Heroes News (Page 10)

The connections between Star Trek and Heroes continue.

Zachary Quinto, of course, is joining the next installment of this movie franchise - and in new casting news, it's been announced that another member of the original series is coming to Heroes for a bit.

Nichelle Nichols (Uhura) will be joining her Star Trek cast mate George Takei (Hikaru Sulu) on the NBC hit show next season.

According to reports, Nichols will have a recurring role on the show, appearing in five or six episodes.

Her addition was already hinted at recently by Heroes creator Tim Kring, when he told E! Online he was looking "for another face that will have a very similar impact" to genre fans as the casting of Takei did.

Heroes was the most successful drama series on NBC last year. Halfway through the first season, Takei joined the show as Kaito Nakamura, the father of a young Japanese Star Trek fan who can move through time and space using only his will.

Last month, word already leaked out that former Star Trek: Enterprise star Dominic Keating (Malcolm Reed) will be playing an Irish mobster during several episodes of the show's second season.

Sure, Heroes played a major role at Comic-Con this year. But that was a massive convention covering a countless number of movies and TV shows.

Now, however, it appears as though an event dedicated solely to our favorite show is headed to Great Britain.

The convention will be called Eclipse. It's scheduled as a three-day event that will run from March 14-16. And they've lined up at least one impressive star so far for an appearance: Zachary Quinto.

Here's how the official site describes this ground-breaking event:

Eclipse is set to be a fantastic 3-day UK event to celebrate the hit television series Heroes, from Friday 14th - Sunday 16th March 2008. This unofficial convention aims to bring together fans of the series from across the country to meet some the show's stars and enjoy various events over the weekend. There will be activities each day from guest talks and photograph sessions to quizzes and late night parties.

For more information on these, check out our events section. This event will take place in The Park Inn Hotel, Northampton for more information on this venue and room rates see our venue page.

The following is taken from The Sioux City Journal, chronicling the mass appeal of Heroes...

One year ago, Masi Oka was just hoping a little thing called Heroes would last six weeks. Now, the NBC drama is a worldwide phenomenon and Oka is an Emmy nominee.

"It's a dream come true," Oka says as he leads a tour around the series' sets. "Every day, I noticed something changing. A little kid would come up to me and ask for an autograph. A father would stop and say, 'Thank you for uniting my family.' People would be so nice... and all because the series touched them."

Considered a key bridge between network television and on-line broadcasting, Heroes has managed to create buzz in countries where it hasn't even aired.

Sendhil Ramamurthy (pictured) was at the French Open this spring and couldn't move without a crowd gathering. Tennis officials had to assign him an escort just to keep fans at bay.

"That's the power of the Internet," he says. "France hasn't gotten the show yet but people there are fully aware of it."

Tabloid reporters are savvy, too. Hayden Panettiere can't leave her home without photographers chronicling every move.

"You're like shark bait," she says. "Being a young female in Hollywood is no easy task."

Still, Panettiere is grounded. She has a curfew, household chores and "great parents" to make sure success doesn't change her.

"In the first season, we had no idea it had become a phenomenon," Ramamurthy says. "We were locked away in L.A. It didn't hit until we actually finished and were able to travel."

NBC found a lifeline with Heroes, the biggest new hit last season.

As The Orlando Sentinel reports, the success will reverberate with the DVD release Aug. 28, at the Emmys September 16 and in many new fall series that feature superheroes.

Then there's the main event: Season two starts September 24. Yet series creator Tim Kring says he's not feeling pressure to top last season.

"It's pressure to keep it going," Kring says. "This particular show has become a show defined by its ability to defy your expectations. People want that experience of watching the show and not knowing where it's going to take them."

Heroes will introduce more everyday characters with astonishing powers this year. Among them the actor playing these roles? David Anders, Jessica Collins and Dianna Agron.

Heroes features, from left, Ali Larter as Niki Sanders, Noah Gray-Cabey as Micah Sanders, Adrian Pasdar as Nathan Petrelli, Milo Ventimiglia as Peter Petrelli, Zachary Quinto as Sylar, Masi Oka as Hiro Nakamura, Hayden Panettiere as Claire Bennet, Greg Grunberg as Matt Parkman, Jack Coleman as H.R.G., Sendhil Ramamurthy as Mohinder Suresh

"The message of hope caught people's attention," Kring says. "There's something hopeful about the idea we have these abilities, and abilities to connect around the world."

NBC Universal hopes to connect a vital property with more consumers. Universal Media Studios produces the series, which is a model for how NBC hopes to expand its business online and internationally.

