5 Questions With 'Copper' Star

Jon Hamm on Mad Men, Jennifer Garner on Alias, George Clooney on E.R. Sometimes a role seems tailor-made for an actor, and that is 100 percent true for Copper's Tom Weston-Jones.

As the show's lead, Kevin Corcoran, Tom plays the 1864 detective as gruff yet suave, sexy yet terrifying, powerful yet needy -- but he's always utterly compelling to watch. I caught up with Tom before he became the latest in-demand actor to find out what attracted him to Copper, what he learned from the role and what fans can expect from the addictive new series

TheInsider.com: What attracted you to the character of Detective Kevin Corcoran?
Tom Weston-Jones: For me it was just looking at how much he was torn between doing a good job and holding his moral ground but also overstepping that mark and doing some pretty terrible things to people deep down to find out the information that he needs. It was mainly that he's flawed and not a hero. He'll juggernaut through anybody to get the information he needs.

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Insider.com: About 10 years ago the tide turned from All American Heroes on TV to anti-heroes. As an actor, why is that more exciting?
Tom: Definitely. It's all about being complicated. Audiences are more interested in real people now more than archetypal figures. They want to see the drama and the conflict more now than everything going smoothly. Anti-heroes have more of a place in society now that people are aware of how morally ambiguous characters can be. It's shades of grey, which is great to play.

Insider.com: The sets on Copper are astounding. How much did they help you to get into the retro mindset?
Tom: Yea, it's kind of like you can switch off the imagination part of your brain because everything's right in front of you. The sets themselves are amazing. At first they can be kind of distracting because it's so great and you're so aware of the work that goes into it, so you don’t want to mess it up [laughs]. Eventually you throw that out the window and it starts to feel like home. You don't bat an eye at all the turkeys and three-legged dogs on set.

Insider.com: This story is steeped in history, but how accurate are the stories?
Tom: [Creator] Tom Fontana is such a stickler for detail so everything is historically accurate. But what's great is he doesn't sacrifice drama for that. Everything is steeped in accuracy, but it won't stifle the storytelling. Drama is always the number one thing. I think a lot of people will be surprised to see an African-American doctor working in this time, but there are several accounts of African-American doctors working in the Five Points.

Insider.com: Speaking of Freeman's character, I was intrigued by all the crime solving techniques they use. Did you find yourself learning a lot?
Tom: Definitely. It's strange because you have no way of gauging 100 percent what they would have done. It's all very crude but what I like about Corcoran's approach is that he doesn’t care about the scientific side himself, yet he's happy to take all the credit from Freeman [laughs]. I found all of that crime scene investigation stuff amazing because you never think about the routes of these techniques and feel like those things were always there. This is when New York was already in its primordial phase. When it was beginning to become something, and the same is true for the detective work. That's why it’s so entertaining because you see this stuff and realize, "Holy sh*t, that's where it came from!"

Copper premieres August 19 at 10 p.m. on BBC America.

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