‘Being Erica’s’ Sebastian Pigott Is Back From the Future

Being Erica‘s mysterious barista, Kai, immediately caught the attention of Erica and viewers. Little did we know that  Kai was not only going through the same special brand as therapy as Erica, but he was also a rock star from the future!

Recently, I chatted with Sebastian Pigott about how he got the role of Kai, what it’s like playing a time traveler and his feelings for Erica. Read on for more about the man, the music (Pigott performs live alongside his brother and both of them were contestants on Canadian Idol) and more.

Were you familiar with the show before you auditioned? Had you seen it?

I wasn’t really, no. Embarrassingly unfamiliar. I counted myself really fortunate when I watched it after I got the job and it turned out it was actually a really good show. I went in there pretty blind.

What was the audition process like? Were executive producers Jana Sinyor and Aaron Martin already familiar with you because of Canadian Idol or did you just come in?

One of the casting directors, Jason Knight, knew me really well from some short films that I’d done and from auditioning over the years. Stephanie Gorin, who’s also one of the casting directors on it, knew me well and had cast me in stuff before. I went in to audition for her and then didn’t hear anything for at least two months. I sort of thought nothing more about it. Then I got a call out of the blue, so I gathered that they started looking at some Canadian Idol tapes because they were looking for someone who was legitimately a singer to bring some authenticity. I got the screen test out of the blue and was really surprised. I flew out to Vancouver to meet Erin [Karpluk, who plays Erica] and to audition with her. Up until then, I hadn’t met any producers. I sat down with Jana after that and chatted with her a bit. Then I got the role from there. I think, in a way, it was an advantage to me that I didn’t really know the show because I might have been intimated meeting Erin for the first time. It certainly worked out for the best.

How much did you know about your character going into the audition? Did you know he was a time traveler like Erica?

Yes. I knew he was from the future. I knew he was supposed to be thirty-two in a twenty-two-year-old’s body, which was a big thing for me from an acting perspective. To try to bring something to that, whatever that’s going to look like. I knew he was a rock star from the future. I didn’t know anything about Travis, but I knew about Dr. Fred and that I was from 10 years in the future.

Were you nervous about entering the show as the new guy?

Well, yeah. You don’t want to be the guy that causes the show to jump the shark. I found that to be tremendous pressure. To their credit, they made it easy on me. It was also nice that the character was eased into the story over the first half of the season. It’s a couple scenes an episode before it starts to ramp up, so there was some time there to become familiar with not just the character, but also with the show and the environment. Also, I’d never done a series regular before. I’d done films and guest star roles and things like that. It was my first series regular, so that was a bit of a daunting task, as well. And just flying blind because you don’t know a lot of what’s coming. You have to make choices based on intuition and based on your imagination because often times you don’t know where the character’s going. The writers are still building it all. It was all tremendously daunting. I didn’t find until maybe episode 6 that I really started to relax and I started to feel comfortable.

The response to Kai from those who’ve seen the season has been largely positive. Were you relieved to see that fans accepted him?

Really relieved. I’m glad to hear you say that because I’ve tried not to look too much at blogs or forums or even newspaper reviews. Everybody has an opinion and you can take it to heart sometimes, more so when you hear a negative review than a positive review, unfortunately. But I’m really glad that everyone’s accepted the character. Yeah, tremendous relief.

Kai and Erica have this great, unusual friendship and maybe something more. How did you and Erin establish that chemistry?

I would imagine that’s a lot of what they were looking for in the screen test to see if it was a good match. I think a lot of that stuff is just up to nature. You either have that natural response or you don’t. I think the world of Erin. She’s really sexy and just really alive when she’s working, when the cameras are on, as much as when they’re off. She’s just so relaxed. That’s a huge part of the job done right there when it comes to chemistry because you’ve got so much to respond to. I think it’s one of those mysterious things, chemistry.

Kai and Erica have a really interesting relationship. It’s right on the border of right and wrong.

I think Kai’s right on the border of right and wrong.

Do you think he’s the right guy for her? Are you rooting for them?

From Kai’s perspective, which is the only one that really concerns me, I think he feels like it’s right. But it’s one of those star-crossed love affairs where no matter how right it is, it’s just never going to be, which is sort of the heartbreak there from Kai’s perspective.

You got to play a two different versions of Kai — present Kai and future Kai – in “The Unkindest Cut.” Did you ever have difficulty keeping track of what he knows or what emotional state he’s in?

