Ron Livingston

How goes it, Ron?
Doing good, brother.

Good morning.
Good morning to you.

I hope you have a few minutes to talk about time travel and impossible love.
Yeah, absolutely.

How did you get involved with The Time-Traveler’s Wife? Were you pissed that your character wasn’t a time traveler?
No. I just went in and auditioned. I read the book, so I sort of knew the story. You’re never quite sure how much they’re going to change it for the movie. Fortunately, with this one, it’s elaborate enough that they couldn’t change too much or it would all start to fall apart.

The perils of time travel.
Yeah. It gets pretty elaborate.

The whole thing—a strange, time-displaced romance between Eric Bana’s character, Henry, and Rachel McAdams’s character Clare—kind of puts one’s own mundane relationship problems in perspective.
[Laughs] Yeah, you figure if they can deal with that, we should be able to deal with socks on the floor.

That’s what I’m saying. Next time you catch hell for leaving the toilet seat up, just say, “Well, at least I’m not phasing in and out of temporal reality. Ever think of that?”
It’s really a great excuse for the “Where were you for the last three days?” question, or “Why do you always leave you clothes on the floor?”

Who had it worse: Henry or Scott Bakula in Quantum Leap?
I think probably Henry, because of the whole naked and cold thing. Bakula at least got to show up in someone else’s body, which has to be kind of interesting.

He had Dean Stockwell, too.
Yeah, he had help.

If you could time travel, where would you go?
Hmm. I’d probably go back to when I was a better dancer.

When was that?
That was high school.

You had the moves?
I don’t think I had them, but just didn’t realize yet that I didn’t.

In your new show, Defying Gravity, you seem to play the two-fisted scientist hero with a heart of gold. Will this make Ron Livingston the Patrick Dempsey of outer space?
Well, there’s really only one Patrick Dempsey, but I think this character lands somewhere between McDreamy, McScotty and MacGyver. I don’t know about the heart of gold, though. It’s more like he’s a grizzled veteran of the space program getting the second chance he never thought he’d have.

I guess you could live with Darth McDreamy if you had to.
[Laughs] I think that one might be copyrighted. I’ll have to come up with my own.

What Would Han Solo Do, right?
I think we all know what Han Solo would do. He’d blast someone from under the table and run. Always a good option.

How could your character not be a hero with a name like Maddux Donner?
Yeah, it’s pretty heroic. I sort of felt at the beginning like it was a little too heroic to pull off. The writer was pretty adament though. If you look at the kids being born today, all the people in the future are going to have weird names like Dakota or Donner.

Donner party jokes?
Yeah, and Donner is classic. Santa had a reindeer named Donner. Donner Pass.

What does your team expect to find on Venus?
Good question. Well, Venus is the goddess of love, so maybe we’ll find that.

I was hoping some kind of magma creature. So if your buddies from Initech—Samir, Michael Bolton and Lumbergh—were all were all laid off during the recession, where do you seem them working right now?
Iphone apps.

I feel like there would’ve been an app to get Bakula out of Quantum Leap.
The trick is to travel with the charger.

—Interviewed by Drew Toal

Livingston’s newest film, The Time Traveler’s Wife, opens Aug 14, and his television show, Defying Gravity, airs Sundays on ABC.

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