Bill Camp Didn’t Need to Know

“I played the whole thing as Raymond, and Raymond’s super-objective was to defend Rusty. But I, Bill Camp, was always curious.” Photo: Apple TV+

All Raymond Horgan wants to do is save his best friend — and maybe stave off retirement without dying from cardiac arrest. Is that too much to ask? With “The Verdict,” which concludes the first season of David E. Kelley’s take on Presumed Innocent for Apple TV+, he gets to do just that. After eight episodes of legal and emotional chicanery, a jury finds Rusty Sabich not guilty of murdering his lover, Carolyn Polhemus. The show then ends on a complicated and twisted note: The secret of the killer’s true identity brings the family unit closer together, in spite of Rusty’s betrayal, and the Sabiches move on with their lives.

So, too, it seems, does Raymond, played by the venerable Bill Camp, who brings a weathered frisson to the ousted district attorney. To a large extent, Presumed Innocent is a scintillating summer show defined by actors making big choices: Jake Gyllenhaal does the full Gyllenhaal bugout; Peter Sarsgaard slimes all over as the bolo-tie-wearing Tommy Molto; O-T Fagbenle is reaching for transcendence with Nico Della Guardia’s iconically wacky voice. Amid this gallery of weirdo men stands Camp’s Raymond, whose comparatively grounded presence makes for a fun counterbalance. His best moments tend to come in the form of grade-A throwaway lines (“Nothing’s beneath me; I once fucked an ottoman”) and in the quieter kitchen-table scenes with his wife, Lorraine, played by Elizabeth Marvel, Camp’s real-life partner. This isn’t to say that Raymond doesn’t get explosive moments — at times, literally. The fifth episode, “Pregame,” is punctuated by a horrifying sequence where his head suddenly explodes, eventually revealed as a dream sequence foreshadowing the character’s heart attack in court.

Raymond recovers in time to return as Rusty’s defense lawyer, but the health scare is enough to convince him of the virtues of retirement. At the end of the series, he appears to finally slip into a quiet life with Lorraine, and they are last seen gardening together. In Camp’s perspective, though, that idyllic conclusion might itself be a head fake. “I don’t know if Raymond could happily retire,” says Camp. “I just don’t see that. What does Raymond want? He’ll find another obsession. And I don’t think it’s gardening.”

This version of Presumed Innocent is quite different from the movie and the book. What did you think when you first learned about the ending?
I thought it was really clever. Really fun and also moving. I didn’t really think it was going to be Jake’s character. That’s not something that was in my landscape. I played the whole thing as Raymond, and Raymond’s super-objective was to win the case and defend Rusty in such a way that they were successful. But I, Bill Camp, was always curious.

The show plays around with ambiguities to a point where several characters are on the table as suspects. A co-worker of mine thought Raymond could be the wild-card murderer. Did you consider that theory at all, and if so, did you apply it to your performance?
Not at all. I wouldn’t have thought that. That’s something that would come up, I think, only if one was aware of what the previous stories were, you know what I mean? But I don’t know how one would come to Raymond. That’s far-fetched for me.

Did you go into the shoot not knowing who the killer was?
No. It was just presumed, no pun intended. I didn’t know how it was going to end. And that’s okay. I didn’t necessarily want to know. I don’t always want all of the information. I had a guess, but it didn’t really factor into how I was going to move through all those eight episodes.

So when did Bill Camp, the actor, find out how the show would end?
It wasn’t really until close to my last day. I think those who knew were probably keeping it quiet. Again, it didn’t factor into the performance. I mean, Raymond is a smart enough guy to wonder, because of his years as a prosecutor, but he was able to just focus on the case, which is what makes him such a good lawyer. The priority was not to find a killer. He even argues with Rusty that “it’s not our burden to have to focus the jury’s attention on somebody else. Our objective is to show that the prosecution has not met the burden of proof.” That’s it. In a way, it’s a great thing to be able to play, as complicated as it is given the fact it’s his best friend, and given his best friend is such a good lawyer also and really wants to vindicate himself and wants to know who it is.

