Heroes Unmasked (2007) s01e10 Episode Script

- Sylar.
- It's Sylar.
- Sylar.
- I didn't kill these people, Sylar did.
- I can't control it.
- Find Sylar.
- You made me this way.
- Take him out.
I made you a murderer? He may be out of the shadows, but he's darker than ever.
The sinister Sylar is here to steal your powers.
Any show like this is going to depend heavily on villains.
He's very creepy and very scary.
It was a vileness that's born, and a mercilessness that's born.
He is the embodiement of what happens when you like your ability too much.
It was very important that we had somebody who represented this phenomenon going very, very wrong.
He become power-hungry and that's definetly dangerous.
These powers are not all good, and it really depends on who has them as to whether it's gonna be used for good or for bad or as to it's gonna be used at all.
If you're predisposed to doing good and you can walk through walls, then you may walk through a wall to save somebody's life.
If you're predisposed to doing something bad, then you may walk through a wall in order to rob something.
It's him! It's Sylar! The first eight episodes all you hear about is this terrible killer.
- This is Barstow all over again.
- It's Sylar.
There is no Sylar.
You see him in shadow, you don't really have any idea of what he looks like.
I'm running from people he has a baseball cap on, a long black trenchcoat.
There was a lot of speculation as to whether or not he was a member of the cast and that's why we kept in on the shadows.
And that really was just to build up his presence.
Very early on in the series Parkman and Hanson come across Sylar in a way that is so scary.
You okay? What we originally shot was: "I shoot Sylar, he gets up and then he just goes bum, bum, bum, bum" and takes off, like Spider-Man.
But it was too much too early on in the series, to do something like that.
The less you see sometimes, your imagination's gonna take you to a place that's much darker, much lighter, much funnier sometimes, than what we can deliver on screen.
It was really cool to be the first one.
I mean, I shoot the guy! I shot him, we have a history.
So later on, in the series, when I'm, you know, when I face him, it's gonna be really interesting.
What's going on? What are you doing here? Sylar.
He's killed again.
I've killed a family, killed Charlie.
The first murder for me, the first murder that I actively committed as an actor on the show, was Jackie, the cheerleader.
And that was a mistaking murder, of course.
That was all something that we had to do a number of times.
You do a backplate, you do Jackie, you do the prosthetic, we do the blood and light, and that's all with a locked-off camera and what they do is to marry all those things together.
But of course he wasn't always Sylar.
So what turned this withdrawn watchmaker into a ticking time bomb? Gabriel Grey was nobody who desperately wanted to be somebody.
A really sort of isolated, almost lonely watchmaker? In Tim's initial conception of Sylar, he was actually a priest.
And we sort of found that that was somewhat limiting in terms of where we would gonna be able to tell the story.
We were limited in terms of you know, where that person's gonna live and what that person's gonna wear and who that person interacts with and, you know and in particular if you're gonna have any kind of romance with that character and it's odd to think about that when you're talking about, you know, a serial killer in our show.
But those are the kind of thinks that you do have to sort of take into consideration.
Can I help you? I hope so, mr.
Grey.
Meeting Chandra Suresh and discovering that he has something ticking inside him that would allow him to become significant, turns him all the way to the most, you know, to the darkest of places.
I can fix it.
My watch isn't broken.
Actually, it is.
I do very quickly exibit that sort of ability to know that his watch is broken, but I don't think it's enough to be classified as a power or as being special, I think it's more just a sharpening of all that detail that he's been engaged in for so long and, presumably, so alone.
I think we should prepare for the possibility that I may have been wrong, you may not have a special ability.
I'm so close.
I can feel it.
I think Sylar's a decision and I think Sylar's a very deliberate manifestation of aspects and realizations that Gabriel has made, through his work with Chandra.
And the realization that he isn't special but he possesses the knowledge to become special.
My name is Sylar.
Gabriel Sylar.
I don't think that he ever necessarily espects Brian Davis to come, so when he shows up it's like this: "Oh! Actually, who you are?" And now he's like on the line.
Then he wants to give his power away and doesn't want it anymore and I can't avert my mind around that, like: "How could you not want it?" And there's this thing that takes over, you know.
So then I so then I kill him.
Don't worry, Brian.
I can fix it.
It's an evolutionary imperative.
Then I steal his powers.
But how does the scalp-slicing Sylar actually collect the abilities? I think it's established that I gain whatever powers I take from the brains.
The brain controls every human action, voluntary or involuntary.
Every breath, every heartbeat, every emotion.
Chandra Suresh has this great line where he says that, you know, if the soul exists it exists in the brain.
This idea that somehow our essence is confined in this one part of our, you know, mysterious part of our body that's like a watch: if you cold figure it out and dissect the pieces you can make it all work and to work in a very efficient way.
It's a fascinating thing to a character like Sylar.
Nobody really asks the question of "what does Sylar do with the brain?" or "how does he actually take the ability?".
You know he opens their heads up and kills them, but what beyond that? Peter does it the nice and the peacy way.
He just hangs out with you and all of a sudden he can do what you can do.
Peter and Sylar are in some ways two halves of the same coin.
A kind of a ying to a yang.
Not that they balance each other out, but I mean, for light there is dark, for good there is bad.
My character is going away from himself, he's creating this other sort of entity, this other being, this other monster.
Peter's being this empathic character, this character who has a tremendous amount of heart.
Is that you, Peter? If it's you, then you're gonna die.
At 8:12, tonight.
- Don't go, Peter.
- I have to.
I have to.
You're just beginning to see Peter can absorb when he's near all the other Heroes, and I murder for them, I mean, it's just, it's different means to a similar end.
