You can have your “American Idol”, your “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives” and whatever else. For my money, the very best show on television for the past half-decade has been “The Shield”, the complicated cop drama that never, ever seems to go down the road you expect. Seriously, if you haven’t seen it, shut down your computer and go rent the back seasons on DVD, immediately.
Actually, read on and you might want to forget that DVD because it seems Vic Mackey might just come to the big screen one of these days.
Recently, I had the pleasure of interviewing Michael Chiklis, which was exciting for me not only because he’s a genuinely powerful actor, but also because he’s from my hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts.
After we reminisced about the birthplace of the industrial revolution for a moment, I mentioned that he’s the latest in a line of randomly famous Lowellians, following Jack Kerouac and Ed McMahon. “And Bette Davis,” he added, wearing the same black t-shirt, jacket and shades that are Vic Mackey’s uniform. “She’s no slouch.”
Once we got down to business, the “Fantastic Four” star and die-hard Red Sox fan (”Go Sox!” he would later scream at me) said he’s about to wrap up the show that now seems intent on portraying a “Hamlet”-like tragic hero’s fall from grace. “At the moment, actually, I’m about to go into production on the last season of ‘The Shield’,” grinned Chiklis, while I feared that he might push my face against a stovetop grill. “So, that will keep me busy well into next year. That’s the next seven months of my life.”
Assuming that Vic makes it out of season 7 alive, Chiklis said he’d be willing to don the sunglasses again for a “Shield” feature film. “Wow, there are a lot of questions about the potential of a ‘Shield’ movie these days,” he revealed. “I don’t dismiss the possibility at all. I think it’s potentially very real. It would all really depend on the idea. We are very, very protective of ‘The Shield’.”
Then, he upped the ante by bringing up the intriguing idea of spinning off Mackey into his own “Die Hard”-like adventure. “I don’t think ‘The Shield’ will be a movie,” he said of the series. “But I think that there’s potential for Vic Mackey to be in a movie.”
“It really depends on if he even survives this season,” grinned Chiklis. “Because, with these writers, you don’t really know. I don’t think they even know yet how it’s going to end … but there’s no question that it could go on.”
Wrapping things up, I couldn’t help but ask the bald bad-ass if he could finally do what every “Shield” fan has been fantasizing about for years: Kill Shane.
“Oh, I can’t tell you that,” he laughed. “Even if I was.”
