Titus Welliver on Bosch's New Season, His Real-Life Son's Role on the Show and a Surprising Hobby

He’s been cast in every movie Ben Affleck has directed, and Titus Welliver, 56, has been on TV in Lost, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and The Good Wife. But he’s best known as the crime solver Harry Bosch in Bosch. The Amazon streaming series began its third season April 21.

What’s new with Harry this season?

Harry now has his daughter, Maddie, living with him. So he’s trying to figure out the parenting thing. At the same time, he has compromised his personal code of ethics and has a terrible secret he can’t share with anyone, and it’s eating away at him.

Harry tends to anger people, but is there another side to him?

He’s very good with the families of victims of crime. He is an extraordinarily empathetic and kind man in that way, but I think that he does not suffer fools because he doesn’t subscribe to the societal norms of politeness all the time. He’s prickly. He’s not Jim Rockford. He’s not a father-knows-best guy. But if one were a victim of a crime, you would want Harry Bosch to be the detective that caught the case because he is relentless in his pursuit for justice.

We root for Harry, but he isn’t really a hero, is he?

I think Harry is an antihero and that’s probably why, for me, he’s interesting to play. He’s human; he’s flawed. I don’t think that he’s a guy who is mean-spirited or who intentionally sets out to be unpleasant. He just sometimes loses sight of societal norms.

What other issues are Harry battling this season?

He’s also still struggling with the emptiness that he knows exists since he solved his mother’s murder. As Harry says, “Closure is a myth.” He’s still very much wrestling with that, so he’s more internal than ever, but he’s got Maddie there and he’s trying to protect her to a certain degree from his inability to express himself, but also still show up. He’s dreadfully afraid of her being in harm’s way considering what happened in the previous season where she and [his ex-wife] Eleanor were abducted and could have been killed.

Harry’s credibility is being called into question this season because of something he is doing.

Because he has a conscience, there’s some level of shame that he has about the fact that he’s been surveilling a profoundly evil bad guy who’s a serial murderer, but Harry’s breaking the law by having illegal surveillance equipment in this man’s apartment and outside of his building.

I’m OK with that. As Titus, I say, “Hey, he knows this guy is bad, he knows he’s evil, and he can’t seem to catch him.” So, rather than plant evidence on him, which is not something that Harry would do, he compromises himself, he compromises his credo. It’s interesting to see how that plays out. It creates upheaval and havoc for him.

Your son Quinn played a younger Harry in flashbacks. Does he want to follow you into the business? Are you good with that?

I’m fine with that. First of all, he’s very good at what he does and so I’m proud of him. I don’t say that just because I’m his dad. I’m not the kind of parent that heaps praise on my kids for everything they did. I only give them praise when I think it’s warranted. He’s developing into a really fine actor, as is my eldest son, Eamonn. My daughter Cora was on the show last season as well.

These opportunities presented themselves. When I was approached about Quinn playing me as a young Harry Bosch, I said, “I have to ask him.” I did and he knew that there was no pressure from me. From the time my kids were little, I would have casting people and/or agents coming up to me and saying, “Hey, your kid would be great in commercials,” and I just said, “No, that’s OK. Thank you, no.” Because I felt like I just wanted them to be kids. They’re now at an age where they’re old enough to arrive at some of those things on their own.

When I was asked if my daughter, Cora, wanted to do a scene, at first she said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” and then a day later she said, “I’m not really an actor. I don’t know what to do. I don’t think I want to do it.”  And I said, “OK.” But then 24 hours later she changed her mind, and I finally said to her, “You either commit to it, or I need to let them know so they can move on.” And she came and she did it.

It’s a very familiar environment because my kids have grown up on film sets. So it’s a very comfortable place or them to be. I’ve neither encouraged or discouraged them. It makes sense to me; I grew up with my parents being artists. They certainly didn’t put paper and pencils in front of me when I was little and say, “Draw something.” I think there’s a process of osmosis and environment that makes you curious.

But my kids also have other interests. Quinn’s come back this season. He’s older, but it gives us a glimpse into Harry as a teenager, and it’s a very important time. I’m very hands-off. I tried to make myself scarce on the set the day Quinn was shooting because I said to him, “You’re your own man. You’re a professional, you have to come in here and you’ve got to work on your own. I can’t hold your hand.” Nor did he want that. He went to the next level as an actor. I said to him, “You’re a better actor than I was at your age.” Of course, I think, he thought I was just paying him a compliment because I’m his dad. He has a sense and a gift and I think he’s benefitted from being on sets from the time he was a little boy, just seeing the process.

I say to all my kids, “I’m only interested in your happiness and anything you want to do as long as it makes you happy and gets you up in the morning, that’s what matters to me.”

A lot of Bosch is shot on the streets of Los Angeles, and not the best parts of town. How have you taken to that?

That’s the thing, Harry, he works Hollywood division, so you’re right, it’s in the funky areas of Hollywood, it’s down in Boyle Heights, it’s in the not-so-glamorous parts of Los Angeles. It’s not Entourage, where it’s all the glamour and glitz.

Los Angeles is a character in the same way that Bosch is a character. When Michael Connelly writes the books, having lived here, all these places are there for a reason. I think it’s very interesting how Michael chooses certain little things that inform Harry like where he goes to eat, where he goes to hang out, where he goes to drink and what he likes. They are all institutions of Los Angeles.

How has Bosch season three been reworked from Michael Connelly’s novels?

It was reworked from The Black Echo. They had to change Harry’s military service, his having been in Vietnam in the books, to bring Harry into present day. They reconfigured that and there was a female character in the book that was connected to the murder victim, so there’s some stuff that will not be in the show.

I think the substance of what they brought from The Black Echo was the killing of a special forces operative and the discovery of that murder by Sharkey, a kid, and how Harry interacts with this kid who he feels is a kindred spirit from his own childhood.

And then, of course, we also used bits of A Darkness More Than Night. The McCaleb character is a key player in that book. He’s the one that raises the eyebrow of suspicion towards Harry. The rights of that character are owned by Clint Eastwood, from his having done Blood Work, which was another McCaleb book. So we couldn’t have someone come in this season and play McCaleb. So what they did, and they did it artfully, was they took that suspicion and they spread it out between Jerry Edgar, Grace Billets and another homicide detective named Jimmy Robinson.

Do you still paint?

I do. I haven’t had a show in a few years. But one of my paintings is with the U.S. ambassador to Azerbaijan. I’m extremely touched by that because my father’s work [artist Neil Welliver] was collected and hung in many embassies over the years.

https://parade.com/462861/paulettecohn/bestselling-author-michael-connelly-on-taking-harry-bosch-from-books-to-tv/