Exclusive Interview: Miles Doleac Discusses His New CW Series Containment

Miles Doleac is one of today’s busiest actors and… teachers. As the thesp tells us in this exclusive interview – to coincide with the launch of his new series Containment (The CW), beginning on 4/19 – Doleac’s students have managed out a smart way to get out of their daily class assignments.


AMANDA DYAR: You play Captain Scott in the show. What’s he the captain of?

MILES DOLEAC: He’s a National Guard captain, tasked with running security around the quarantine zone.

AMANDA: Did the role require you to research Scott’s occupation a bit?

MILES: The military background factored into how I approached the character. Certainly, if someone has experienced live combat (which I imagined Scott had), that shapes and affects them in profound ways. Living and working in a combat zone for any length of time is so foreign to the everyday life of the average American. It’s got to change you and you carry that change with you when you return to “normalcy.” I had just played another combat veteran in my own film THE HOLLOW and I had met and talked with military personnel in preparation for that film, so that was fortuitous. I revisited those conversations when I started thinking about who Scott was. I think Scott has really internalized a much regimented, no-nonsense way of approaching things. For him, the mission is extremely clear cut. He has very little patience for hand-wringing and second-guessing.

AMANDA: Are you big on research? Is it something you do on most projects?

MILES: It depends on how far removed the character is from me and my own life experiences. As someone who is also a writer and an academic (I have a PhD in History), I certainly deeply appreciate the value of research and I always consider the analytics of a character’s background, but acting is so much about being organic in the moment … reacting and responding truthfully to another actor … on some level, acting is like jazz. I mean great jazz musicians have worked long and hard at their craft; they’ve done a lot of homework, no doubt, but when they get on the stage or in the studio, at least many of them, they just play. Great acting is a delicate marriage of preparation and inspiration. And that was how I approached Scott and most of the characters I’ve played.

AMANDA: Did the writers of Containment give you any specific instructions on how to play Scott?

MILES: Only that they didn’t want him to come off too heavy or antagonistic initially, which I thought was a brilliant note, given how he’s introduced and how things develop thereafter.

AMANDA: Do you appear in the pilot –or is your character introduced later?

MILES: I’m not sure I can answer that. I’ll say the show uses flash forwards and other devices to heighten the drama of the situation. The writers do a great job of teasing the fallout of the outbreak before the chaos actually erupts.

AMANDA: How many episodes does one have to be in to be considered a regular?

MILES: I think that one is above my paygrade too. I will say that I thought the writers did a terrific job with Scott’s arc. Every character in the show feels so complicated and fully human. It would have been easy to trot out a few one-dimensional characters to serve some specific narrative purpose, but the writers went to great pains to ensure that all of these characters are living, breathing human beings and I love the fact that, in this show, the line between the good guys and bad is very blurry indeed. There’s a lot of grey. Real life, after all, is most often that way.

AMANDA: You’re also a teacher. Do your students get excited seeing you on screen?

MILES: Yes, they do. And they’re very good at trying to distract me into talking about my film and TV work in lieu of whatever assignment is on the table for the day. But, hey, I’m flattered that they care. I really am.