Wacky 'Nip/Tuck' plot leaves John Hensley speechless

That's right, in the Season 6 premiere airing at 9 p.m. Wednesday, Matt has to explain to his two dads (long story), doctors Sean McNamara (Dylan Walsh) and Christian Troy (Julian McMahon), that he's spent a ton of money on mime classes.

Matt (John Hensley) explains to his dad, Sean (Dylan Walsh), that he is taking mime classes. FX photos

As is always the case for Matt, things don't work out the way he hopes when he takes his new skills to Venice Beach boardwalk.

"That story line, and everywhere that story line goes, has probably been the most fun I've had on the show," said Hensley, who took mime classes before filming. "Even though it's twisted and a little out there for this show, at least it has some levity. ... But things sort of take a dramatically different turn."

Still, the mime plot doesn't compare to what's coming in Season 6 and in the final season, which will air sometime in 2011. Hensley hinted that later this season Matt appears in a dream Christian has. "That was just so bizarre," he said, adding that the Season 7 shocker is "unbelievable, even for Matt."

Hensley said he feels fortunate to have played Matt, but has shaken his head in disbelief a lot over the years.

"There have been many instances where I've gotten a script and thought, 'Aw, man, are you kidding me? I can't believe they're going there,' " he said, laughing. "Equally, there have been many cases where I've gotten a script and thought, 'I'm so lucky to be on a show like this because they want to go here.' "

Hensley talked more about the final season, working with Murphy and how he initially resisted playing Matt.

So where does the mime story go?
Well, I mean, as it involves Matt and takes place in this bizarre world of "Nip/Tuck" you can safely say it doesn't go to good places, for sure.

They never do.
They really don't, especially when it involves that kid.

I was looking back at all the stuff that has happened to Matt over the years. Wow, you've hard a hard time.
It's been an interesting road for sure. I've been really fortunate ... that Matt happens to be the character that I got to play. Every season, without fail, it's been a bit like playing a different character that just happens to have the same name. There's no sort of through line with Matt other than ... a real lack of judgment and penchant toward self-destruction. I feel really fortunate that that's the straw I drew on this thing. He's the one character that's not defined by his circumstance, meaning that he's not bound by a profession or anything like. There's a lot of freedom for [the writers] to have fun with him. That's been a nice thing to play over the years.

Has there ever been a time when you've picked up a script and said, "What is this?"
Oh yeah, are you kidding?

Or "Do I have to do this?"
I've never gone to Ryan and said, "Do I have to?" Maybe this is a bit of my nature anyway. I take it as a challenge, not in terms of, "I can't believe they're asking me to do this because it's so outrageous," but in terms of, "OK, they've sort of dumped this in my lap, now how am I going to make it work?"

[When I react with] "Come on, you're kidding me," are when it doesn't have a connection to the story as a whole. It's just sort of there for shock's sake or to be sort of outrageous and you think, "OK, how do I tie this in to everything that we've established over however many episodes?" That's often where the challenge is.

"Nip/Tuck" is a world of, what would you call it? It's a world of sort of flash and sort of shock and often times without the foundation beneath it to support that flash and shock. It's very specific I think to "Nip/Tuck" where that's where the job is. You know is to thin, "OK, how do we make this work? How do we pull this off?"

So what is the weirdest thing that you've done as Matt?
Let me think. The weirdest one? Well, there is something coming up in this season that was just bizarre. Without giving too much away because it's sort of later in this season, the mime thing doesn't really pan out the way Matt thought it was going to and things sort of take a dramatically different turn and he ends up, as usual, in a pretty dark place and bad situation. It affects all the other characters and Christian has this dream involving Matt. That little sequence was an odd one. Other than that there is something in the last season, which is way down the road, ... which is kind of unbelievable even for Matt.

We do get to see you perform as a mime in the first episode.
There was a whole performance that they had choreographed that I'd worked with this mime coach for probably about a month before shooting that episode [that] hardly made it in. I was a little bummed when I saw it. I thought, "Oh man, I was really proud of that mime."

DVD extras.
Oh God. I hope not.

So you did do some mime training? That's cool.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I did. Honestly, it was pretty amazing to do. I, like probably so many people, just thought of mimes as very strange, odd little characters with creepy face paint doing stuff on a street corner. It was actually really enlightening, quite frankly, to do some training and to really see what it's about. When somebody is good at that, they can really tell a whole story without, as cheesy as it sounds, without saying a word. So yeah, it was pretty cool.

Did you just decide to train or did the show set you up to learn mime?
That was arranged by the producers for the show. I was so thrilled actually with the whole mime storyline. Initially Ryan came to me and he said, "Look, I'm thinking about doing this thing with Matt that should be a lot of fun." And he said, "I basically want to turn Matt into a really bad actor, like really robotic, bad, terrible actor." And he said, "So I want to shoot scenes, sort of scenes within scenes to where Matt is in like a little black box theater and he is just horrible on stage in front of these people and maybe put him on sort of a set, but he gets some sort of role and he is just terrible."

That is what I fully expected and then a few months later Ryan came back to me and he said, "I'm thinking I'd like to make Matt a mime."

