Gosselaar Talks Dual ‘CSI’ Roles, Plus A Sneak Peek

Mark-Paul Gosselaar first appeared as twin brothers Jared Briscoe and Paul Winthrop in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation’s season 15 premiere, “The CSI Effect”, and he’ll reprise both roles in this Sunday’s episode, “The Twin Paradox”. You can find an interview excerpt and sneak peek after the jump!

DB Russell (Ted Danson) and Julie Finlay (Elisabeth Shue) helped put Briscoe on death row for the notorious Gig Harbor murders in Seattle five years ago, but the past came back to haunt them in the season premiere. The reveal that Briscoe had a twin brother put the old case on shaky ground, and the CSIs have to make sure they’ve got the right killer—or killers—behind bars. Both brothers have a dark side, and Gosselaar spoke to Yahoo TV about the characters. Here’s a question from the interview:

Every actor who plays a villain says, “Yeah, but they don’t see themselves as a villain.” But the guys you’re playing are tearing out people’s guts and making CSI tools out of them. So… maybe they think they’re a little bit bad? As an actor, how do you play that?

I think these guys know they’re bad, and they actually don’t mind being bad. There’s obviously something wrong with them, but I think they truly enjoy what they’re doing. They’re sociopaths. It’s kind of fun for me, maybe because you make a lot of different choices; some of them you get away with, some of them, the director says no, that’s not going to work.

But with characters like this, you just throw things at the wall and see what sticks. There is no right or wrong way to play these guys because I can’t relate to anything they do. So, you kind of just play around and leave it up to the director to cut together.

And here’s a clip from “The Twin Paradox”, which features DB alongside Gosselaar’s “more calculated” character, Paul: