Eon Magazine — Highlander 4: Endgame Promotion

“Byrnes, Baby, Byrnes” by Abbie Bernstein, Eon Magazine, September 21, 2000

Going on a Car Chase with Joe, Duncan, and Methos in Highlander Endgame

“Byrnes, Baby, Byrnes”

An Interview with Jim Byrnes by Abbie Bernstein, Eon Magazine, September 21, 2000

Jim Byrnes Plays a Regular Joe in “Highlander: Endgame”

Highlander, Endgame Print

Even — maybe especially — if you’re a 400-year-old Immortal Scotsman who beheads enemies with a sword, there are times when what you need most in life is a loyal friend who’s a regular joe. Specifically, you need Joe Dawson, the mortal character played winningly by Jim Byrnes in the last five of HIGHLANDER: THE SERIES’ six seasons and in the new film HIGHLANDER: ENDGAME.

Joe, as HIGHLANDER viewers know, is a Watcher, a member of a secret society who observe and record the doings of Immortals, but supposedly never interfere. It’s Joe’s job to chronicle the doings of Duncan MacLeod (Adrian Paul, who starred in the TV series and in ENDGAME), but he’s been putting friendship before Watcher law for some time now, sharing information and sometimes physically coming to the rescue of the long-lived hero. Without giving too much away, Joe runs true to form in ENDGAME.

Byrnes, speaking by phone, says he first got wind of the possibility of a fourth HIGHLANDER feature about three years ago.

“There was talk of it before the series even before the series ended, which was November of ’97, so that’s three years,” says Byrnes. “It took another year and a half after that for it to actually come to fruition, but there was always talk. I knew that [producers Peter Davis and William N. Panzer, who have been with the franchise from the first film onward] did in fact want to incorporate concepts from the television series into the feature film. They had done HIGHLANDER 3 [starring Christopher Lambert, who stars as Duncan’s Immortal kinsman Connor MacLeod in all of the feature films and guest-starred in the series’ first episode] while we were in production on the TV series. [HIGHLANDER 3] had nothing to do with any of the ideas from the series, but then when they decided to do [a fourth feature], from the get-go, there was this idea to incorporate ideas from the series into the film. One of the concepts they wanted to carry on from the series was the Watchers, and since I kind of embodied that for them, I ended up having a piece.”

Jim Byrnes is just a “regular Joe” on a visit to France.

It was by no means a sure thing at first that the Joe Dawson character would be part of the ENDGAME action. “When I knew it was gonna happen was when the check was in the bank,” Byrnes laughs. “In terms of putting the thing together, there were probably six scripts that went together before they actually had a shooting script. I didn’t see any of these [earlier] scripts, but they apparently took lots of different directions. I have to give a nod to the guys over at Davis Panzer. Over a period of five years on the series, we had established who this guy was and which direction he worked in. They kept the Joe character in [ENDGAME] and true to what I had done. It didn’t change much from the concept on the series. I think that’s basically due to Bill and Peter’s input.”

Byrnes, a native of St. Louis, MO, began acting when he was in high school. “The day before I started school, I broke my arm playing football, and so I was unable to go out for any sports stuff,” he says. “There was a school play casting, and I went out and walked on the stage and felt like I was at home. I had a really good teacher in high school who got me involved with professional theatre. I worked as an apprentice at a summer stock company, and then got a scholarship to study at Boston University School of Fine Arts.”

Byrnes moved to Canada in 1970. “I’ve been back [to the U.S.] a lot, but I came out to the west coast [of Canada] in the early ’70s and made a lot of friends and sort of fell in love with the place.”

In 1972, Byrnes lost both legs in a vehicular accident. For the next 15 years, Byrnes worked primarily as a singer/songwriter/musician, but he resumed acting on a regular basis when he took on the role of Lifeguard in the long-running TV series WISEGUY. Other roles followed and in 1993, he found himself in the world of sword-wielding Immortals.

Joe Dawson was introduced in the first episode of HIGHLANDER’s second season and slated to reappear only three more times. However, when Byrnes “sparkled off the screen,” in the words of HIGHLANDER series staffer Donna Lettow, he was made a regular. “The character seriously evolved,” Byrnes observes. “It was extremely vague in its original conception.”

In fact, the role was initially intended for David McCallum or David Warner, British actors noted for their dry reserve, as opposed to the earthy American presence of Byrnes. When neither McCallum nor Warner were available, Byrnes says, “I just happened to be in town [Vancouver, where half of the series was filmed] and available. It was fortuitous. We rewrote a little bit to pull it off.”

Actor Jim Byrnes of HIGHLANDER: THE SERIES spent 15 years of his life as a singer, songwriter and musician.

Byrnes says he put some of his own persona into Joe. “Joe and I share a lot of similar characteristics,” he observes. “We have very great differences between us, too, but I brought a lot of experience to the fore. That’s what you do as an actor — you take words on paper and turn it into, hopefully, a real person that people can believe. I find a great way to do that is use your own experience and keep it simple.”

