Fox.
-Henrik Batallones, BuddyTV Staff Columnist
Source: Fort Worth Star-Telegraph
(Image courtesy of Fox)
Staff Writer, BuddyTV
