'Prison Break' cast heats up premiere party at the W

[Dumi]

'Prison Break' cast heats up premiere party at the W

07:30 AM CDT on Monday, August 14, 2006

By ED BARK / The Dallas Morning News

The on-the-lam cast of Prison Break at last caught a break Sunday night.


Prison Break's Amaury Nolasco braves searing temperatures on his walk down the red carpet Sunday. Two months of filming in the sweltering North Texas outdoors made them ripe for the cold, calculated, 33rd floor coolness of the W Hotel's Ghostbar, site of the hot Fox show's second season premiere party.Not that anyone's feeling oppressed, least of all Dallas native and J.J. Pearce High School grad Lane Garrison.

"We endure the heat and we keep going on," he said after serving as an ad hoc correspondent for cable's E! Entertainment network. "If people were horrible here, it would be a nightmare. But you endure the heat because people are so great to you. That's the difference between shooting in Texas and another town we won't mention."

Mr. Garrison, who plays fugitive David "Tweener" Apolskis, has become a familiar figure at the W. That's because he's the only Prison Break star living in the recently opened hotel. It allowed him to zip upstairs to "get fluffed" before joining the night's ground-level red carpet procession.

"I'm the only ignorant one in the cast doing this," he joked of rooming at the W. "Everyone else goes, 'I need a little stability and quietness.' I'm like, 'No, no, no, no, I need to be surrounded by 6,000 people at all times.' "

Dominic Purcell, known to Prison Break fans as wrongly accused Lincoln Burrows, is far more a solitary man. Sipping a Coke and later a Red Bull, he quickly sought the Ghostbar's warm, breezy outdoor balcony, where the music lay lower and the crowds stayed thinner.

"My partying days are kinda done," he said. "I don't drink anymore. So going to a place like this is kind of rare for me. I like to keep a low profile."

He did play around with Mr. Garrison, though, taking his E! microphone from him and then asking with mock seriousness, "What's your favorite color?"

For the record, Mr. Garrison answered, "Blue."

"But it's not," he later said. "It's black. I don't know. I like dark colors."

Prison Break, which returns next Monday at 7 p.m. on KDFW-TV (Channel 4) locally, is in the midst of filming the season's fifth episode. The cast so far has been all over North Texas, including jaunts to Rockwall, McKinney, Decatur and Denton.

"I don't mind the heat. I never have," Mr. Purcell said. "We've been in some very remote, rural places. I was expecting it to be brown and kind of desert-like, but it's actually very lush and green. I don't know what you guys feed your plants."

Back in the Ghostbar's lime-green-accented interior, Prison Break hottie Wentworth Miller had a little different take on the heat.

"I'm not going to say I like it, I'm not going to say it's bearable. But it's adding something to the show," he said. "It looks like we're suffering and it looks like we're struggling, which is what we're supposed to be doing."

Mr. Miller, who plays Lincoln's younger brother, Michael Scofield, said he's not a habitué of Ghostbar. "I'm not a social animal."

He's had his coolest time so far at Arlington's Six Flags Over Texas amusement park.

"I love roller coasters," Mr. Miller enthused. He also tried the bungee jump rides, "which I know legal isn't too thrilled about."

No one seemed to be living too dangerously at Ghostbar. Nine cast members attended the party, mingling with roughly 200 other guests, including Channel 4 anchors Clarice Tinsley and Megan Henderson, and Dallas Film Commission head Janis Burklund. Available delicacies ranged from grilled Maine lobster sandwiches to barbecue beef sliders to shrimp and avocado bruschetta. Ample free booze, too.

Ms. Burklund, still lobbying for tax incentives that might lure more productions to Texas, said she had invited several state representatives to the Prison Break soiree.

"It just makes it more real to them, once they start to feel the glitz," she said. "They realize that this is kind of fun, maybe we should encourage more of this. These people spend millions of dollars in the state and they give good parties, too."

Prison Break star Robert Knepper, who plays the twisted Theodore "T-Bag" Bagwell, said that he and his wife, Tory, already are sold on North Texas.

"They actually, like, wait on you at a store," said Mr. Knepper, who wore a black Prison Break T-shirt and matching leather jacket.

Parties at the Ghostbar are a nice perk, but no one in the ensemble cast has copped a 'tude, he said. "You're dealing with guys on this show who are all very humbled by this. It's not like we're used to this kind of treatment."

Mr. Garrison, the local kid who's made good, kept using the word "surreal."

"We're literally on top of the world in Dallas, and I'm still coming off my high," he said after his brief one-night stand as an E! correspondent. "It was pretty cool, but I never want to be a journalist again."

Instead he has a proletarian excursion in mind to beat the heat of yet another long day's location shoot.

"I'm trying to get 'em all to go to Dairy Queen and have a Blizzard with me," Mr. Garrison said. "That'll be our most obscure field trip, and I will make it happen."