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Lance ordered himself a coffee and we started chatting. He was intrigued as to how I came to be running this site for him.  I told him that as a rule I am not a fan of actors, or famous people per se.  So I thought about his question and firstly, well I work in marketing, so I know what makes a good web site:  good content; great entertainment; regular news updates; and somehow to make peoples' lives better.  And Lance provides all of this. 

But it really all started when, like many people out there, I simply fell in love with Frank Black.  And in the process of reading about Millennium and Frank I found out about Lance, and that was it - there was no choice my: fate was sealed!  And so we talked about Frank Black. 

"Boy that was ... ah!"  Lance took a breath. "See I really don't have an education, I didn't go to school.  I went to about three years of grammar school and that was it.  So I didn't go to high school or college or anything, so I wasn't ... my reliance on words, you know, books ...", he trailed off somewhat.  "Those intellectual themes weren't available.  So I learned to paint.  I was a painter and nobody asks you if you're an idiot when you're a painter, they just figure you're a painter. It's like a woman being pregnant, no-one says 'What do you do?'. 

"And so ... I guess to approach a character like that I had to really think the things that I could relate to.  I know what it means to play chess, you have to have at least two moves to as many more moves as you have figured out.  And I got books from the ... " He suddenly interjects here.  "I finally did learn to read by the way, when I was 30,"  he laughs shyly.  He told me that he got his friends read his scripts and put them on tape for him.  I said to him that it must have taken a lot of guts for him to do this: to take on a job that meant reading all those pages of script, those thousands and thousands of words when you couldn't read, when words meant nothing to you.  "It's not guts it's just survival.  Because I wanted to be an actor and what are you gonna do?  You just gotta do what you've gotta do." 

I had to tell Lance at this point that this is why we love him so much.  That he came from this, that he hasn't had some ivory tower education, that he got into this business through sheer passion, force of will and hard work and against the odds, from a tough early life. (I mean you can't get much more of a Joseph Campbell-type hero than that!).  Lance was stuck for words, he gave me a big smile and laughed, quite flattered,  "Oh thank you, you've made me blush!  Sshh ... I wanna tell you again and pull your leg!"

Like a true professional he quickly regained his composure and carried on, "But Frank Black; he was a challenge because I realised that I had to have secrets away from Chris Carter ... things that I knew he was using which he [Carter] didn't know about.  Otherwise he would have tried to exploit them in some way.  And so the thing that was the most important to me was to play a character that was not broken up.  But also the FBI.  I got they guy to send me material that most people don't see. I had 15 cases, I wanted to form my own opinion of them. Follow them through and try to ... We also had the real Academy group from Onasis, Virginia; and those guys I respected so greatly.  I mean they were geniuses, really.  They had been paid to do this thing.  And they knew everything about how to go about this stuff.  So I relied on them, I just completely surrendered to it.  "

And one of the things I found - the intellectual level of Chris Carters; his language, his pretension with language ... it's like pretension ...  You know he would write things like ... 'I detect an unusual level of mindfulness associated with the violence.'  And I'd go 'What the hell!  Why the hell do you have to say that!'" Lance and I both laughed at this.  "And I'd get I'd get those lines and I'd go 'I gotta live up to the sound of this'  And the first time I read it ...!". 

I could really relate to Lance saying this and I suggested to him that these are only words, you need to get inside these words, and that's what Lance does with Frank.  "Oh yeah.  The words were like, in a way, like music. Became like music in a way, because I'd be thinking about other things while I was saying it.  I'd be trying to figure out what this guy .. how he was receiving what he was saying.  So I was very busy all the time.  I never got caught acting because I was always busy and I was more interested in ..."

"An example would be I realised even though the show ended at 9 o'clock, which I always hated, I thought that was a bad idea.  I was always working on cases that went further than that, so that if the show was about a kidnapper, I'd be trying to figure out how many other things he had done besides what he'd done here.  And even when the show was over I'd still be thinking about it.  I had notes - I kept stringent notes about the last case I just read, so that if any of these things started to feed into each other I'd detect it.  So it was like a lifestyle.  The problem was that I never let it go.  And my wife would beg me 'Frank can Lance come out and play?'.  It was like ..." he laughed.  " At the end of three years I was so tired, physically and mentally tired." 

Lance went on to add, "The guy that it was patterned after actually he had a stroke ... almost died .. he was in the FBI and he was in a hotel.  And he was working on over a hundred cases and he was so  burnt out - he was travelling the whole country from one side to the other - that he had a stroke and almost died. And by the end of the show, I swear to you ..."  I told Lance that we (fans of the show) were worried about him, because of what Frank Black had taken out of him, about the demands of the role.  And that in a way we were perhaps a little glad when it finished because of this.  "Yeah, " he agreed.  " I was worn out. I was like a rag." 

I stressed to him what a fantastic show Millennium was and what an unforgettable character Frank Black is and that so many people the world over are so grateful for all the work and effort Lance put into him.  "Wow", he said.  "Well we were hoping, Chris Carter was ... I kept talking to him about it.  Every year, at the end of the year, I would say 'Chris, I wanna have a meeting, just you and I and I'll tell you what I've learned this year.' and maybe you can use it and maybe not, I don't care.  But I could at least get it off my chest.  And I kept saying to him, 'Buddy let's not end these shows at 9 o'clock, let's not have just one case going.  Let's have them all running parallel and one ends this month, maybe another one never ends.  And a lot of little pieces that would suddenly go, yeah suddenly go, 'hold it a second, I just realised', that you know it's the way you see, you see the discovery take place.  Plus you're working on this 'has to be done now' case.  And, and I kept begging him for that." 

Finally I asked him about the chances of a Millennium film, and if there was anything we could do to help make this happen.  But he seemed a little unsure (and my tape ran out half way through this - timing or what! - so I think he was talking about Chris Carter) when he went on to say:  " 'And this is what I [Chris Carter, i think!] wanted people to have: 'you, Ray Liotta and Carradine in a feature.  So now it sounds a little to me like X Files.  And everything depends on the script, everything depends on that.  I don't think that from the outside anybody can ... the only thing that people can do is contact Fox and say.  But you know Ten 13 [Carter's production company] is off the lot.  They had their offices on the Fox lot and there not there any more.  So whatever that means!"

Still no reason to give up hope, I guess.  There's always hope.  But even if the film never happens, Lance has given us so much already in Frank Black.  And this, quite simply, is why we do love Frank and why he is the most memorable character ever to grace our TV screens.

Read the other interviews in this series:

The Transcripts  - Part 1 :  Alien vs. Predator

The Transcripts  - Part 3 :  A Passion for Acting

The Transcripts  - Part 4 :  By Invitation Only