Visited the impressive and friendly set of the legal drama Suits last week in Toronto. The series returns for a second season tonight at 9 p.m. ET on Bravo in Canada and Thursdays at 10/9c on USA Network in the States.
Suits shoots at the same former munitions factory in Downsview where Covert Affairs is lensed. By crossing a gigantic, wide concrete hallway, you can sort of walk between Washington (Covert‘s locale) and Manhattan (the Suits setting).
Talk about multi-functional. The same huge building also houses a church and a roller derby rink!
The Suit set is stunning (say that three times fast). The legal offices are all chrome, glass and teak and stretch along much of one very large soundstage. Outside the windows is a crazy long and very realistic photo scrim of the view from a midtown Manhattan skyscraper. You can see across the Hudson to the boroughs and the panorama is stunningly three dimensional.
Louis Litt’s only a junior partner at Pearson-Hardman but you wouldn’t know it from his office. The room is as big as a bowling alley. The walls are covered with fake law degrees and especially photos of Litt, played by Rick Hoffman.
Speaking of fake law degrees, I spoke with Suits stars Gabriel Macht (Harvey Specter) and Toronto-born Patrick J. Adams (Mike Ross) between takes. The two look like lawyers in their designer suits, especially Macht.
I asked them if either was ever temped–having played a lawyer–to defend himself in a real court of law. Adams, who plays fake lawyer Ross (the character is a former drug dealer who is brilliant in court even though he doesn’t have a law degree), said hell yes–especially after he was hit by a bus in Los Angeles.
Whoa, in case his mom is reading this, he’s fine. “It sounds way worse than it was,” he qualifies. “The bus was moving very slowly. Basically I bounced off the thing, got a scrape on my arm.”
Adams was sitting on his Honda scooter at the time. What the hell, he thought, the bus company owes me for the damage to my twelve-hundred dollar scooter. Time to change into TV lawyer man.
“For about three days I was doing the research, prepping for a case and thinking, this would be great press for the show,” he thought. “But as soon as I actually got into what it literally takes to get into anything legal…” Adams realized he was not cut out for the real legal ordeal.
He didn’t hire a real lawyer, either. “It ended up costing my $400 to fix the scooter he says. “What was I going to do–stick it to the man? The L.A. bus company has an army of lawyers.”
Macht had a hard time topping that story. “Well, I got hit by a train last month,” he joked.
He says his dad has asked him to put on one of those fancy Suits suits and represent him in a property dispute with a neighbour but he’s thought the better of it. He says he couldn’t walk into a real court without what he walks onto the set of Suits with–a writer. “I could maybe do it in a Cyrano de Bergerac kind of way,” he says.
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