Yahoo News Milo Ventimiglia on why he wanted to play a con artist in The Company You Keep
Milo Ventimiglia may be staying on network TV in another drama with fraught family dynamics, but if you think he's staying in familiar territory, you don't know Jack Milo. The actor, who starred as patriarch extraordinaire Jack Pearson on This Is Us — a role that earned him two Emmy nominations and the affection of America — aims to play a long con with his new drama series. Or make that a con artist for a long time. On ABC's The Company You Keep (Feb. 19), which is inspired by the Korean drama My Fellow Citizens!, Ventimiglia is a masterful high-stakes grifter named Charlie whose father, mother, and sister are also con artists (and partners-in-crime with him). Adding to the intrigue: He becomes romantically involved with an undercover CIA officer named Emma (Catherine Haena Kim) who hails from a politically powerful family. Neither Charlie nor Emma knows about the other's occupation, meaning that these two just unwittingly chose the exact wrong person to fall for.
How did Ventimiglia bring this hustle to life? What kind of scams will Charlie be running? And can two people hiding a huge secret from each other find an honest romance together? Here, star/executive producer Ventimiglia tells all about the Company that he now keeps in this rom-con.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: When you were thinking about your next job after This Is Us, did you have any parameters or specific goals beyond choosing something that was decidedly un-Jack?
MILO VENTIMIGLIA: That was actually first and foremost: Let's let Jack be who Jack was — and let's give the man a break. If I can just kind of find something different, as an artist, it would be pretty satisfying to just dive into something different, something new. Those were the only two things in looking at characters was: Let's make him not be a father, let's make him not be a husband, just a guy on his own, however that comes at us.
I had known [Company executive producer/Crazy Rich Asians director] Jon Chu casually in business, and when he came up with this project, and his folks spoke with Russ [Cundiff, co-founder of Ventimiglia's DiVide Pictures, which produces Company] and Deanna [Harris, DiVide's VP of development], it was like, "Oh, that's just interesting — a con man who gets involved with a CIA officer. Sure. I'm curious." And then we'd heard the take from Julie Cohen, who wrote the pilot [and serves as executive producer/showrunner], and there was just something magical about what the show could be and what I could explore of the character.
Charlie Nicoletti in my mind is unremarkable. He's very plain, very simple. He tries to be unnoticed, yet when he steps into that con world, he has to put something on that is remarkable and forgettable. As an actor, it's challenging to be able to be engaging, and at the same time, people are going to forget you in the same breath if they're ever talking to law enforcement or anything like that. He's got to be a chameleon that kind of just disappears. That's what we're working on now is understanding what the Nicoletti family's gotten into, what they've been doing in the world of grifting, how their choices are affecting Charlie personally. He's pretty unlucky in love, and all of a sudden he has this wonderful thing, all predicated on lies with a woman who works in law enforcement, and that puts his family and their livelihood and their world completely in danger. So it's complicated. I like that complexity.
What kind of different skins will Charlie be slipping into? And what type of con skills will you be showcasing, whether it's coin or card tricks?
The fundamentals of conning is reflecting who you're going after, reflecting their emotional state. If you're happy, I'm happy. If you're sad, I'm sad. If you're anxious, I'm anxious. It's more that skill set to read people and understand how to get them into where you want them to be in order to take advantage of what it is you're wanting from them — that's probably the best skill to have in the world of cons. Yeah, we've got some slight of hand. We've got card tricks, magic kind of things, but it's less about the mechanics and more about the psychology behind it. So as we're pulling these cons and shifting through this world and paying back our debt from the Irish mob catching us conning them out of 10 million dollars crypto, we have to find targets that, one, fit within our moral code, because we don't take from people that aren't deserving of it. And two, we've got to make sure that we are clean in the act, whether it's popping in as caterers and then going a little further to con an ambassador, posing as a photo crew, to a little later on being a gunrunner who's very, very, very, very, very flashy in all his Gucci drippings and designer gold and all of that. It's creating these characters that are believable, they're grounded, we could see who they are, but also making them very distinctly different from everyman Charlie.
Identity will clearly be a theme in a show like this, and Charlie seems to be bound by family — and hemmed in by it. He has made sacrifices for his family in this line of work, and he's tortured to be hiding this secret that has impacted his personal life.
It makes him a good bad guy. That's a play on the words two-fold. He's good morally; his heart's in the right place. But he is also a bad guy, in terms of profession. But he's also talented at what he does. He's a good bad guy. He can excel in that world where he doesn't excel in his personal life. Historically for years that had happened to me, where my personal life always took second seat to my professional life. My professional life was always firing on all cylinders and doing really well, and I never really understood the need for success in personal life. But I can definitely relate to Charlie's struggles or desires to have that and want that, and understand that there's got to be shifts in his professional space.
ABC Milo Ventimiglia and Catherine Haena Kim on 'The Company You Keep'
How would you describe the dynamic between Charlie and Emma? Exploring intimacy and honesty while holding fast to their secrets must be an exhausting highwire act for each of them.
