HEROES MAGAZINE
ISSUE 1
MILO VENTIMIGLIA - PAGE 4
Working in Hollywood, Milo Ventimiglia is not far from his hometown of Anaheim, California. Ventimiglia made his television debut on a 1995 episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. He had recurring and regular roles on the series Opposite Sex, Boston Public, and American Dreams, but was perhaps best known prior to playing Heroes' Peter Petrelli for his two seasons as Rory Gilmore's boyfriend, Jess, on Gilmore Girls. Ventimiglia has also often appeared on the big screen in projects including Boys Life 2, She's All That, the werewolf movie Cursed, the horror film Stay Alive, Rocky Balboa (as Rocky Balboa's son), and most recently in the upcoming thriller, Pathology. Ventimiglia has also formed a production company and has directed a series of 12 five-minute films for the American Eagle clothing company.
Working in Hollywood, Milo Ventimiglia is not far from his hometown of Anaheim, California. Ventimiglia made his television debut on a 1995 episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. He had recurring and regular roles on the series Opposite Sex, Boston Public, and American Dreams, but was perhaps best known prior to playing Heroes' Peter Petrelli for his two seasons as Rory Gilmore's boyfriend, Jess, on Gilmore Girls. Ventimiglia has also often appeared on the big screen in projects including Boys Life 2, She's All That, the werewolf movie Cursed, the horror film Stay Alive, Rocky Balboa (as Rocky Balboa's son), and most recently in the upcoming thriller, Pathology. Ventimiglia has also formed a production company and has directed a series of 12 five-minute films for the American Eagle clothing company.
What's it like portraying Peter's fraternal relationship with Adrian Pasdar's Nathan?
VENTIMIGLIA: I don't think I've ever had a brother on-screen. I've pretty much been an only child, oddly enough, in a lot of the work that I've done, so to have a brother was kind of fun. And Adrian Pasdar - we really took a liking to one another and got along great and built the relationship up before we even got onto set. These two characters - they're so different, but at the base of it, they're brothers, and if one of them were in harm's way, they would step right in and try and save their brother - which was shown when Nathan instinctively catches Peter. So we tried to show a lot of that in the scenes where we were butting heads. I mean, I have sisters in real life and I know what that was like growing up (laughs), but having an older brother was fun.
Do you like the flying/falling scenes?
I've done several wire stunts [before]. I was on a 60-foot decelerator on the concrete on a commercial. I did wire-work on [Cursed] for Wes Craven and Dimension. I'm really pretty comfortable in a rig and harness. It's always exciting to be 40 feet up in the air, just kind of hanging by a cinched steel cable, but at the same time, I asked to do the bigger stunts, like literally jumping off the 12-storey building, and I was hoping to do that stuff, but they wouldn't let me. So it was show up, do my lines while dangling instead of free-falling on a wire (laughs), which is a lot more fun. You're pretending to make it look very perilous, when you know you're quite safe. I think that's the difficulty in it. But at the same time, you've got to approach each of those scenes the same way you would any other scene, standing with two feet on the ground - what's the intent, where is the scene going - and then just listening to what's going on. Those are brief snippets, but I think they turned out pretty well because of what Adrian was doing in the scene for me and what hopefully I was giving back to him.
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