In the beginning, Joe’s function was mainly to provide exposition, but as the character evolved, he became the focal point of a number of the series’ recurring themes. “The first few episodes were really a lot of names and dates,” Byrnes recalls. “I kept tying [plot points] together. Through the entire run of the show, they used me that way. It was not until [Joe] really started getting involved in [Duncan’s] life and doing these things [he] wasn’t supposed to do and breaking the rules that things started to move. It became a big plot point, because [of] the questions it asked about what’s more important — loyalty or the rules, or where do you draw the line?”

It wasn’t hard to recreate the dynamic between Dawson and MacLeod in ENDGAME, Byrnes reports. Likewise, it was no problem re-establishing the onscreen rapport between the Watcher and Peter Wingfield’s 5,000-year-old character Methos. “Pete and I see one another a lot. We’re friends and we go out and drink beer together, so that relationship, I fell back into quite easily. And also with Adrian. Once you get the first day’s shooting, everything was kind of back to normal.”

While the production on ENDGAME moved through several countries, all of Byrnes’ scenes were filmed in Romania. “I was there for about five-and-a-half weeks,” he says. “The shoot went on for two-and-a-half months. I found it fascinating; I had a ball. The local crew people there were extremely enthusiastic, hard-working — right into things. There were some great locations. I mean, sets — you couldn’t have built some of this stuff. And there it was for us to walk right into. This is not a scene I was in, but they shot in these salt mines that were absolutely phenomenal. A city street at night, dressed properly — there’s a couple of scenes where the look is very New York [the fictional setting].”

There was, however, a downside. “There were difficulties involved,” Byrnes acknowledges, “just because what we’re used to in the West is not always readily available in Eastern Europe. Getting a roll of tape is tough over there — you had to bring tape in from England, for example. [The production team was] just trying to find things that we take for granted. You’d have to find a way [outside of] the country to get them. Every day, there was some sort of a challenge in finding the simplest sort of gear that would be readily available here and there it just didn’t exist.”

A scene in which Byrnes and two other characters have a conversation in a moving car, with the on-camera vehicle being pulled along in what’s known as a “tow shot” by the truck containing the camera, turned out to be one of these challenges. “Trying to find a tow truck over there is a whole different ball of wax. I think there were two trucks in the entire country, and we had to shoot it twice, because the [first] night that we shot, everything was unusable because there was a squealing noise that came from the rig, from the hook-up.”

This was, Byrnes points out, more immediately frustrating for those behind the camera than for the actors. “All I had to do was show up and use whatever they had,” he says. “I didn’t have to provide anything for them other than my imagination — I kind of take that with me wherever I go,” he laughs.

Byrnes has now put his imagination in the service of Joe Dawson and HIGHLANDER in a whole new way, contributing the short story “Letters From Viet Nam” to the HIGHLANDER THE SERIES: AN EVENING AT JOE’S. JOE’S is an anthology of short fiction edited by HIGHLANDER staffer Gillian Horvath, with all entries written by cast, crew and staff members of the show.

Can a mortal man survive among the Immortals of HIGHLANDER? Watcher Jim Byrnes sees to it.

“There had been talk [of the anthology] toward the end of the series,” Byrnes explains. “It kind of sat in my head as to exactly what I was going to do, and then when the idea finally came to fruition, and they said, ‘Okay, we’re actually going to do this,’ I wrote the stuff in one afternoon.”

Like the actor who plays him, Joe Dawson is a Viet Nam veteran. Byrnes’ story is exactly what its title implies, seen from Joe’s point of view. “It was taking my own experience and filtering it through the experience of this character I had played for five years,” Byrnes relates, “and just putting him through the wringer and see what came out. It was quite a fun process. There were obviously things in the character that you invent, and then I took some of my own real-life experience and put them in the blender.”

While Byrnes is a prolific songwriter with several albums to his credit, so far as fiction goes, “This is the first time I’ve had anything published since I was in university and had poetry in the university journal.”

“I’ve been working on a couple of different scripts, so it’s a good experience in, ‘Okay, this is actually going to be [published] and I’m going to do something with this,’ just in terms of the focus of what you do in writing,” Byrnes says. “It gave me a good start and in fact some inspiration for some of the other projects I’m working on.”

These projects include a one-man stage musical that Byrnes is writing/composing, a collection of stories and songs seen from that point of view of a character he describes as, “A step away from myself — a sort of invented self.” He is in his third year of producing and starring in the Canadian TV variety series THE JIM BYRNES SHOW, and has recently filmed guest stints on the genre dramas MYSTERIOUS WAYS and FIRST WAVE, as well as contributing his voice to the animated series ACTION MAN.

As to whether or not he’ll be back as Joe Dawson, Byrnes says, “I know that if [in] the first couple of weeks [of ENDGAME’s North American release], they make their money back, there are plans to jump right back in with another one,” he says enthusiastically. “My run with HIGHLANDER is a lot of fun and I’ve met some great people and got to do, I think, some good work, so given the opportunity to do it again, sure, I’d do it again.”