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Patrick Bauchau: Xposé Special

Caring or self-serving? You're not sure about The Pretender's Sydney, as Patrick Bauchau tells David Richardson.

From Xposé Special no. 9 -- September 1999
by David Richardson

Good and evil are never clearly identified in The Pretender. We know that Jarod (Michael T. Weiss), the consummate genius who was snatched as a child by The Centre, is on a mission to help the weak and abused in society. However, the band of characters who work for that organization -- Sydney (Patrick Bauchau), Miss Parker (Andrea Parker), Broots (Jon Gries), Mr. Parker (Harve Presnell), Brigitte (Pamela Gidley), Mr. Lyle (Jamie Denton) -- are not so easily classified.

For Bauchau, that's part of the joy of starring in the popular series, which begins its fourth season on NBC soon.

"Sydney is the moral conscience of the show," the actor explains, "but at the same time he was the head of the program in which Jarod was brought up. I would say he's tainted; in other words you're never quite sure how sound his morals are. He might suddenly become a morally gray character again. That leads him to being pretty much an ambiguous character -- not a villain in the way a lot of the people in the Centre are -- but definitely ambiguous which is a very rich area to live with."

Sydney's story goes something like this: born in Europe to Jean and Greta, he has a twin brother Jacob. During World War II, the family was taken by the Nazis; the children became subjects of eugenics experiments and the parents were sent to the gas chambers. Sydney and Jacob survived, traveled to America, and were both eventually employed by The Centre, which at the time was devoted to philanthropic projects. Yet over the years the organization began to exploit the innocent in the name of profit. Jarod was taken from his parents and raised by Sydney, his intellect sold to the highest bidder. When Jarod escaped from the Centre, he remained in contact with Sydney and in recent episodes -- "Parole" and "Flesh and Blood" -- they have pooled resources.

"Jarod cannot separate himself from the Centre in a certain way," considers Bauchau. "That's where his umbilical cord keeps taking him. Jarod is incapable of really taking leave from the Centre because that's essentially his home.

"In this season I've been closely involved with him in at least two episodes where we worked together to achieve certain ends. In a certain way we've gotten much closer and yet Jarod still likes to take his distance from what in his head is obviously a torture situation.

"Sydney is essentially teamed with Jarod in an inextricable father/son relationship -- inextricable in a sense that they are not father and son. In a certain way their relationship is impossible to resolve."

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Image: Patrick Bauchau smiles for Xposé at the Pretender studios in California. Photo by David Richardson, Xposé © 1999. Click image to see a larger version in a new window. Do not use without prior, written permission.