Prison Break's Robert Knepper

50-year-old American actor Robert Knepper is hungry, and a bit distracted. Well, he has spent all day talking about reprising the role of racist, murderous rapist T-Bag in the impending videogame spin-off of late TV show Prison Break. (You may also know him as Sinister Dirty-Fingered Chief Carnie Samuel in the spectacularly awful latest series of Heroes.) We're going to make him talk some more about it, as well as about the Fonz, fake beards and singing drunks. He's charming, loves to tell stories and has lovely twinkly eyes, but he doesn't know Jack about videogames.

Eurogamer: What's been the process for recording your stuff for this game? Is it just you whispering murderous epithets into a mic, with no-one else to bounce off, or is it an ensemble recording?

Robert Knepper: Yeah, it's individually. The guys that came over from Germany to put it together, they were huge fans of the show, so that's nice - even when they had to be specific about what I should say, to trim it down for time, they really appreciated the show. And you could tell that it was a job for them, but it was also their love.

Eurogamer: Were you conscious of reading the lines into a vacuum? With a lot of games you can tell when that's happened, there's all these weird pauses and inflections in what's supposed to be a conversation...

Robert Knepper: Weird. How come they don't edit it better, so there's an overlap? No, there was no sense of that here, because that's how we do it. If we have to go back in on a film and do ADR [Automated dialogue replacement], re-loop the line because there was a plane flying overhead or a phone rings... Normally we would cut there. Sometimes I'll say "shall we keep going?" and the sound guy goes "no, we'll cut..." So... Er. I lost my train of thought. [Stares into middle distance.]

Eurogamer: Ah. So, this was purely voice work? You didn't have to wear hotpants and be covered in ping-pong balls for mo-cap?

Robert Knepper: Yeah, yeah. No, it wasn't that at all. People keep asking about that. Maybe a lot of them do that, right? It's sort of the 3D thing.

Eurogamer: Was it odd to go back to a previous iteration of T-Bag, back when he was still a full-on, child-murdering, white power psycho, before he developed a bit of a conscience?

Robert Knepper: I think the challenge of it was, even if he hadn't been a nasty guy, even if he'd been a hero, just revisiting a part that I'd played was hard. I know it's a videogame, but I thought, "I don't wanna become a caricature of myself." That always is possible with that kind of part.

Eurogamer: In Prison Break you're one-handed, in Heroes you've got the dirty fingernails. Are you worried about people typecasting you as guys with freaky hands?

Robert Knepper: Y'know it's funny, about three episodes into that show, someone said, "I see why your fingernails are the way. It's because you dip your fingers into ink, or you're always in the earth." The original impetus wasn't any of that. I just thought 'rock star'. And my original thought was just paint my nails black, and then I thought I don't wanna be Adam Lambert from American Idol, I want to do something different. And then I started scratching them and that's how it all came about. And after three episodes I started saying, "oh yeah, it's because of the ink, definitely..." I actually wanted to go a bit further, be more Bowie, Keith Richards, those legends.

Eurogamer: So you'd rather be remembered as a rock star carnie than a one-handed, racist paedophile?

Robert Knepper: Look, one of these days maybe I'll get an Emmy, and I'll thank Prison Break for that. It was a break, it put me on the map, it put us all on the map. There's a lot of great, iconic characters on television, and their actors who are still alive. Henry Winkler will always be the Fonz, y'know? That's the reason I wanted to go to Heroes right away, I wanted another job, I didn't want people to have time to say, "he's that guy, that's all he does," even though I had been acting for like 20 years by that point.

I just wanted to totally do something different, so I don't care what people recognise me from, so long as they rec... so long as they watch the work.

Eurogamer: It was Carnivale [a tragically cancelled HBO series about supernatural goings-on in Dust Bowl-era America] I recognised you from when you cropped up in Prison Break, in fact.

Robert Knepper: That was a great series. Such a well-written show.

Eurogamer: And a meek, well-intentioned, non-psychotic character too, in contrast to your most renowned roles...

