John Barrowman Talks About TORCHWOOD: MIRACLE DAY

Torchwood leading man John Barrowman, better known as Captain Jack Harkness from the Doctor Who spinoff, made a few comments about the move to America for the next season of the show, which is branded "Miracle Day".

“There is so much more we can do with Torchwoodnow having made the leap to America. It’s going to be even bigger and better,” said original Torchwood star and Glaswegian-born Barrowman, aka Captain Jack Harkness. “And,” he added with a chuckle, “for me on a personal level the move to America has been f**king amazing.” The budgets are bigger, the stunts are more dangerous, and the sexual chemistry is more explosive, he said, pointing to the opening scene in Season 4, which involves a helicopter. "If we were in Wales shooting, we might not have had that, or we would have had to re-write the sequence.” Overall, "the audience is going to need a forklift truck to pick their jaws off the ground. The stunt work is unbelievable. I used to do quite a lot of stunts except if it was jumping off of buildings but now I’m not allowed to because of the insurance policy. I’m much more valuable in America!”

Among the tweaks on the show, Captain Jack’s iconic RAF coat has been “re-booted” with a lighter weight material and a “slimmer cut.” According to Barrowman, the former was to account for LA’s hotter weather, while the latter was the decision of the designer, not him. Both Gardner and Barrowman said that the new series keeps the heart of the original, including what Barrowman called the “heavy moments of drama” up against humorous one-liners. He also said that the relationships between the characters go on as they always have but are even ramped up a few notches. And the notoriously bi-sexual tension? “Jack will have his little dabblings and the audience will get exactly what they want,” he said. “And I had a lot of fun doing it!” According to Barrowman, all but the 10th episode have been written by Russell T. Davies, who is in LA now working on the final script. Torchwood has been a popular cult show in its original British incarnation, but the move to the U.S. will push it to the next level, Barrowman says. “We’ve going to be bigger than cult, now it’s about world domination.”

I'm curious about this installment, and in addition to its filming in the United States, its parent series Doctor Who, filmed parts of its two part season premiere in the States as well.

Here's the official synopsis:

TORCHWOOD begins with a day when nobody dies. All across the world, nobody dies. And then the next day, and the next, and the next, people keep aging, they get hurt and sick, but they never die. The result: a population boom, overnight. With all the extra people, resources are finite. It’s said that in four month’s time, the human race will cease to be viable. But this can’t be a natural event – someone’s got to be behind it. It’s a race against time as C.I.A. agent Rex Matheson investigates a global conspiracy. The answers lie within an old, secret British institute. As Rex keeps asking “What is Torchwood?,” he’s drawn into a world of adventure, and a threat to change what it means to be human, forever.

The series will also star Eve Myles as Gwen Cooper, Kai Owen as Rhys Williams, and Bill Pullman as Oswald Danes.  It premieres on Starz July 8.