And I just thought, "Well that's brilliant and I'm game, so whatever you need me to do I'm down." I don't really know how he went from really bad actor to mime, but I'm glad he went there.

I thought yeah, I'm 100 percent onboard. Let's do it. So that really added to the sort of fun factor of this season for me. It's actually a really nice thing to be able to say that six seasons in that you're having more fun with it than you ever have.

Speaking of Ryan, you said that you don't know how he got to the mime thing, but I sometimes wonder how he gets to a lot of things in your show and "Glee." How is it working with him? Is he just a crazy fun guy or what?
Well it's funny. When I first met Ryan, which was not long after reading the pilot, it became very apparent to me that he is somebody who possesses a wide sort of spectrum of knowledge about a number of different things. He is one of those people that if you're going to get into a conversation about something with him you really should know what you're talking about because, chances are, he does.

He is one of those odd people in the sense that he knows a little bit about everything regardless of topic. He is able to incorporate those random odd bits and almost process them in a creative way. They almost get perhaps jumbled up in the head and then vomited out onto a page and it sort of makes this crazy palette.

That is, to me, sort of what "Nip/Tuck" and "Glee" are. They're almost like two sides of the same coin. They're very result-oriented shows, meaning that Ryan presents to everyone the final picture and then says, "OK, now give me the brushstrokes to get there." It's a different process because other shows and films that I've worked on are very much a step-by-step building block [process].

And he also doesn't beat around the bush. He'll dump as much action into one episode that takes any other show four weeks to do.
Yes, that's it. That's it exactly. We joke all the time on "Nip/Tuck" that it's sort of a show of miraculous healings. It's like you'll have a character that has been shot seven times in one episode and then they come back a week later and they're completely healed.

The show is, it's just farcical. It has no bearing. It has no attachment to reality whatsoever, and I would argue that that's a thread throughout Ryan's work. I don't think anyone would ever call what he does realism. It's fantastical and it's flash. You know that's what he does and he is very good at it. He is very good at painting those pictures for sure.

How old were you when you started doing "Nip/Tuck"?
We started in 2003, so I was probably 24 [26 actually] I guess.

John Hensley was coached by a mime for the new season of "Nip/Tuck." FX photo

And how old was Matt supposed to be then?
Well that was always a point of almost contention. I did not want to do "Nip/Tuck" when they first came to me. ... [Matt] was written as like a 16 year-old kid or something like that. I said, "Are you crazy? Don't even send it to me." Like, "I'm a 24 year-old guy. I have no desire whatsoever to play a teenager." ... I didn't feel that Matt could be written in a believable way to ever necessarily match what I might naturally want to bring to a role on a consistent basis for potentially years at a time.

Three, four years of the show, that was the hardest thing for me about playing Matt. It was really difficult at times to have to constantly feel as though I was holding myself back. I can't tell you how many times I would hear from a director, "OK that was really fantastic for a 25-year-old. Now let's try to peel about 8 years off that and let's try to find a place that's believable for this guy."

That was sort of the trickiest thing about [playing] Matt. It was never the situations that he was in. It was never the craziness of the situations. It was always the sort of peeling years off of him and the sort of continual process of doing so.

That eventually went away. I think this was around the third year that [the writers] said, "OK, we've officially decided that we're abandoning any idea of attaching any age to Matt." I was so happy to hear that because I thought now we can have a little fun.

You're done shooting both parts of the final season. Was it kind of bittersweet when you were done filming?
No, it wasn't even that. God, how do I describe it? It was bizarrely natural to end it.

The one thing about "Nip/Tuck" that I could always get behind and that I was always so happy with was the fact that even though [it could be ridiculous], it was truly a story. This is probably one of the coolest things about Ryan is that he is willing to tell a story without apology, meaning he is willing to tell a story with complete disregard for how others might react to it. He is not going to apologize for what he wants to say or how he wants to say it. ... That is a very rare thing to have the opportunity to be a part of.

So coming to the end, you sort of anticipate that it might be odd and weird, but when we got to it, ... it really came to a moment of just feeling like it was totally right. The story has been told at this point. It's a done deal.

We've gotten to play with those stories and I can tell you that by the end, the story will have been told. There is nothing left unsaid and I think that if that weren't the case then maybe saying goodbye might have been bittersweet, but because that was the case I think we all walked away feeling that it actually felt really clean to say goodbye.

There wasn't a sense of sadness and as well there wasn't a sense of relief. It was just purely like shutting off the lights at night. And you know what? I guess you can't ask for anything better than to walk away with something with that feeling.

That's sort of similar to what Dylan Walsh said.
Yeah, it's very true. Dylan, I really can't express just how much I love working with that man. I mean he is a true coworker. He is there with you sort of until the end and he is a guy who put in more hours than anybody and yet I never once saw him on any cruise control or never give anything than 100 percent. He really served as sort of a walking example of what to do when you're the lead of a show.

So what's up next for you?
For me? God, what's next? That's a really good question. I've got a couple things that I'm actually working on from the production end and as a writer. One is a documentary of sorts and the other is actually a feature.