"A hit does drive the business," says Ben Silverman, co-chairman of NBC Entertainment. "Then we can build so much of this around it."

Universal Studios Home Entertainment is releasing the first-season DVD weeks before season two begins. The goal: gain viewers who haven't watched and please fans with extra content.

"There's like 50 extended and deleted scenes," says Masi Oka, who plays Hiro. "You get to see the behind-the-scenes things, the making of, Tim Kring's commentary on the 72-minute pilot that we premiered at Comic-Con."

Heroes will produce 24 episodes next season. The plan is for them to end in April. Heroes: Origins, a six-episode anthology series, will air in May and introduce characters separate from the main series.

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Jason La Padura is the casting director on Heroes. Over on Heroes Wiki, the man with one of the coolest jobs in Hollywood spoke on choosing roles for the NBC series...

You cast for major characters and for minor characters. Is that correct?
Yes, that's correct. As long as somebody actually has something to say, we cast that role.

Now, you've had some pretty big guest stars on Heroes—Malcolm McDowell, Stan Lee was on, George Takei. How do you approach "bigger name" stars like that?
What will happen is, like in a case like Malcolm, we wanted somebody who—we wanted a certain amount of a payoff. Because we had been speaking about Linderman for awhile, we wanted somebody that people were familiar with in some sense, but not so familiar that it would be like an Ed Asner, where they go, "Oh there's Lou Grant!" You know, you want somebody that people will go, like, "I know that guy."

And Malcolm's one of those men who's been around for such a long time. You know, you go back to his early stuff, like A Clockwork Orange, that made a big impact back in the '70's. That movie is still being watched today, probably by a lot of our core audience, too.

They may know him from that, or they may have seen him somewhere before. But at least there's a little bit of familiarity there, and we wanted a little bit of that there. What we had done is we came up with a long list of actors, and we circulated that amongst our producers, and entered into a discussion as to who did they like, who didn't they like. Then it became, like, who's available, and who will do it for the amount of money that we have.

I enjoy George Takei. I know he's returning for Season Two.
Yes.

Not only does he have the Star Trek background, and Masi Oka is a big fan of Star Trek—
Right.

That's a really great choice.
Well, you know the thing there, of course, is we needed an actor who could speak Japanese. And that is a much more limited pool of actors here in the United States. I mean, there's a small pool, and we have been really seeing them. Keri has been prereading men and women because of storylines we're thinking about and that we're currently in production with. She's looking at people who speak Japanese quite a bit.

But we came up where we had to do Masi's dad, there's only a couple of actors that came immediately to mind. Even with the help of breakdown services and solicitations from agents, that list didn't get very large. And then George just seemed like a natural fit.

And with the success of Heroes, I'm sure that some of your actors are contacting you.
Oh yes! It's become a very different thing now. I've worked on a lot of different series over the years, and I can tell you when a series is somewhere in the middle or the bottom of the ratings list, it's a lot harder getting people on.

When you're doing a big hit, people are coming to you saying, "Oh, my client would love to be on your show!" "Oh, my client would love to be on your show!" Okay, great! Especially if it's a well-known actor, what we do is we let our producers know that so-and-so is interested in being on the show so that they can keep that in mind when they're actually writing roles. Or they may actually conceive a role for somebody specifically.

What were some of the toughest roles to cast, and some of the easiest ones to cast?
Oh, I don't know, let's see... Well, you know, early on, one of the toughest things to cast was the role that eventually went to [Milo Ventimiglia], because Milo and Adrian, those two characters were originally conceived as twins. And what happened there was we found that to make the character old enough that the character could be running for Congress, you have to be a certain age to run for Congress.

If you made the character too old, it made the character that Milo plays seem pathetic. So we had to stop - we were seeing men who were in their early 30s for this role. But the dilemma that Milo had in that pilot seemed almost pathetic in a man his age. It didn't make sense. So during the casting process, we realized that the character really needed to be the younger brother to a successful older brother.

And Adrian does have the maturity needed to believe that he's running for Congress.
Right. But that was a very difficult role to cast. Milo's role is one of the last roles cast. Whereas other roles there were very easy to cast.

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Video game developer Gameloft is working on a Heroes game for your mobile phone. Below is the press release from the company regarding this development:

Recreating the mind-bending universe of the television phenomenon of 2007, Gameloft®, a leading developer and publisher of games for mobile phones, today announced an exclusive worldwide licensing agreement with NBC Universal to develop and publish Heroes: The Mobile Game.

