When you mention a caped crusader, your mind usually goes to Batman, but how exactly is The Cape (David Lyons) different from Batman? Check out how show creator Tom Wheeler explains how his creation comes from a different place and teases Orwell’s (Summer Glau) backstory as well as the mystery behind the grand plan of villain Peter Fleming aka Chess and James Frain, himself, give you a glimpse into what exactly is going on behind those chess pieces eyes of Chess. WARNING: There are mild spoilers in these interview excerpts.

Q: Of course you’re drawing some comparisons to Batman. How would you say the two stories diverge the most?
Tom Wheeler: Obviously I’m a big comic book guy and the most recent stuff from (The Dark Knight writer/director) Chris Nolan, and Iron Man…. The stories couldn’t be more different in terms of the origin story and the catalyst and the family and the way he’s trained, but there’s no question he’s a pulp-style hero. The heroes I love are on the ground, not necessarily with galactic powers. I’ve always been drawn to Daredevil, stories like that. I want this to be a sort of costumed crime drama where it’s not always about the world blowing up.

Q: Some critics have rolled their eyes at the circus-performer thieves who train Vince, but I like it. Heck, I’d even like to see more of that.
Wheeler: It’s going to be a huge part of it. I’m a Houdini fan, and I love the texture of characters from that world. Max Malini (played by Keith David, Spawn) is a huge mystery character with a lot of layers.

Q: Orwell, the all-knowing blogger played by Summer Glau, seems to have a horse in this race. Is she related to Fleming?
Wheeler: I’m not saying anything. There have been some initial speculations…. She has a complicated history, let’s say.

Q: And Peter Fleming’s overall agenda: Is it big, really big, or frighteningly big?
Wheeler: [Laughs] It is frighteningly big. There’s always a bigger dog down the line, and we’ll start to see more of Peter Fleming and a bit less of Chess. James [Frain] is such a great actor, and Peter Fleming is becoming such a favorite. He’s like a psychotic James Bond — you like him, but he’s so awful and horrible. He believes himself to be a world builder, and Palm City is a sort of nesting area. But there’s more than even he realizes at work.

James Frain: I play basically two guys, two characters fighting for the mind of one man. He has created this alter ego as a way of controlling the city, but it turns out that this character starts controlling him. We go into that a little bit with a bit more of the psychology of who this guy is and why he’s done this strange transformation. But what’s also interesting about it is the villains on the show – and there are lots of them – are very colorful and larger-than-life characters, and I think that’s where Vince kind of gets his inspiration from, adopting a disguise. They’ve created the world of disguise and he has to operate within it.

Q: Will we find out more about your character specifically? Why he created this alter ego and why he has this need to be this other person?

Frain: And what drives him. They’ve got this interesting concept where you’ve got these regular serialized characters who have big story arcs that play out over the episode and you also have these “crime within a crime” stories of individual bad guys. But it turns out that there is in fact a great big nexus of control that’s going on behind the scenes. As the series plays on, we start discovering that there are layers and layers of machinations and power structures that are going on.

Q: What can you discuss that’s coming up?

Frain: We start to find out that Peter is a little bit more of a ladies’ man than we first thought. As the show goes on, the guy who he is by daytime, the guy who he is in the mask, becomes more and more separate and this conflict starts opening up. There’s going to be some action with a young woman that comes up that’s very interesting.

Q: Have we met her in the first two episodes or is she a new character?

Frain: That’s a surprise.

The show opened with modest ratings with its premiere this past Sunday. It captured 8.4 million total viewers its first night out in TV land.

Watch The Cape on NBC when it resumes its regular slot after Chuck on Mondays, beginning January 17^th.

What did you think of the two-hour premiere of The Cape?

[Source] THR, TVLine