Interview: Jimmy Jean-Louis

What have you been up to since the last time we spoke?

I’ve been doing a few movies, two in France and one in

South America. They were all French movies and I’ve shot

one English movie, it’s a short movie, and I think that’s

about it.

What are the movies about?

The English movie is a short movie we decided to shoot because we have in our minds to shoot the feature next year, and it’s pretty much a cross between “The Transporter” and a movie called “The Professional” which is an old film which stars Jean Reno. It’s that kind of action movie and the character which I play is very much like the character in “The Transporter”. One of the French movies is directed by Hervé Renoh and it’s coming out December 23rd in France and then it will be coming out later in other countries, it’s called Coursier and I just came back from the Toronto Film Festival with another film which I shot with the French people and that one was really well received there.

Do you know why your character wasn’t in the last volume of Heroes?

Why wasn’t he there? Maybe they didn’t need him to be there. It’s always difficult to explain the gaps. As you know by now the Haitian comes back and disappears and then comes back and disappears but when he comes back it’s always for a very important reason, so I believe that if the writers can’t find a good reason to bring him back, they don’t bring him back, so that’s probably why they just let him be because as you know his powers are just so strong that they can not really be in play all the time, unfortunately for me.

Yeah, if he was just standing around all the time then the other characters couldn’t use their powers.

Exactly, I mean we’d be able to finish the show very quickly [laughter]. So you know by not playing him a lot you still keep the mysterious appeal which he has and that intrigue keeps going so I don’t mind but the good thing is he’s back this season and he will be working with Mr Bennet and of course he will be interacting with the main characters like Claire, the Petrelli family, I will be close with Peter Petrelli, but yeah mainly them.

Have you shot any scenes with the new cast members?

I’ve shot some scenes with Gretchen, Madeline Zima, but I haven’t shot anything with Robert Knepper yet.

Can you tell us anything else about your character in the next season?

You are finally going to find out what his name is and the other cast members will be calling me by my name, and you will hear it in the first half of the season.

What would you like to see your character do more of?

I would like to explore him a little bit more, I would like people to know what he’s up to when he’s not with Mr Bennet, when he’s not there to erase somebody’s memories, I would like him to have a personal life. And I know we did explore some of that when we went to Haiti but we haven’t looked at his life in America, we don’t know what he’s up to. You don’t know if he has kids, has a wife or a girlfriend, we don’t know what he does when he’s not working for the company. I would love the audience to know a little bit about him. But is that going to happen? I don’t know but that’s the direction I would like him to go because even though he’s very powerful, he’s very mysterious I think

that he must be a pretty cool dude as well to bring that element.