Aussie native Julian McMahon began his U.S. career on the soap ANOTHER WORLD when he was cast as Ian Rain in 1993. Since then, the actor appeared on CHARMED, headlined NIP/TUCK, was part of the Fantastic Four franchise, and is now starring in the CBS series FBI: MOST WANTED. Here, McMahon talks about his career journey.
Soap Opera Digest: Tell me about FBI: MOST WANTED and the character you play.
Julian McMahon: Dick Wolf [executive producer] was very specific about wanting to create a couple of shows that were orientated toward the FBI because they have certain divisions that he thought were all interesting places to mine some work out of and some good drama out of, which he does very well. And one of them was the FBI, which is the regular FBI show, and the other is the Most Wanted division, which is our show, a smaller group. I call them the office show and us the road trip show. It doesn’t mean literally, but figuratively. We get an assignment and we go on the road and chase people down until we catch them. So what happened was season 1, episode 18 of the first FBI was the embedded pilot, which was its own uniquely written and created piece, specifically for the Most Wanted division, and that was about this character, Jess LaCroix, who is a father who is raising his daughter on his own, he lost his wife in Afghanistan a couple of years earlier and he’s kind of struggling with his own stability of work versus sanity versus raising his daughter at the same time and trying to put those pieces together. He’s a real ornery kind of guy. He’s not a very social guy. He put together this very specific team, these five agents, and they’ve all got unique and different talents and they’re all top shelf and that’s kind of his family outside of his family being his daughter and his parents-in-law and his parents. He’s a really fascinating character. I was thinking of going back to network television at the time, and I had read a lot of scripts and I was quite surprised, to be honest, that this is the one that stuck with me the most, but it was and here I am.
Digest: Amy Carlson (ex-Josie, AW) is appearing in a recurring capacity. What was your reaction to reconnecting with her?
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