The only difference between the two of them is their own personal sense of what's moral and ethical.
That's it, you know.
But that's a really thin thread, actually.
Because then what it's really doing is rebasing in completely inhumanity.
Because their powers are somehow similar you can tell that they're on a crash course, heading for each other.
Run! Go! When Peter sort of discovers just who Sylar is, its impactfull, what he has to do is stop this person, this thing, this great power that can really destroy and kill a lot of the world.
You realize, during the course of the season, that you can do a lot with telekinesis.
It's a really, really good power.
Like, if you get that, like pretty much everything can be like: "Well, I was telling you, that is easy!", you know.
'Cause there are all these other people that are like: "Oh, what power did he use for that?".
And, like, all these conversations always reduce to "is telekinesis, wasn't it?" When you have a need for or a desire for power, it's probably indicative of a real weakness.
I always wished that a stranger would come tell me my family wasn't really my family.
I mean, ther weren't bad people, they were just insignificant.
And I wanted to be different.
With him is a combination of sort of social upbringing or sort of lackness of social interaction.
As Sylar's trail of atrocities continues, the special make-up effects team would enjoy creating the carnage of corpses he left behind.
One of our favorites is a there's a fellow sitting and eating his breakfast cereals and he was frozen mid-range with the spoon on the way up to his mouth, and he also has the top of his head removed, which at some point, during the day, he got filled with fruit, if I remember right.
It was a giant fruit ball once we got done with him.
For the art department, the look of Gabriel Grey's world was inspired by the intricacies of his profession.
Alan Arkish, the director, wanted to really use the sound of clocks, and ticking and the image of clocks.
I felt like, in order to really make that work, was just to paint the walls black, and that you'd only see the clocks, it's the only you'd see and you'd feel the smallness of the room, the darkness of this room.
And the only thing you would see were these clocks and this man.
So it was really about putting all the attention, as much as I could, on the actor.
That watch shop was just so overwhelming to me when I walked in for the first time.
So much detail went into that house, remarkable.
Everything about it is so precise and so overwhelming sensorally that defines a lot about that character before he even opens his mouth.
We wanted to kind of give him kind of a creepy, you know, look to him, something that is just a little off.
And so I got him glasses, and he's got these several different lenses that I got for his glasses.
And the tools, very precise, precision tools.
Had to find the crystal that would be perfect, that would fit in his hand.
Not too heavy, not too small, that's sharp enough, and then make a rubber copy of that crystal that he kills that character with.
His hair is very slicked, and his clothes are very pristine.
You know, he looks like a little nerdy, very well put together boy and so, as we see him evolving into his Sylar character, we suddenly see a very different person emerging.
On Heroes we do thing sort of massively, so we've a massive, massive blue-screen and we're doing a shot with a massive, massive Techno-Crane of Sylar standing over the entire city of New York.
That was scary.
Well it was, like, this platform, right? And a double blue-screen in so that it would look like I'm standing on the roof of the building.
I was probably about 15 or 20 feet up in the air.
I was standing with my toes just hang over the ledge.
I was looking at the camera, but the camera was moving so i didn't have a stationary frame of reference.
So as the camera went up it felt like it was pulling me off the roof so that I was like, really, actually God great, thank you! I'm not a fussy actor: I don't like to make trouble, I just like to do my job, hit my mark, but I was, like, praying I don't fall off the 20-foot wall of that to be true.
I've never been on a show on which the special effects were so well executed.
So, to be a part of the process of making it a witnessing and being made and then to see that even for us it's a real thrill because you got to see where it's come from and how it looked like nothing like that when you did it.
- Zach has all the power.
- Power! - And he misuses it.
- Misuses it.
But you have to tune in to find out how and why.
Acting since the age of 11, the role of Sylar is Zachary Quinto's biggest to date.
As he was not cast until the series had already started airing, for the first seven episodes the shadow you think you actually see, was played by a stunt double.
Zach's performance of the power-thieving murderer has captivated both the fans and the Heroes team alike.
I remember several members of the cast coming and saying: "This is Sylar? We were sort of figuring he was gonna be like this big, scary guy", and and we just sort of smile and said: "I think you have to wait to see what Zach is like on camera".
The watchmaker son became a watchmaker.
He's so capable of giving both an incredibly, a disturbingly sympathetic performance, and at the same time being able to turn it on a dime and become this ruthless killer.
Murder.
I'm so glad my little daughter got to meet him because then she wasn't scared anymore, 'cause he's the nicest person in the world.
Zach's a good guy.
He's very much not Sylar, like, in real life.
'Cause you do begin to identify with several aspects of your character that's probably just healthier to keep them separately.
I'm not Sylar.
I went to a movie and I was like buying tickets, so my friends would be parking the car and I turned around in this courtyard to sort of just wait and there was this couple like, "Don't eat our brains!".
Like, really dramatically.
And I'm sure that you know I'm else and I won't.
You know, I probably seem less approachable because of the character that I play, but maybe that's not always a bad thing, you know.
The night that they put us against one another, when we had these glaring stares at one another, we just ended bursting out with laughters.
Action! So, it's often a fun and humouros thing to film.
It's kind of a dream, sometimes.
Does it need to be higher? I got the job right as the show premiered, so sort of, like, before everybody knew how huge it was gonna be and that sort of escalated, escalated it's been amazing to be a part of it and everybody's so open and excited about what's happening, so I feel really grateful.
- Mark! - Action! Next time Sylar makes it clear that there's only one power he wants.
Here I am alive and well, and as soon as I get out I'm gonna collect one more ability from you daughter.
Sweet, innocent.
- That's enough! - Ripe, indestructible? I said that's enough, Gabriel.
My name is Sylar! And cut!