DEBRIS’ Norbert Leo Butz on Maddox’ Questionable Loyalty: ‘Morality is a Fluid Thing’

More than halfway intro DEBRIS’ first season, Norbert Leo Butz isn’t quite sure if his character, Craig Maddox, is a good or bad guy—but he likes it that way.

“As an actor, I do much better if I look at that script and that episode, within what I know needs to happen, formulate my own ideas about what I think is happening, and act on that,” he told reporters in the video below. “If I try to act knowing, ‘Oh in five episodes, I’m going to be found out to be a bad guy or a really good guy, or really this guy,’ it’s going to change my performance. I’m going to add things on. I know my weaknesses, as an actor, is what I’m saying. The less I know, the more my imagination can kind of grow. So, I don’t know if he’s a good guy or a bad guy, to be totally honest with you.”

So far, Maddox has existed in shades of grey: while he seems loyal to his CIA colleague Bryan Beneventi, he’s also put him in difficult positions. (Like asking him to withhold information from Finola Jones, Bryan’s partner, about her formerly-presumed dead father.) But that comes with the job.

“In this world of intelligence and special ops, these kind of covert operations, I know that morality is a fluid thing,” Butz said. “People do terrible things for reasons that they truly believe in. The end justifies the means. There’s culpable deniability in almost everything you do. That’s the name of the game, it’s a large game of chess. And so things like good guy, bad guy, in a guy like Craig, they don’t really compute. It’s more what is the next thing I need to do to play my end game to get control of this debris.”

Check out more from Butz in the video below…

DEBRIS, Mondays, 10/9c, NBC

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