On one level, it boggles Lee Tergesen's mind that, at age 40, he's still playing cops and robbers, just like when he was a kid. At the same time, he adds, it makes absolutely perfect sense.
His role as a tough-guy cop in Wanted, TNT's new crime series, often takes Tergesen back to the days when he was "running around my backyard with a fake gun, chasing imaginary bad guys." Nowadays, of course, the props are more realistic and the plots are more intense. But the main difference, he says, is that he actually gets paid to play. "It's a blast now to sort of live out all those childhood fantasies."
Not that Tergesen ever dreamed of a life in law enforcement when he was a boy. His fantasy was to be doing precisely what he's doing now: performing for a living. "There was this moment, I think I was about 4 years old, and my parents and their friends were having a party and they were all sitting around the living room, the music was playing and I was sort of dancing wildly. I mean, I was really into it and everyone there was entertained. And I remember I was like, 'Wow, man, I'm watchable!'"
Ever since then, acting is all that Tergesen ever wanted to do. "I remember my 15-year high school reunion," he says. "A friend of mine said to me, 'Oh, man, I went to see Wayne's World and, when you came on the screen, it blew my mind.' Because he didn't know I was acting. I was only working for about a year at that point. And he said, 'I totally remember, we were in second grade and you were sitting next to me and the teacher was going around the room and everybody was saying what they wanted to be when they grew up.' Most of the kids, they wanted to be policemen and firemen and doctors and Indian chiefs, but I said, 'I want to be an actor.' And my friend was like, 'Twenty years later, there you are on screen doing what you said you'd be doing in the second grade!'"
Tergesen's film and TV credits range from sublimely goofy (Wayne's World and Weird Science) to disturbingly brutal (Oz and Monster). But there's a common thread throughout: Just like when he was 4, dancing for family and friends, Lee Tergesen is always imminently watchable.
In Wanted, he plays Eddie Drake, an eight-year veteran of the U.S. Marshals Service who joins an elite undercover task force tracking L.A.'s 100 most wanted fugitives. Drake is a seriously flawed human being, someone you probably wouldn't want to be friends with, but it's somehow comforting to know that there's a good guy out there who's tougher than the criminals.
It's hard to believe, though, that Tergesen, who has played many cops and convicts in his career, never had to handle a gun until this role. "I had to shoot a gun for the first time because of the show," he says. It simply had never been necessary until now. The nonstop action, he says, makes Wanted "unlike anything that's on television right now. It's kind of a throwback to another era." Tergesen knows whereof he speaks; he has been a cop show aficionado since boyhood. "I loved Starsky & Hutch, Baretta, SWAT, The Mod Squad." It's worth noting that costar Rashida Jones' mother, Peggy Lipton, was one of the Mod Squad cops. "And I actually got to meet her, which was a freaking thrill," Tergesen says. "I was so in love with her when I was 5 years old."
For Tergesen, this is the dream job that keeps getting better. "If it weren't for this, I would be pumping gas for a living," he says. "And this is way better than pumping gas. But you want to know the truth? I'd do it for free. I love it so much I'd be willing to do it for free. Just don't tell my producer I said that. Tell him I need more money."
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by David Martindale
