NEW YORK: With exotic locations, an international cast and plots that involve tracking serial criminals across European borders, Crossing Lines, which debuts on US television today, aims to set itself apart from other police dramas.
The series, created by Ed Bernero, formerly of Criminals Minds and Rola Bauer, of Munich-based Tandem Communications, follows a small, elite unit of investigators from the United States and Europe working for the International Criminal Court to solve cross-border crimes.
Award-winning actor Donald Sutherland, who plays ICC prosecutor Michel Dorn, said the key to the series is that it is not a typical police drama showing how crimes are solved.
“It is observational. It is about people and the inter-relationship between those people and what they observe and why their smartness, the sensibility of that smartness, is what makes them good,” he explained in an interview.
Sutherland, who won an Emmy and Golden Globe award as best supporting actor for Citizen X and a Golden Globe award for the historical drama Path to War, said his character is very loosely based on Luis Moreno Ocampo, the first prosecutor at the ICC. Sutherland said Ocampo approached him at an airport, and asked if he was doing a project about the International Criminal Court and then introduced himself.
“We had the most wonderful conversation. He said, ‘I always wear a black tie.’ So, if you look at the series, after the first episode my character always wears a black tie.”
The actor described his rather mysterious character, Dorn, as “an honest man, a true man and he has suffered a lot,” adding that he also adores women.
The most difficult aspect of portraying Dorn, he said, was finding the truth in the character and displaying it.
Reuters