Robert Knepper: Yeah. American actors, we tend to pigeonhole people because maybe that's all they can do? I dunno. My influences when I started acting weren't the American guys, they were the English actors, because they were able to transform themselves and be different people. That's acting to me. I never understood the whole thing of just be the same guy, look the same way, sound, walk, talk, everything. No, I need to be Stephen Sondheim or the woman who sings, "I never do anything twice, mmm-mmm-mmm-mmm..." [Humming continues for a while.]

We had this great thing in the States called the County Fair. Each county in Middle America has a fair, and they used to book these Hollywood or TV personalities, like a guy called Frankie Fontaine who was on the Jackie Gleeson show. He always played this character named Crazy Guggenheim, who was a drunk and a goofball, but Frankie Fontaine had this Basso Prodondo voice. He would come out and starting singing. [Knepper starts singing French words in a lounge voice. This continues for a short while.] I always think I'm never gonna work again, the only thing I'm ever going to do is be relegated to travelling the country, and doing the county fair circuit, singing T-Bag's favourite hits. That's my worst nightmare.

Eurogamer: After doing Prison Break and Heroes back to back, you must get crazy stalker fans following you around and trying to put their hands in your pocket?

Robert Knepper: Yeah, Prison Break changed all that. I'd always been able to watch people without them knowing I was watching them, to develop characters, to write notes, and all of a sudden people were watching me. It's something an actor always dreams about happening. I don't know one actor that won't admit this. We wanna work, and we wanna do great work, but we also wanna be in a position where we have some clout.

You can't do that unless you're somebody. So part of the business of showbusiness is saying I surrender to the fact that I know that in order to play the great parts, I have to be known. And in order to be known I have to play a part that people really want to watch. And because they're watching me I have to give up anonymity.

Eurogamer: Have you tried amassing a huge collection of fake beards? That'd solve the problem.

Robert Knepper: I shot Transporter 3 in Paris a couple of years ago, and in France if they don't know my name they call me Monsieur T-Bag. They show the scumball some respect. They're ravenous for Prison Break in France. I thought there was two ways of dealing with this experience in Paris. I can keep my head down and cover up, and look like a bum in a beard and hat, insulate myself and call home and say, "honey, they have amazing old sidewalks here, these cobblestone streets," because I never looked up.

Or I can admit that I never like wearing sunglasses. Sunglasses don't help anyway. I've tried it, and they just make people wonder who's behind them. So I said here I am, and of course everybody came up to me. But I'd rather do that than look down the whole time.

Eurogamer: If, heaven forfend, you ended up in a situation where you couldn't land high-profile parts, would you consider more videogame voicework a viable career, or do you think it's still too far away from traditional acting for you?

Robert Knepper: I don't know the world well enough, the videogame world, to even know what that is. I think voiceovers are great - we always say it's easy on the face. It's nice to do commercials, and it's nice to do commercial campaigns. I hear my buddy Kiefer [fixes me with knowing look], I hear Gene Hackman doing it all the time. I'm sure it's the same for videogames.

It's a nice fantasy of mine to think a friend of mine might call up and say, "the TV was on last night, and I heard this guy talking and I was all like oh my god, that's Rob. And it was some other character in something else." I don't think of my voice as being distinct just by itself until I play a character. Then you know you've made it, because people know your voice. Like you always know it's Jaaaaaack. [Slips into note-perfect Nicholson impression.] Jaaaaack's gonna do a commercial, and you know it's hissssssss."

Eurogamer: So the shows you're most known do the Lost thing, forever posing questions that take years to answer. A lot of big games series have started doing it too. Why do you think we're stuck in that cycle?

Robert Knepper: The cool thing about serialised TV shows is that I always do one fraction of a movie every week. I don't have to know the ending. In movies you would. I don't have to know the beginning, middle and end of that story. I'm right there. That's all I have to know.

A director told me once that one of his favourite days of directing was when he was shooting a pilot, and he had the whole thing done, the locations planned, and all of a sudden at the last minute the writers rewrote a scene. So the day they shot it, they had to work out right there and then in rehearsal where they were going to shoot it, what set they were going to put it on, and have the actors perform it. And he said it's one of the most amazing scenes he's ever shot. Everyone was on the same level - no-one was prepared. Sometimes if you don't think too much about something, it's better.