Actor Tim DeKay never quite grew up. He still loves pretending, he says, in a hotel suite, crowded with people from the USA Network."As a kid I always loved playing cowboys and Indians, and it was always freeing for me to really be the Indian, not be the cowboy. As I got older I thought, 'I want to be a lawyer,' 'I want to be a doctor.' But I realized I don't really want to be those, I just want to PLAY them, behave like those people."
He's been behaving like other people for most of his adult life, but folks know him best from his turn as Jonesy, the gimpy carny roustabout in HBO's "Carnivale."
"'Carnivale' what I loved about it, it was one of the only shows or sets that when you wrapped, you didn't go home. You still stayed. When you're acting in a show that takes place in contemporary times, you're pretending. But if it takes place in the '30s you're twice removed from reality, so you're really pretending. And when you drive down Highway 118 for 18 miles, take an exit and drive on a paved road for five and then a dirt road and drive for three, and come up over a crest and there is the Ferris wheel and the tent — you're there."
But DeKay, 46, finds himself somewhere else now. In his travel-worn overcoat and regulation gray suit, he plays the straight arrow FBI agent who's coerced into joining forces with a sly con man (Matt Bomer) on USA's "White Collar" premiering Oct. 23.
"White Collar" marks his 11th pilot and the battle weary DeKay says he didn't harbor high hopes when he got the call to audition.
"You look at a pilot as something that is an extremely well paying guest star until you hear, 'We've been picked up.' You can get your hopes up too high," he says.
Matt Bomer had already been cast when DeKay tried out for the part. "'It was fantastic,' they said. I went in for the studio execs. They said, 'Great, can we test for USA?' I was doing three episodes of 'The New Adventures of Old Christine' and they let me out during lunch and said, 'Go test.' And I tested, and by the end of lunch, I got a call saying, 'It's you.'"
But it hasn't always been him. By now DeKay knows to read between the lines. "You learn to decipher what the expressions of the producers are: 'Oh, we thought Tim was a little too rugged for this role.' Which mean not good looking enough. Or, 'He was a little too earthy for this role,' which might mean I didn't come off as intelligent as they might have hoped. They're very political with these," he smiles.
Married to former actress Elisa Taylor and the father of two children, 10 and 7, DeKay confesses he and Elisa went through a rough patch when they first came to L.A. from New York.
"I was working a lot and I was away a lot and there was a lot of difficulty being away so much of the time. This could be one of the toughest times. We got through it by really communicating and my staying committed. And that changed me. I don't think I really knew what commitment was prior to that. I had an idea. My parents had separated when I was 10, so it was really foreign for me to stay in it even though it was very difficult to work things out.
"My instinct was to say, 'You know what? Let's call it a day. It's been good.' It would've been easier. But we didn't. We stayed in it, and that changed me greatly. And I'm so glad because now I've got two kids and now they see that mom and dad are together."
Becoming a father skewed his priorities, he says, leaning closer to speak above the din. "When both my children were born, you realize, 'Oh, this is really the A story in my life right now, everything else is a B story. It's like the Peace Corps: the toughest job you'll ever love."
Though acting was foreign to them, DeKay says his parents always supported his wayward desire to be a performer. "My father wanted to make sure I got a master's so I could possibly fall back on teaching and I thought that was smart actually. I didn't fall back on anything fortunately. I've always made a living at it. I do go to colleges and do seminars because I do love to teach. It would not be a falling back of sorts. It would be just another way to talk about pretending."
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Multi-award winning journalist Paula Zahn is back on television in Investigation Discovery's new "On the Case" premiering Oct. 18. Zahn thinks the show is unique in several ways. "This is an hour-long show focusing in on a single story, heavily interview-driven, and it's actually one of the most interesting assignments I've had in my career," she says.
"I've had the opportunity to do a lot of different work over the years which I'm proud of. But, to me, the most exciting thing about this format that we've paraded on this show is that we have the luxury of time to spend, sometimes months at a time, on a story, which allows me, as the producer and reporter on the story, a lot more time for prep," she said. "And I think that you'll see, once the show is finally on the air, these stories are absolutely fascinating. You couldn't make them up if you tried. They are stories about deceit, all different kinds of betrayal, about murder. But at their core, they are about characters in the story."
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Joan Baez will be the subject of PBS' "American Masters" on Wednesday. She says performing today is totally different from what it was when she started. "For the first 20 years, I didn't have to think about it. I just opened up my mouth and sang. And then, all of a sudden, lo and behold, I was mortal. What a nuisance. So I had to begin coaching, and I've been having to work with it ever since. It was a long tunnel of going through having to change all the inner workings because when I sang without any coaching, it was — of course, everything I was doing was against how to keep the vocal working. So then I had to go through all this great struggle. And it is still a struggle. It's a huge struggle to keep the voice working.
"If I stay with it and work very, very hard, the voice continues to get better. It's lower in pitch, and I'll never have that high little vibrato ever again. But I have a lot of voice and changes and depth in place of that. I'm happy with it."
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Whoopi Goldberg, of all people, is executive producing a new game show on the Science Channel called "Head Games," which is supposed to teach us science without suffering.
The show's host is funnyman Greg Proops of "Whose Lines is it Anyway?" Goldberg confesses she was no science whiz when she was in school. "Well, I liked science, but it didn't seem that it was practical information for me. It wasn't fun. You know, there were things I would have liked to have known, but I knew I was never going to be an astronaut, so my interest in science only went so far. Now, if someone had said, 'Whoop, you could actually be an astronaut' and mean it, I probably would have done it." The show premieres Saturday.
