Tyler: Violence Is Not The Answer

Former CSI: Crime Scene Investigation star Aisha Tyler trades in her lab coat for a gun and badge.

Tyler portrays Detective Wallis in the movie Death Sentence, which also stars Kevin Bacon as Nick Hume, a vigilante out for revenge. Wallis must try to track Hume down, but Tyler said that Death Sentence is not a typical revenge movie. "This is a movie about the notion that 'an eye for an eye' leaves the whole world blind," she explained to EURweb. "Yes it's a hyper-violent, thrill ride, but it also contains some rather interesting concepts at the center, which is that violence is not the answer."

Tyler worked with real police officers before filming Death Sentence, and she said that it gave her perspective. "[T]he thing that you learn when you spend time with police officers is that they're just regular people," she said. "They've got families and a lot of the same emotional responses that we do, but they see terrible things every day." Because of this, Tyler wanted her character to be "a real person. There's all this violence kind of swirling around her, and she's sort of the moral core of the story." Tyler also said that she "wanted this character to be conflicted, because she really feels for what Nicky was going through, since he'd lost a family member incredibly violently. Yet, at the same time, she's sworn to uphold the law, and that push and pull between what she feels is right and what she knows is right is the same conflict that I think the audience is feeling when they're watching the movie."

The director of the movie, James Wan, was interested in having real stunts in the movie, rather than special effects. "Yeah, he's not a CGI guy, he's not a trickster," Tyler explained. "So, everything you see, we shot it. We made it. The result is, it feels real when you're watching it. You see a lot of action movies nowadays that look fake, but everything you see in this one really happened."

"If you just want to go and kinda get your rocks off, and see a bunch of stuff blow up and get some great action, you're going to get it from this movie," she said. "But if you want to appreciate the more sophisticated levels in the story's plot and in the dialogue, those are there, too." She also felt that Death Sentence had a message. "The movie is really saying, 'Violence solves nothing,'" she said. "Not only that, but, 'It will escalate to the point where you cannot extricate yourself from the situation that you've created.'"

The role of Detective Wallis was not originally meant for a black actress. "It was for a 50 year-old white guy," Tyler said. Wan made the decision to cast Tyler instead. "He has seen me on 24, loved my character, and wanted me to do something like that," she said. "He wanted a really strong female character who could bring an emotional element to the movie." Tyler likes playing intelligent characters like Wallis. "I'd be plenty happy, if I could keep playing scientists and cops for the rest of my career," she said.

The original interview is from EURweb. More information about Death Sentence can be found on IMDb.com.

Discuss this news item at Talk CSI!
 Add CSI Files RSS feed to your news reader or My Yahoo!
Also a Desperate Housewives fan? Then visit GetDesperate.com!