Fishburne Didn't Watch 'CSI'

The newest member of the franchise is ready to get started.

As CSI Files previously reported, Laurence Fishburne will join the cast of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation during the show's ninth season. Fishburne admitted in a phone conference that he had never seen CSI before he met executive producers Carol Mendelsohn and Naren Shankar. "I (did) I feel a little stupid that I hadn't watched the show prior to meeting with them in New York," he said. "But I'm happy to say the episodes they sent me to look at (after) were really, really engaging and really wonderful, and kind of dark and moody, like a lot of the work I've been involved in."

Although Fishburne has joined the CSI cast, he won't be the main attraction. "The most important thing for me to remember is not to mistake my presence for the event," he explained. "The event is the show. The event is CSI. Everyone has a responsibility to bring their unique talents and gifts to it and that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to enter into this with the most positive attitude I can. I'm coming to work with people who are wonderful, who have made great television for nine years. That's a gift. All I can say is that I'm ready to play."

Fishburne may be ready to play, but the details of his character aren't ironed out just yet. The official CBS press release said the new character will be a professor with an interest in studying criminals, but the previous speculation that the character will have a genetic predisposition to violence is not true according to Shankar. "I think it was misreported a little bit in terms of this character having the genetic profile of a serial killer," he explained. "In reality, there is no such thing. From the outset, what we really wanted to play with in a dramatic sense is a character who has been able to examine his own genetic profile to a certain extent and find certain complexes and certain clusters of biological facts that he has in common with that is associated with aggressive or criminal behavior. That's all it is."

That, Shankar continued, is what got the character interested in forensics. "It's what draws him to it," he said, "the sense that if you find within yourself certain tendencies and see certain behaviors, it lets you wonder how these things turn into murder, how they turn into violence, how they turn into criminal behavior. That's all it is. It's an underlying element for the character."

Shankar expanded on the professor's background. "The character that we're creating has a background as a medical doctor – a research pathologist, in fact," he explained. "And for a number of reasons that will be revealed over the course of the season, we will find out that he's been forced out of that career and has become a college lecturer. He's teaching a course in criminalistics when he gets involved in a CSI investigation."

"We're a show that spends a lot of time thinking," Shankar said. "We don't blow stuff up, we're not about chasing people down and shooting people and the quality we were looking for was deep intelligence. Mr. Fishburne, when you look at his work, he's always brought that sensibility to the material he's done. It was a perfect fit for CSI."

Fishburne said he doesn't feel that joining a weekly television show is stepping away from his film career. "It's another medium in which to work as an actor," he explained. "Because I haven't done series television since Pee Wee's Playhouse, it's a welcome change. It's going to be challenging, it's going to be fun and it's going to be exciting."

The original articles are from The Star and Zap2it.

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