There’s one thing that Wade Williams, who plays jail guard Brad Bellick on “Prison Break,” won’t miss about Chicago: The long drives from his home on the North Side to the show’s first-season set at the former Joliet Correctional Center. That commute, with traffic, could take up to four hours.
Everything else, he misses. But, as the actor said in a phone call from the show’s new set in Texas, despite his regrets about leaving the Windy City, “my mantra is, it’s nice to have a gig.”
Filming just began in Texas, and temperatures hovered around 100 degrees on his first day of shooting outside Dallas, Williams said. And crew members for “Prison Break” keep warning the cast that it’s only going to get worse.
“One guy told me, `You should take your daughter outside and fry an egg on the cement,’ and I was like, `You can really do that?'” Williams said with a laugh.
Williams and his wife had already enrolled their daughter in the British School on the city’s North Side, and Williams expected to keep pursuing fiddle lessons when he came back to Chicago after a short hiatus that began in March. But the show’s producers decided a couple of months ago to move “Prison Break” to Texas for logistical reasons.
Now that the prisoners, led by Michael Scofield, have busted out of the joint, “Prison Break” needed all sorts of locations, many of them rural, and the cost of transporting the cast and crew far from Chicago just proved to be too high.
For the show’s first-season finale, Williams said, hundreds of cast and crew members were transported to the far northern edge of Illinois to film postescape scenes. “We filled three hotels up there,” Williams says. Many of the locations that “Prison Break” will be using in Texas are a half-hour or so outside Dallas.
“We were just heartbroken” by the move, he says. But he added that the “Break” team has one souvenir from Chicago — lead camera operator Bill Nielsen Jr., whom the “Break” cast successfully campaigned to bring from Chicago to Texas.
Bellick is not so much heartbroken as really enraged, Williams says. “He’s already got a shell in the chamber” of his shotgun, the actor jokes.
“Now the prison is not going to be Joliet, it’s going to be the outside world,” Williams says of the show’s second season, much of which involves the hunt for Charles Westmoreland’s hidden cash. The escaped prisoners “are still not free. They’re in the open, running, but they don’t know who to trust. In a way, maybe prison was a safer place — they knew the rules.”
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moryan@tribune.com
