CraveOnline: “Murder in the First” is such a unique concept. Is the idea that by the end, you’ll be in the courtroom working on the trial?
Kathleen Robertson: Yeah, they want to structure it so that over the course of the 10 episodes, each element, from the two murders that happen in the pilot and around the midpoint we get into the trial and then the endpoint is the resolution of the storyline and where it goes.
Steven Bochco really wants to focus and example and really get into the idea of class and the idea of are we equal? Somebody who is wealthy and who has power, examines that person’s journey through the system versus the other murder that happens in the pilot, the supposed junkie guy on the street. What does that path look like versus the path of somebody who has every access and every opportunity to work the system?
A lot of it becomes about class and about the haves and the have nots. It’s very personal. There’s a lot of storylines to do with my character’s backstory and her personal life, so that really appealed to me too because I didn’t really want to do a procedural show where every week there’s a new body, every week there’s a new whodunnit kind of thing. That didn’t really appeal to me, so we’ll see. I read the first four episodes and they’re great. The pilot is kind of a jumping off point and then it gets very complicated and messy and dirty and all those good things.
Is the cast pretty much set, or is there still potential for new characters to come in for an episode at a time? Maybe a witness or something?
It’s a pretty big cast. I just found out that James Cromwell is going to be on the show so he’s a new character that they’re bringing in. He appears in the second episode and he’s playing the trial lawyer for Blunt, the character played by Tom Felton. It’s a really good cast. Richard Schiff is a regular on the show. It’s a really good cast.
How often in your career are you called upon to brush your teeth on camera?
Oh, because it’s in the pilot? I don’t know. I don’t know if I’ve ever really done that before. It might be my first.
Was Hildy’s hair what you came to the show with, or is that a practical way for a detective to do her hair?
You mean the shortness of it? I know for me it drives me crazy when I see a character of a cop or somebody in that world and they have this insane long, blown out babe hair, Victoria Secret hair. It just kills me and ruins it for me. So I was very anti going in that direction. I just wanted it to be no nonsense. A woman in that world doesn’t want to be looked at particularly and they want to blend in as much as possible. It felt like the right look for her.
How does her partnership with Terry develop?
Obviously that’s kind of the core of the show. If the show gets picked up for a second season, from what we’ve been told from the beginning is each season it’ll be a brand new cast and a brand new storyline, so Terry and Hildy will remain the core of the series. Everything will be seen through their eyes as the seasons progress if it gets picked up.
We’ve obviously all talked about is it romantic and will it become romantic? I don’t think it will. I feel like any time you do that or cross that line, where do you go from there? From all of the research that I’ve done in terms of a relationship between partners, especially when it’s male/female, it’s always very complex. They always have, a lot of times anyway, they have a sort of understanding of one another that’s deeper almost than maybe their current relationships or their past relationships. It’s a sort of knowing somebody in a way that isn’t typical. It’s very deep and it’s almost like being married without the sex.
How long have they been partners?
We’re kind of creating the backstory for them and working on being really specific about that. We’ve sort of come to the figure of five years.
How does Hildy feel about Erich Blunt before she started investigating the case? Did she know who he was before?
Yeah, she was absolutely aware of who he was. I don’t think she probably had much of an opinion about him. It’s not really her world and it’s not really her focus. She probably just had a preconceived idea of him being a very privileged, wealthy, smart, probably arrogant kid and that’s kind of it. So I think that when his name shows up on the iPad in the pilot, it would be the equivalent of Mark Zuckerberg or something like that where it’s like wait, how is this person involved in this? It makes absolutely no sense.
Does she think he’s guilty?
I think she does and it sort of vacillates a little bit. I think what happens in the second episode really throws her for a loop, so I think she’s much more suspicious of him than Terry. There’s definitely too many coincidences and too many things that are lining up for him not to be guilty in some way I think.
