One week, “Quantum Leap” star Raymond Lee was wearing a 50-pound space suit for 12 hours a day. The next, he was in a boxing ring. The next, he’d be focused more on the emotional strain.
“It’s a dream job. I don’t have ADD but I like new things. I like being constantly stimulating. I like learning new things,” the 35-year-old actor told the Daily News.
“For somebody who considers himself a jack-of-all-trades but a master of none, I think this is a pretty perfect job.”
Lee stars in the new version of “Quantum Leap,” which premiered Monday and set 30 years after the original. But he’s not stepping in for Scott Bakula, who starred for five seasons as Sam Beckett as he jumped through time and space. Instead, he plays Dr. Ben Song, a quantum physicist who makes an unauthorized leap, leaving behind a lab of security analyst Jenn Chou (Nanrisa Lee), artificial intelligence scientist Ian Wright (Mason Alexander Park) and boss Herbert “Magic” Williams (Ernie Hudson).
With the help of former Army intelligence officer Addison Augustine (Caitlin Bassett), who appears to him in hologram form, Ben continues jumping, each week into a different person and different time period.
“Ultimately it is a show about empathy,” Lee, recently seen in “Kevin Can F— Himself,” said. “I am literally putting myself in someone else’s shoes and forced to look through that lens.”
Executive producer Martin Gero, who said he watched “almost every episode” of the original “Quantum Leap” as a kid, stressed that he didn’t want to remake Bakula’s version, but still wanted to show “reverence.”
Gero’s show will split time between Song’s leaps and the lab back home, where the scientists are trying to figure out how and why their colleague left. Much like Lee, he found excitement in the variety he could imbue into each episode.
“Each episode is a totally different genre: one’s in space, one’s horror, one’s an old Western,” Gero, who recently worked on NBC’s “Blindspot,” told The News.
“The joy of that and being able to have a show that’s so malleable, where the tone and quality consistency stay the same but every week you’re getting something new and hopefully something totally unexpected, as a writer that’s a tremendous opportunity.”
The new “Quantum Leap,” Gero said, should be just as fun for newcomers as it is for what he called “Leapheads,” those who grew up on the show like he did. Connecting the two, beyond the technology, is Magic, originally played by Christopher Kirby as a Vietnam War soldier whom Beckett jumped into in a Season 3 episode. Now, Ernie Hudson takes over the role as a “very spiritual, very intuitive” former Navy SEAL.
For Hudson, best known for playing Winston Zeddemore in the “Ghostbusters” movies, Magic provides a fresh perspective the show has never seen before: the survivor left behind after the scientist jumps in, then back out again.
As much as Lee stresses that Ben is gaining empathy, Hudson said it’s important to remember whose body he’s using.
“It allows the audience to look at situations and circumstances and have a much more honest respect instead of judging from a distance,” Hudson, 76, told The News.
“A lot of times it’s hard to even imagine because the judgment is so strong. We just assume a person living that way must be like this. This show shows that no, at the heart of it, we’re all pretty much the same. We have much more in common than we have separating [us]. We’re all connected.”
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