"Heroes has created a large, die-hard fan culture and we are excited to bring the action and intrigue of NBC's leading drama series to gamers and Heroes fans alike," said Gonzague de Vallois, vice president of Publishing, Gameloft.

"With an international cast and rapidly growing international level of success, Heroes has achieved a massive global appeal and as such, Gameloft is the perfect publisher to deliver Heroes: The Mobile Game worldwide."

Heroes: The Mobile Game will allow fans of the show and casual gamers the chance to experience the thrill of the superhuman abilities of the show's characters.

The game's action will be based on the events from the electrifying first season, as well as the hotly awaited second season, with the game script being contributed to by writers of the hit television series.

Players will assume the roles of the time-travelling Hiro Nakamura; the beautiful, but deadly Niki Sanders; telepathic cop Matt Parkman and the enigmatic Peter Petrelli, as they enjoy game play styles based on their unique powers.

The Chicago Tribune was on hand to chronicle the Heroes panel at Comic-Con over the weekend...

If we needed proof that geeks now reign supreme over popular culture – especially television – we got it Saturday at Comic-Con International in San Diego.

This year, the yearly gathering of fans of genre entertainment and comic books, which was expected to top last year's 4-day attendance of 123,000 people, was all about the second coming, literally, of Heroes, which got the Comic-Con blessing a year ago and returned to do a victory lap.

"You helped create this incredible enormous success for the show," creator Tim Kring said during the show's celebratory hourlong session.

As if to give the hit NBC show the ultimate nerd seal of approval, the director Kevin Smith, who on Friday presented the pilot for his own new geek-friendly TV show, Reaper, came onstage during the raucous panel the next day to announce that he will write and direct an episode of Heroes: Origins, the spinoff series that will debut in the spring of 2008.

As the surprised and excited cast looked on, the fans jammed into the enormous room went wild, cheering Smith's arrival for a full minute. The director is not just a boldface Hollywood name, he is the Geek Revolution in the flesh: He's written comic books for years, and given his annual presence at the Comic-Con for the last decade or more, the voluble New Jersey native, whose Friday Q-and-A with his fans was diabolically, almost painfully funny, is pretty much the honorary mayor of Nerdtown.

And Smith was the one who was nervous, not Kring, who was the bearded, professorial type on the panel, which also featured the entire, 12-person cast of the show.

"I just don't want to be the guy who ruins Heroes," Smith said.

What a difference a year makes, huh? In 2006, the NBC show came as a supplicant to the convention, which has been used to build buzz about films for years, to the extent that the stars of big-budget tentpole movies are more or less expected to turn up (this year Jessica Alba, Harrison Ford and Nicolas Cage were only a few of the A-list types who came to flog upcoming projects).

Heroes got a good reception at Comic-Con a year ago, and then the show blew up that fall. Cause and effect? No one can say for sure, but the positive reaction of the blogging types at the convention certainly didn't hurt.

Whether or not that show's success story can be replicated like an army of droids (or possibly clones), the Heroes effect was impossible to ignore this year at Comic-Con. Many network shows for fall – everything from the fanciful Pushing Daisies to the vampire drama Moonlight to the geek-friendly remake of Bionic Woman – presented clips, complete pilots and/or panel discussions.

Whether or not the Comic-Con types truly have the power to make or break a TV show or to "open" a movie, Hollywood executives are paying studious attention to the likes and dislikes of the men and women at the fest, which, 37 years ago, started out with 300 comic-book collectors in the basement of a San Diego hotel.Continue Reading...

At the 38th Annual Comic-Con International, fans of the sci-fi and fantasy genres proved they're no longer on the fringe of pop culture.

The mammoth convention, held this past weekend at the San Diego Convention Center, attracted more than 125,000 people. And our beloved cast of Heroes was deservedly front and center.

The entire Heroes ensemble appeared and was given a rock-star welcome. Fan favorite Masi Oka (pictured with Bionic Woman star Michelle Ryan, Skeet Ulrich and Matt Dallas) played to the crowd and even showed his geek cred when he helped fix a faulty speaker on stage.

On the first day of the convention, it was officially confirmed that Zachary Quinto, Heroes' slithery villain Sylar, will be playing Spock in the next Star Trek movie (opening December 25, 2008).

"It's really incredible," Quinto said. "To be a part of something so iconic with the support of the man [Leonard Nimoy] who created the role is a true honor... I certainly intend to bring my own spin on Spock, and with these guys I'm sure I'll be able to find that."

