Jon Togo: Getting 'Miami' Role Like Winning Publisher's Clearing House

Jonathan Togo described what it was like to receive the call from his agent telling him he'd gotten the role of Ryan Wolfe for CSI: Miami.

"I actually lived the moment where the person receives the Publisher's Clearing House check," the actor told the Boston Herald. "Before that I worked a lot; I did a series for UPN in Vancouver. I had done a bunch of guest spots and plays, but it's hard as an actor. There are very few actors that get to make a living doing it, so I was still bartending at a bar in Little Italy. I had been working for five or six years to get a break like this; in literally two weeks, my life completely and inexorably changed."

Togo can't complain about the treatment his character has received: from being distrusted by another member of the team to being shot in the eye with a nailgun, the atmosphere around the lab since Wolfe arrived has been tense, which has helped Togo stretch his acting chops. However, the actor revealed his mother disliked the idea of seeing her son being shot in the eye - even if it was just pretend.

"I first found out about the story from my mother, who had read about it in TV Guide and was very, very upset and said that she did not want that to happen. And then she informed me that she was not going to allow it to happen and she wanted to know who she had to call," he said.

"I was actually really excited," he said of the storyline that started in "Nailed" and has continued to be explored. "When we do the show, it's so the process of hunting down and finding criminals that it becomes a little bit like Groundhog Day in the sense that the show follows a formula and you adhere to it. So when we get a chance to play, like, a personal story, it's rewarding in the sense that you get to try something new and do something different that you don't usually get to do."

Getting such storylines, of course, also means the actor is starting to get recognized. "Being recognized is very flattering, and it's also, like, the weirdest thing to ever happen. It's a little like The Truman Show. People are looking at you, and they know you and you don’t know them. And a lot of times because I'm not like Brad Pitt or anything, people recognize me but they don’t know why."

To read the rest of this article, visit the Boston Herald.

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!