BC Living
How to Support BC Wineries Now
Embark on Culinary Adventures: 5 Must-Try Solo Dining Experiences Around BC
You Gotta Try this in April 2024
4 Tips on Balancing a Nutritious Diet with a Side of Indulgence
Choosing Connection: A BC Family Day Pledge to Prioritize Presence Over Plans
Embracing Plant-Based Living this Veganuary and Beyond
Inviting the Steller’s Jay to Your Garden
6 Budget-friendly Holiday Decor Pieces
Dream Home: $8 Million for a Modern Surprise
7 BC Retreats Where Solo Travellers Can Find Inner Peace and Wellness
Protected: Spring into Fun in Kamloops: The Best Events in the City
Travel Light, Travel Right: Minimalist Packing Tips for Solo Explorers
BC Distilled
Melodies and Museums: Solo-Friendly Entertainment for the Independent Traveller
Arts Club Theatre Company Celebrates 60 Years
8 Gadgets and Gear for Your Solo Adventures
A Solo Traveller’s Guide to Souvenir Hunting in BC
Sḵwálwen Botanicals – Changing the Face of Skincare
An Oscar winner lends some added star power to a tense television hit
It’s common for television shows to add new regular cast members as they go along. Adding someone of the stature of Catherine Zeta-Jones? That’s not as common.
The Chicago Oscar winner and A Little Night Music Tony winner hasn’t been a stranger to TV in recent years, having appeared in the Lifetime movie Cocaine Godmother and the series Queen America and Feud: Bette and Joan, but it’s still major news for her to join Prodigal Son. The hit Fox drama introduced her in its early-March midseason finale, and she’s fully present as it resumes season two on Tuesday. She plays psychiatric-hospital doctor Vivian Capshaw, whose new association with serial killer Martin Whitly (Michael Sheen)—alias The Surgeon—generates unease and danger.
I was a fan of the show, Zeta-Jones explains. I gravitate to the kind of nuance of what I think is so different and powerful about Prodigal Son. It’s pretty good family drama, and it’s a dark family. And Michael Sheen [who grew up near Zeta-Jones in Wales], I’d never met before but I’ve admired from a distance. Even though we are the same age and we have all of these mutual friends, we’d never crossed. My mom and dad know his dad, so that was, of course, a huge pull for me. And the character was intriguing to me.
The arrival of Zeta-Jones has been a big deal for Prodigal Son‘s continuing stars, including Lou Diamond Phillips, who also directed the episode that brought her into the show. You don’t always know what you are going to get, he admits, and she is so gracious and so warm and so inclusive of everyone. From the moment she stepped on set, it was as if she’d been a part of the ensemble from the beginning. She came to play.
Zeta-Jones has not been the only member of her household to return to home screens lately, since her Oscar-winning husband Michael Douglas also has done it with Netflix’s The Kominsky Method, and picked up a Golden Globe in the process.
Historically in film and TV, family dramas are very powerful, the actress reasons. Every family can relate to something in there.
As it happens, Whoopi Goldberg played a part in Zeta-Jones hopping aboard Prodigal Son, since the fellow Academy Award winner gave the series an impromptu rave review on ABC’s The View just as Zeta-Jones was mulling joining the drama.
She just randomly gave it this incredible thumbs-up, and I’m lying there going, ‘That’s what I’m talking about! She knows.’ Michael [Douglas] was there, and he went, ‘Did you know they were going to say that?’ And I went, No. Great minds think alike, baby.’ That was, like, the stamp of approval that came from nowhere.
Prodigal Son airs Tuesday at 9:01 p.m. on Global & Fox