That’s really the job, isn’t it, to keep that continuity? Physically, of course, but emotionally too. We shot it in chunks. Most of the future stuff was shot in one big chunk. There wasn’t a lot of jumping back and forth between the two. That was one of the best parts of the character, getting to play to him in these completely different states. He’s really two different people at those times in his life. In the future, he’s a mess. He’s addicted to drugs. He’s full of guilt. His best friend’s just died. He takes a lot of the responsibility for that. Then you see him in his twenty-two-year-old body and he’s a completely different guy. To me, that was fascinating as an actor. How are you going to approach that? And also why is he a different guy? What are the reasons? So it’s not just an artificial change where you’re trying to fool the audience, but where you’re actually examining this guy’s life and who he is. It’s two different sides of the same person. It’s a joy to play that. But at the same time, it’s got to be two different sides of a cube. It’s all got to be related to the same thing. You’re examining the whole from two different perspectives as opposed to two unrelated adjustments.

I thought that episode also had a really interesting look to it. Was the future what you thought it would look like?

Oh man, I thought they nailed that. They really pulled it off. It’s ten years in the future and they always screw that up. It’ll be either way too far in the future or not far enough. I think they just imagined what are some of the little things that are going to changed in 10 years. I thought they were pretty accurate, with the idea of throwbacks, as well, because we had the hummer limousine. Things like that touchpad. Shit, that’s like the iPad. It’s pretty much the iPad, but ten years down the road and they came up with that last year. I thought they did a good job. No flying cars or any nonsense like that.

I think you also got off a little lucky. Erin said she hated her wig, but you got to look like a rock star.

I thought she looked good in her wig.

She told me she thought she looked like her mother.

Yeah, I know. She kept saying that. I thought she looked really cute.

Do you have a favorite episode?

I really liked episode 7. It’s selfish because that’s an episode I got to do a lot of cool stuff in. And I really liked episode 12. Chris Grismer directed that one. He got some great stuff out of me.

“Alien Like You” is sort of like the anthem of Kai and Erica. Did Jana and Aaron give you any guidelines for writing that song?

They really gave us a chance to go away. We knew what the characters were all about. We knew what the episode was about. Me and my brother just went off and started writing. We came up with four different tunes. We came in with demos. Jody Colero, who’s the music supervisor on the show, he picked that one and said, “I think that’s the one,” so we dressed it up a bit. They sent it on and the show really liked it. That was pretty much it. It was one of those magic things.

You also recorded a couple of other songs for the show, right?

We did “Hard to Go,” which is in episode 8. That one’s funny because for that one, we were demoing it and you demo it while watching the scene to see how it fits over, to see how it works. Right before, was my love scene with Sam, so my brother had to watch me do it probably a dozen times while we recorded this thing, which was one of the more uncomfortable experiences of my life. [laughs]

Are you planning to release any of the other songs that you wrote for the show?

Yeah. One of them is called “Dirty Bones” and that’s going to be on the Pigott Brothers new album, which is in pre-production now. Should be out in the summer. We’re doing another version of “Alien Like You,” which is going to be on it. “Dirty Bones” — I wanted to use it, but it’s kind of like Foo Fighters. Hard rock & roll. They thought it was a bit intense.

So far the series has been very Kai and Erica, will they or won’t they? But then he sleeps with her sister. What do you think was going through his head at that moment?

I think on a really basic level, he’s really into Sam in that moment. Erica has a boyfriend. She hasn’t done anything really to encourage him. So I think he’s being a guy in a really simple way. In some earlier drafts of the script, they went into the psychology behind it a bit more. Dr. Fred confronted Kai and he said, “There’s something called transference in psychology,” I think was the line. Where you put feelings symbolically onto therapists, meaning Erica in this context. Because I can’t have her, I go after her sister. They kind of explored that. For me, I just played it that I was really in love with Erica and because I couldn’t have her, in a cheap sort of way, you try to make her jealous. I did play with a little bit of that idea that I was trying to make her jealous. Something I can connect to as a weak-kneed man. [laughs]

Can you offer up any hints for what’s ahead for Kai?

You can look forward to a lot more music. There’s the reappearance of “Alien of Like” later on in the season. And certainly he’s going to pursue his feelings for Erica with reckless abandon.

Being Erica airs stateside Wednesdays at 10 p.m. on SoapNet. Check out my interviews with creator Jana Sinyor and stars Erin Karpluk and Michael Riley here.