Ellen Gray: Richard Schiff felt drawn to 'Past Life'

PAST LIFE. 9 p.m. tomorrow, Channel 29.

PASADENA, Calif. - If Richard Schiff is open to the possibilities presented in his new Fox series, "Past Life," it may just be that he's an actor.

Reincarnation, after all, has to be less of a stretch for anyone whose job description includes frequent reinventions.

But Schiff, whose best-known life on-screen was "The West Wing's" Toby Ziegler, says his latest - as Dr. Malachi Talmadge, head of an institute devoted to helping people deal with past lives - involves a subject that's long interested him.

"I don't delve into it the way these characters do," he said in an interview here last month.

"I did have a past-life regression in Santa Fe, but only because my wife kind of insisted that we do this," he said. "I love my wife [actress Sheila Kelley]. She takes me on adventures, and I tend to not say no."

The experience "was very similar to what we do on the show, which is that you go into a kind of hypnotic trance of sorts, you've got deep breathing, and then things come to you."

What wasn't like the show: "Guy living out of a shack, got 23 dogs, down the road, out of Santa Fe. You know, it was kind of hysterical."

As for what actually happened there, Schiff's not sure.

"We're actors with imaginations. We know how to let our imaginations go. So I went off on quite a little journey. I just went with it," he said. "The regressionist was like, 'Oh, my God, that was the best regression I ever had! That was really cool!' . . . I don't know if it was real or not."

Still, "there are certain things that have happened in my life," said the actor, who's 54.

"I have a fascination with D-Day. And June 6, '44. Ever since I was a kid. Fascination with World War II. Fascination with the Depression era."

Years ago, "I ran into this hippie girl . . . who was all into reincarnation and I said, 'How do you know?' And she said, 'If you find yourself attracted to certain dates and certain eras, then that's the clues that lead you into that journey,' " Schiff said.

He's still looking for clues to the character of Malachi, whose introduction in the show's pilot was so cursory I'd thought that, like Toby, he might just be a little grumpy.

"I don't think he's grumpy, no," Schiff said.

"I didn't like the way that scene went, for character reasons. I don't think he's that guy that's mad at people that way, the way he did in the pilot. And that altered. It's what you've got to do when you do TV - you don't have the whole play in front of you, where you can do all your work."

Now that the actor's spent a bit more time with the character, "I think he's a good guy and I think he's a healer and I think he's devoted his life to this institute."

In the show, created by David Hudgins ("Friday Night Lights") and inspired by an M.J. Rose novel called "The Reincarnationist," Talmadge's institute apparently does some work similar to research done at the University of Virginia's Division of Perceptual Studies.

This being television, it's also likely to be solving at least one crime each week.

"It's a procedural, basically, so it's not character-driven, it's story-driven, and you know you have to live with that when you take those kinds of jobs," said Schiff, who didn't look for a TV series for a period after "The West Wing," working in theater and films instead.

"Laurence Fishburne is doing a procedural [CBS' "CSI"]. So this is the way of the world right now," he said. "But I do think we have the potential to develop a kind of very fascinating character here." *

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