The Hunting Party started Season 2 with a bang and with two very special guest stars. Eric McCormack and his real-life son, Finn—making his acting debut—both star as serial killer Ron Simms in the episode, titled “Ron Simms.” Finn plays the younger version, while Eric plays the present version. And the character is truly a memorable one, in a bad way.
Fangirlish spoke to Eric and Finn McCormack about how it all came to be, seeing each other on set and The Hunting Party, and we started strong, with a nepotism joke. “I remember Finn saying, is this nepotism?” Eric shared. “I said, it was not your idea, and it was not my idea. I didn’t say anything. It was the producers who said, ‘What about if your son plays the young you?’ And I said, ‘Well, you haven’t even seen my son act? How do you know he acts?’ They said: ‘We just have a hunch.”’
Then “they said put him on tape, and suddenly 3 hours later, he had the job.” Which made dad really proud. “It was really exciting for me to watch him just sort of follow his instincts and get the role.”
For Eric McCormack, “it’s great fun to show up and play a well-written bad guy, and it’s sometimes easier than being the guys that have to solve the crimes week after week. So that was fun. And just the idea of how it happened for Finn, that there were flashbacks. No one wants to see me play a 25-year-old, so this worked. It worked out beautifully.”
And the fact that the character was pretty interesting helped Finn with this, his first role. “He’s an interesting one, I think. If you were to take a lot of the clips of my dad as older Ron Sims and review them, it seems like he’s a mastermind. And he’s figured out this crazy way in which he can go about meeting these people and continue his path of carnage. But when you get to watch the younger version of him, you put the pieces together pretty quickly, how kind of sad his situation is.”
“I mean, he’s not someone who’s necessarily maniacally preparing to kill his next victim in some gruesome way. He’s lonely, he’s sad. He’s traumatized, and for whatever reason, he believes that the best way he can connect with another person is through stillness, and that stillness he wants he gets through horrifying means. So, I think for the character, it’s like those little slivers of empathy that you have for a monster that could do such horrific things. Like, you can at least have the slight understanding of where it’s coming from, so I’d say that’s the big difference.”
And neither Eric nor Finn had to do much to fill out the pieces, Finn shared. “The script does such a wonderful job of giving us everything we need to know. So, from my perspective, being able to have that information definitely helps me get inside the brain and understand why he does the things he does.”
Eric agreed. “Sometimes you just have to get past the fact that it’s really fun to play a terrible guy. But when you get past that, and you realize he really is damaged goods, and our backstory was really handed to us of all the things that went wrong in Ron’s life, it does help you go okay. I get it. And there are slivers of sympathy you can play.”
All of this talk about getting into character and doing a good job of understanding the role brought back the emotions of seeing his son act, for Eric. “It was really emotional, because on the days that he was shooting, with the exception of the very rabbit bit at the end, they were his days, not my days, and I just sort of came in. I was like, ‘Is it okay if I sit here?’ and it was great that the producers were okay with that.”
“But they were also not paying attention to me; they were focused on the story, and on Finn telling it. So that was even better, just to be a fly on the wall as my mother used to say, and see it happening.”
We got to see it happen on our TV screens, too. And it was a pretty enjoyable ride.
New episodes of The Hunting Party Season 2 air on Thursdays on NBC.
