24: Rigid CTU Boss Bill Buchanan Secretly Quite Flexible
The fascinating things one learn in the New York Times Sunday Arts section: In a long overdue profile of '24' character actor James Morrison -- the silver haired, serious man, former Marine type CTU boss who's got a hotline to the White House, terrorists and terrorist-slayer Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) -- it is revealed that the sleek, whippet-thin, ramrod-straight looking actor is secretly quite flexible.
Morrison is a certified yoga instructor who's been teaching for five years. He tells writer Walter Dawkins that yoga has helped him play Buchanan. “There’s so much insanity and so much dysfunction in the story that it craves an element of balance,” said Mr. Morrison, who lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Riad Galayini, and their 7-year-old son, Seamus. “I’m a yogi, and that’s what I try to bring wherever I go.”
Even more surprising: Morrison is an ex-circus clown. (The crying on the inside kind, obviously: he hated that job, he says) and tightrope walker. "It did prepare me for being an actor,” he said, “because as bad as it can get in Hollywood trying to make a living, nothing compared to how bad it was in the circus.”
MORE 24! Reiko Aylesworth (aka CTU's plague-surviving, Tony-loving Michelle Dessler) talks to New York magazine about the tick-tick-ticking clock and the show's rising absurd-o-meter.