Eric Lange knows he looks like a high school chemistry teacher — and the last person you’d cast as a killer. Yet Lange says his unassuming demeanor makes him the perfect choice for that role.
As former FBI agent David Tate on FX’s “The Bridge,” Lange, 40, has been waiting a long time to get even with Det. Marco Ruiz (Demian Bichir) for his wife’s death.
Until then, no one’s safe. Tate came upon an old enemy in a restroom and slit the guy’s throat. Lange says he spent six hours filming that scene. The victim wore a prostheses with a built-in slit. Fake blood was pumped through tubes running up the actor’s back and into the edges of the cut.
“We had to keep his head forward so you wouldn’t see the slit and then pull his head back. Then the knife went through and they pumped the machine,” Lange says.
Lange also locked Ruiz’s wife, Alma (Catalina Sandino Moreno), and their daughters inside a remote cabin, with Alma holding a grenade.
“The idea that I had to wave this grenade in those kids’ faces has to be one of the top 10 disgusting ideas in the history of TV,” Lange says.
Tate recently kidnapped Ruiz’s college-age son, Gus. “He’s in the midst of causing real suffering,” he says.
In real life, Lange is happy at home. He is marrying his fiancee Lisa, an agent for commercials, in November.