ISSUE 25.3
3/23/2001

iF - FEATURES - FIRST-RUN MOVIES

EXCLUSIVE: ACTOR PETER WINGFIELD ON "HIGHLANDER" AND "QUEEN OF SWORDS"

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN

[photo] Actress Tessie Santiago and Peter Wingfield share a moment on set.

If one looks at his entire body of work, Peter Wingfield usually isn’t playing people who carry swords in independently-made productions – it just seems that way. He made such an indelible impression as the 5,000-year-old blade-wielding Immortal Methos on HIGHLANDER: THE SERIES that his character, initially conceived as a one-time guest, was written into the fabric of the show and then into the film HIGHLANDER: ENDGAME, released theatrically last year and now out on home video. Now Wingfield is voicing the character on the new flash-animation Internet series THE METHOS CHRONICLES, while co-starring as the similarly-armed (if less indestructible) Dr. Robert Helm in the syndicated action/adventure TV series QUEEN OF SWORDS.

For that matter, there’s a direction connection between Methos and Helm, Wingfield explains in a phone interview. "David Abramowitz [QUEEN OF SWORDS originator and executive producer] was the creative consultant on HIGHLANDER. I first met him in ’95, when I started to play Methos. He was on a HIGHLANDER convention cruise [in November, 1999] and he said he’d like to have lunch and have a chat about a new project that he was just starting up. As yet, the series wasn’t financed, but he was pretty confident that at some point down the line, it was gonna happen."

[photo] Santiago with KUNG FU man David Carradine making a cameo.

QUEEN, as its title suggests, centers around a female masked avenger in 1800s California, but there are still plenty of male characters. "There were a couple of roles that [Abramowitz] was interested in talking to me about," Wingfield says. "One of them was Dr. Helm, the character that I’m now playing. The other was actually Grisham [played by Anthony Lemke], the bad guy’s sidekick. At the convention, David Abramowitz actually managed to wangle round one of the questions that the audience asked, to asking people whether they thought I worked best as a good guy or a bad guy."

Wingfield laughs when asked what about the response. "It was very much split down the middle. Which I guess is a reflection on the Methos character. You never really knew with him which side of the line he came down on, and there were people who liked the character for his openness, sensitivity, his vulnerability, and there were people that liked the character when, in the flashbacks, you found out he was one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the baddest of all bad guys."

[photo] Sly and slippery Valentine Pelka in general garb.

When one looks at the big picture, there’s something appropriate about the fact that Wingfield wound up as an integral part of the HIGHLANDER universe – both the actor and the franchise have singular histories.

HIGHLANDER has one of the more unique sagas in the annals of entertainment. The mythology of sword-wielding Immortals now includes four feature films, an enormously popular live-action TV series that lasted six seasons, a less popular spin-off that lasted one season, and now a flash-animation web series, with overlapping characters and actors.

Wingfield has had an unusual path of his own. True, there are other actors who, like Wingfield, have come onto a series to do a one-shot role and have proved so popular that eventually they are written into the regular cast. Fewer performers, however, wind up recreating their TV roles on the big screen. Fewer still – if any – trained to become doctors before making the switch to acting.