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:: WILLIAM SADLER ::

Sheriff Valenti, Roswell

He used to wear leather and now he wears a Sheriff's uniform. The Village People, anyone...?

* * * * * * * *

"I 'LL TELL YOU HOW FAR BACK MY LOVE affair with sci-fi goes," William Sadler says, leaning forward and punctuating each point with his index finger. "When I was nine years old my friend John had the farm down the road from my farm. We would get together in his chicken coop and nail mayonnaise jars to the walls, put numbers on them in crayons, and then sit there on the dirt floor and adjust the dials. The window of the chicken coop became the screen, and we would fly our coop all over the universe to different planets. We would boldly go where no other kids had gone before."

The effects may be a bit more special in the shows that Sadler's involved with now, but there's no mistaking that the actor's proclaimed love affair with the genre began there. Whether playing the Grim Reaper in Bill And Ted's Bogus Journey, interrogating Julian Bashir as the enigmatic Section 31 operative Luther Sloan on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, or in his current role as Sheriff Valenti on the continually popular Roswell, Sadler brings an energy to his roles that derives from this passion.

"Playing Luther Sloan in my tight leather suit was one of the most fun things I've done ever on television," he coos. "I love the fact that he's going to save the lives of all these millions of people by assassinating this group over here. We break our own laws in order to save the greater good, and that's a wonderful grey area that they addressed with that character and Section 31."

The potential in a character is something that Sadler looks for in a script, which the pilot for Roswell promised. "I had just finished Disturbing Behaviour with David Nutter, who directed Roswell's pilot," Sadler recalls. "We hit it off great, and I had tremendous respect for his talents and instincts. When he called up and said he was doing this pilot, it came with more weight than just a normal script. I thought it sounded like fun, but I had one stipulation. When I first met the executive producer, Jason Katims, I asked if Sheriff Valenti was going to be used well, or would he always be the villain of the piece? In the pilot, he's clearly the biggest problem that these kids have, and I didn't want to be standing there at the end of every single episode going, 'Curses, missed the little bastards again! I'll get you!' That would just have been too painful. He assured me that wasn't going to be the case, and that Valenti would have a love interest. He didn't know where he was going to go, but he could assure me that it wasn't going to remain static. "

And as Sadler sits in a trendy coffee bar in West Covina, just east of sunny Los Angeles, watching as his colleagues prepare the Christmas episode of the third season, he reflects that Katims kept his promise. "I haven't been disappointed," he says cheerfully. "I've had girlfriends. I have a teenage son who I love, and an elderly father who I have trouble getting along with. I have problems at work and problems with my romance." The new season has brought fresh challenges as well. "My character has taken a turn for the worse," Sadler jokes. "I sing on the show now: I now have a musical career as Jim Valenti and the Kit Shickers. And if it isn't fun enough as a grown up to suddenly front a rock 'n' roll band, I wrote the two songs that are used for the episode at the bachelor party - a blues number and a rockabilly thing that I wrote years ago."

Assuming that UPN orders a full season (now looking somewhat less likely as this issue goes to press), Sadler will also be going behind the camera to helm the 18th episode. "It'll be great fun, and very exciting - and it's going to scare the crap out of me," Sadler admits. "I'm using the year, leading up to my episode, as a semester of college at a film school, and I'm spending all my spare time watching the directors who do the show now, and reading books about directing."

Sadler is honest about the problems that Roswell faced when it was being made for the WB Network in the States. "My understanding is that they were constantly telling us what to do with the show," he says. "Make it darker, make it lighter, change this hair style, make it more sci-fi, less sci-fi, more romance, bring him in, write hin out... they played with the dials constantly, and would pull whole storylines out of the script a week before we filmed it. Jason Katims and co never knew where they stood with those people it was like walking through a minefield. With UPN, so far anyway, it seems to me that we're being left alone. They know that they've hired talented people, and they're smart enough to back away and let them 'do that voodoo that you do so well'."

The actor feels that the pilot had chemistry. "It had this Romeo and Juliet romance that could never work, but had to work somehow, and just grabbed everybody by the heartstrings. That's what Jason writes well. All of the rest of this he was getting pushed into. This isn't The X-Files. It isn't The Twilight Zone, and it couldn't find its centre. Hopefully we've corrected that..." SFX

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