He's hiding it from her out of judgment. "She's not going to accept this side of my life. Who I am and how she feels about me is not big enough for her to accept that I'm also a criminal." And that's Charlie's torture. Emma's is very different. She's hiding something, but she's hiding it for good reason. National security. The good and the just. And it's also operational security. She can't let people know what she does because of the sensitive nature of what it is that she does. And that's one of those unfortunate positions. If you pick that line of work, or that line of work picks you, you make a choice, and your life is not exactly your life anymore. So, the complications that happen with just simply two people who find love for one another. Everything is going to get in their way, including themselves.
What immediately struck you about your chemistry with Catherine?
She was in the first round of tapes that we saw for Emma. And I remember sitting with Russ and watching tapes, and sitting with Julia and watching tapes, and thinking to myself, "Let us keep her in the mix." There was something that was vulnerable and strong and honest about her portrayal of Emma that always rose to the top of however many tapes we saw, however many auditions there were. And then once we got in front of one another, it just made sense. She understood Emma, and she also understood the level of growth that she needed to make this fully formed character real. Also, there was a very strong willingness and want from Catherine to portray this strong Asian American woman on camera and represent. And it's wonderful. You want to work with people that want to be there. She very much wants to be there, and her talent matches her want, which is comforting for me, not only as a scene partner, but also as a producer.
The pilot introduces viewers to several criminals involved in the largest drug trafficking ring in Europe, and it involves that 10-million dollar debt hanging over Charlie and his family. Will that story continue throughout the entire season, with each episode also containing a con of the week?
That's exactly what it is. What ABC was wanting was to have a con procedural with a lot of serialization story happening for the growth of the characters. I would love the show to be all about character. But if there are neatly packed, neatly wrapped stories about cons that are happening with this through line of how the Nicolettis are now in debt to the Irish mob, that's the way it's going to be. And that's the kind of structure and the shape that it takes. Felisha Terrell, who plays Daphne Finch, is too fierce of an actor to just be the one-off, like, "Oh, that's the opening con?" No, no, no, no, no. We have an opportunity with her talent. We have an opportunity with her character. We have an opportunity to tell this larger, higher-stakes game that's happening for Charlie, for the Nicoletti family, for the Irish mob, for Emma Hill at the CIA, as well as how it potentially can tie into her political dynasty family.
It's such an ambitious show creatively, but it is truly five different shows. You have Charlie and Emma, you have Charlie as a con man, you have Emma as CIA officer. And then you have Charlie's family and everything going on with that — his sister, the wonderful Sarah Wayne Callies, being a single mom of a deaf girl [Shaylee Mansfield], his father's [William Fichtner] memory loss and how that impacts his mom [Polly Draper]. And then on the other side, everything that Emma is dealing with her family, with her brother [Tim Chiou] running for the Senate and her father [who was a former governor and is played by James Saito]. And the duality between those two worlds. They're all kind of criminals, just wearing different hats.
ABC Catherine Haena Kim and Milo Ventimiglia on 'The Company You Keep'
The dynamics of an entire family of con artists are inherently fraught. When your parents are con artists, do you choose this life or are you just drawn into the fold? How much agency did Charlie have in that arena? Can you ever fully trust a family member who lies for a living?
We do have an episode coming up that gets into the history of the Nicoletti family, where we're starting to understand where it comes from, the world of grifting, how it started with Leo and Fran, and Fran's involvement, and then how it blended into their kids upbringing, running scams at horse racing tracks and whatnot when they were young, and then just finding a natural proclivity for it. Like, Charlie's really f---ing good at it. To his detriment. He knows that's the sword he's got to fall on. He can succeed and he can look out for his family. And short of the blind side of love that happens to him in the pilot, hopefully that doesn't happen to him again.
What appealed to you about bringing the show to a broadcast network? Some called This Is Us the last big network TV hit, but obviously you see more potential there.
I'm a product of broadcast. I really, truly am. I mean, everything that I've done is broadcast from Heroes to Gilmore Girls. The only thing that I think I did on the other side was Mob City. That was basic cable. It wasn't even cable-cable. There's a trend for actors thinking they can push the envelope in cable. And that's true. You can toy with storylines and characters, language and subject matter. You can push the limit a lot more, but I find that there's still a lot of room for good storytelling and elevated storytelling that can happen in broadcast. And as long as broadcast is embracing me, I'm going to embrace it. Even down to standards and practices. [Laughs.] Just the other day, I'm like, "Wait a minute. We're Sundays at 10 p.m. What kind of language can we get away with? How far can we actually push things to give an audience a closer-to-cable experience?"
And also what's nice about staying within the Disney ecosystem, we've got ABC and then we're on Hulu. We've got two bites at the apple. There's two different audiences to hit; it's a much larger net that you're casting than just a paid programmer like HBO or a subscription-based [service] like Netflix. There's something exciting about that. And I still love the idea that anybody can turn on ABC, wherever you happen to be, and you can watch our show for free. That's truly priceless.
What's one thing about this show that you can guarantee?
Fun. Just fun. There's action, there's excitement, there's romance, there's deep emotional notes. It's enjoyable. We're not going to bang someone over the head with a message — we're going to just tell a story and show you these characters that are experiencing things. Hopefully people don't find themselves too similar to Charlie professionally, but maybe personally they can understand what he's going through. Or they can look at Emma and not understand what level of national security it takes to hang on to being a CIA officer, but they can identify with a woman who just wants to be in love and find someone to trust. I think there's just a lot of fun to be had.
How do I know you're not conning me right now?
That's the trouble, man. You have no idea.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
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