The franchise's other big news was the announcement that another Comic-Con demigod, Kevin Smith (Clerks, Mallrats, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back), will write and direct an episode of next year's spin-off, Heroes: Origins.

After receiving thunderous applause, Kevin Smith gushed about being a fan of the first season, which he says mastered "the art of the cliff-hanger."

It's not yet known what Kevin Smith's episode is about (the spin-off is an anthology of standalone installments, featuring as-yet unknown characters coming to grips with special abilities), but he said, emphatically:

"I don't want to be the guy who ruins Heroes."

Executive producer Tim Kring was effusive in his gratitude to the Comic-Con fans, who last year gave the show its first major buzz. At TV Guide's Hot List panel he acknowledged the power of the cult fans: "This audience was always there, ready to become a mainstream audience."

A group of TV reporters has been turned loose on the world of Heroes - a sprawling complex of sets at the venerable Gower Studios - and they've all got questions about the show's second season.

The only problem: There are no answers. Throughout a press visit, the cast members of last season's surprise hit were pressed for a little insight into what the future may hold, but they were dancing as fast as they can - trying to be polite but admitting they can say almost nothing.

Asked if the show's producers had called a meeting to go over what can and cannot be said, a newly bearded Adrian Pasdar - who plays Nathan Petrelli, the flying politician - laughs and says, "Yeah, but it wasn't that long. Basically, it was, `You can't say anything. Have a cup of coffee and keep your mouth shut.' "

This, of course, leads to all manner of speculation, based on the sets and who's present for the press visit.

Reporters walking through the set of a new home for Claire Bennet (Hayden Panettiere), and her family try to figure out where it's located. (Rumor has it: California)

Why is Pasdar - whose character appeared to have been blown up in the finale - among the actors on hand? Why is Milo Ventimiglia - who plays Nathan's brother, Peter - dressed in a slick business suit? What's the deal with the new cast member Dania Ramirez (The Sopranos), who plays a "hero" fleeing the Dominican Republic to the United States?

And where is Leonard Roberts, who played D.L. Hawkins, the man who can walk through walls as the loving husband ofNiki Sanders (Ali Larter)? Since he isn't here, can we assume we've seen the last of D.L.?

"I wouldn't make too many assumptions about anything," says show creator Tim Kring.

About the only thing Kring is willing to say about season two of Heroes is that much of it will be set outside the United States, including story lines taking place in Mexico, Central America, Ukraine and Ireland. (There's a very cool Irish pub set that's been built.)

We've tried to uncover as many Heroes spoilers as possible, of course, but the cast isn't very helpful. Not that we can blame them. In fact, we'll probably thank them when surprises next season catch us off guard.

SOURCE: San Jose Mercury News

Fans of Heroes caught the first public showcase of the interactive extras on the show's first season HD DVD at Comic-Con International earlier this week.

Robin Cole, group manager for HD DVD consumer technology for Microsoft, showed off the special features for Heroes: Season 1 at the NBC booth on the convention floor, addressing hundreds of people who were wandering this way and that.

"It takes the elements of comic books and puts them on the screen," Cole said, showing how viewers could single out the famous paintings in the series and use picture-in-picture options.

Of course, this set has the usual fare: deleted and extended scenes (50 in all), a never-aired premiere episode with a commentary by show creator Tim Kring, a making-of featurette, etc., but Cole wanted to talk about the interactive features.

"Interactivity — I know, it's one of those buzz words we use," she said.

Cole walked the audience through an extra called The Helix Revealed, a guide to the mysterious symbol that keeps popping up in the show, and Character Connections, which allows viewers to follow just the clips of their favorite characters. There's picture-in-picture cast and crew video commentary and a mind-reading feature. Extras such as these make the viewer feel like they are a part of the show, she said.

Sadly, due to the lack of an Internet connection at the booth, "What I can't show you is the networking," Cole said.

Viewers can take a Heroes' Ability Test, create a profile, upload it to an NBC Web site, and find out via a unique access code what powers they may have. Users can download exclusive content and Heroes updates to their HD DVD player every day.

"This series doesn't end when you buy the disc," she said.

The people behind HD DVD feel this set is their coming-out party, showing what HD DVD is capable of, with Comic-Con as the venue.

"We really want the consumer to understand the experience they're going to get," said Ken Graffeo, EVP of marketing for Universal Studios Home Entertainment, which is distributing the HD DVD.

Heroes: Season 1 will hit stores on August 28 for $99.98.