'Bosch' star talks reading, bingeing and his Philly childhood

BOSCH. Today, Amazon Prime Video.

TITUS WELLIVER is more binge-reader than binge-watcher.

"I like to watch something and let it sort of gestate," said the star of Amazon Studios' new cop drama "Bosch," in a recent interview.

"I kind of read voraciously. I've always got, like, three books going at the same time."

In "Bosch," based on Michael Connelly's best-selling books and premiering today on Amazon Prime, Welliver, who spent a chunk of his childhood in Philadelphia, plays Los Angeles police detective Harry Bosch.

"He's not the guy who wears the white hat," said Welliver. "There's a level of damage that . . . makes him far more complex and interesting to play."

It's a good fit, and not just because Welliver often plays "hard-edged" characters, be they cops, bad guys or the infamous Man in Black on "Lost." Or even because the actor cops to doing "95 percent of my shopping on Amazon."

Connelly named Bosch after 15th-century Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch. Welliver, son of the late landscape painter Neil Welliver, who headed Penn's graduate school of fine arts for many years, also paints.

His three children all draw, said the actor, and his son, Quinn, plays Harry at age 12 in the series.

"He's better than I am," he said, "because he hasn't been spoiled with conservatory training. So he's a totally instinctual, open being who's incapable of telling a lie, something that I think all actors would love to return to."

Welliver, who attended St. Peter's School, 3rd and Lombard, until third grade, said he's "very proud of my Philly roots."

His time here included drama.

"My father moved to Maine . . . because he sort of wanted to," a decision colored, Welliver thinks, by an incident in which the painter interrupted the sexual assault of a young girl next door to his home on Woodland Terrace, in West Philadelphia.

His father chased the suspect through West Philadelphia, he said. When police apprehended the man, they learned "he was already up on manslaughter charges for killing a rival gang member."

The man was convicted in the attempted assault, but "it was a very, very scary thing," Welliver recalled. "We had round-the-clock protection at our house . . . and got a lot of death threats."

Moving to Maine, where he'd mostly spent summers before, was a big change.

"I went literally from, you know, lovely St. Peter's School and my life in West Philadelphia, which I loved, to going to public school in rural Maine, in which we used textbooks from the 1950s," Welliver said. "You'd be reading in your history and science books, 'Man someday hopes to go to the moon,' " Welliver said.

Starring in a show whose entire first season is released at once is a new experience that Welliver welcomes.

"Typically on television, the detective catches the case at the beginning of the show . . . and the bad guy is apprehended by the end of the episode," he said. "We take 10 episodes to solve a case rather than after the last commercial break. I think the experience, then, is much more like reading a book."

He'd only read one of Connelly's books, "years ago," when he was cast as Bosch, and he asked the writer "which books he felt would give me the clearest view into Harry."

Connelly's response was to send him all the books - signed first editions, "and, of course, I was thrilled" - and to recommend three: "City of Bones," "The Concrete Blonde" and "Echo Park" figure in season 1.

He's since gone on to read more. "I like reading them on an airplane, because I've got nowhere to go and I can just sit with a book and sit with a character."

As for Amazon's "Bosch," "I certainly think that fans of the books are going to binge-watch it. They're going to watch the season in a weekend - and I get it," he said.

"We are such a society now of immediate gratification . . . The same way that when you order something online, you have the option of free shipping" if you're willing to wait, "or you can get it tomorrow for an additional $6. I'm even that guy."

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