I like that Raymond and Rusty regard each other as best friends. Especially given the age difference, which makes it charming. 
Oh yeah, absolutely.

How do you understand that relationship? It’s a little paternal, it’s a little mentor-mentee.
There’s mutual respect for each other. I think Raymond listens to Rusty, and I think Rusty respects the experience that Raymond has. At the same time, Raymond is open-minded enough to be able to respect the viewpoint of a man who is, I don’t know, 25 years younger than he is or more. They have the same vocation. They have the same love for their job. That’s what makes them effective partners. They’re just two people who feel comfortable and trust each other. They have evidence — again, I guess, pun intended here — of their experiences together, and that gives them the ability to have faith in each other.

It’s safe to say that Raymond trusts Rusty throughout the trial, though the show does communicate some flashes of doubt on Raymond’s part as to whether Rusty is actually innocent. At the very end, does he fully believe in Rusty’s innocence?
He does. He arrives at that point much earlier on in one of his scenes with Lorraine. But the fun of a story like this is how you, as an audience member, are also going to think, Well, does he? Because I’m not sure if I do. And those things get projected. So my task is to provide, at certain points, a bit of ambiguity or questioning, and that happens early on. But by the end, yeah, he believes he did not do it.

How did you prepare for Raymond? He strikes me as having a similar energy to Dennis Box, the character you play on The Night Of. 
That’s interesting. I didn’t think at all about that connection. I guess both men are just interested in getting the job done and not getting tangled in emotion. Facts are the only things that are important to them. Dennis Box always dealt in murder. He was a homicide guy. He sort of only trusted himself in the darkness of that job. So there’s a similarity between the kinds of people whose vocation is investigating the most horrible things human beings can do to each other: murder, death. The landscape before them is very similar. That’s a very particular vocation and mind-set to put oneself in.

The things that were more a part of Raymond were external. I made up where he came from. What was his history? Where did he grow up? When did he move to Chicago? What were the things that he liked to do?

Tell me more about that. How much of Raymond’s biography did you come up with? There’s a line in the last episode where he says he’s from Maine. 
Yeah! All of that was in my mind. I don’t always do histories, but sometimes I do, and for this guy, I imagined that he had grown up in Maine, that he’d gone to Bowdoin College, that he was a hockey player and a baseball player there. He’s a physical guy. There’s a presence to Raymond. He’s got a center in him that is just there. He’s grounded in a way that I felt was important for me to have as a man who led a lot of other people in a very important job, and the nature of the job being both physically and mentally taxing.
It helped me with it. There’s also a Maine stoicism in terms of, like, “Well, this is what I think” and “That doesn’t make any sense.” There’s a Yankee thing somewhere deep inside of him that comes from his grandfather or his father or whatever that is. Those little things may not make any sense to other people, but they help me.

How was working with Jake? I know this is not the first time you shared a project; you both worked together on Wildlife. But if I’m not mistaken, this is the first time you’ve shared this many scenes together.
Jake and I are good friends. Or I like to think we’re very good friends. We’ve hung out; we’ve gone to see plays. I’ve known Jake since 2004, which is when I first met him, and we have an easy kind of energy between the two of us. We laugh a lot. We have similar interests, similar senses of humor. It’s cool to watch those scenes with him, because I can remember it was just really easy to act with him.

I wanted to ask about the head-exploding scene, because it’s so weird. It really threw me for a loop. Was the explosion practical or CGI? What’s the story behind that?
Oh, it was practical. The studio made two prosthetic torsos of me.

Wait, did they look like you? Or was it a generic model?
Oh my gosh. Oh, Nick, they’re scary, scary replicas of me. And we did it in one take! So there’s another one somewhere in a prop warehouse someplace. It’s uncanny. Really, it’s amazing what these people did with a lot of cameras and scanners. There was no goop or anything like that, which I’ve had done before. They got it down to the finest detail, even with the weird little capillary breaks on my face.

Did you get to be in the room when it exploded?
No. The room was covered in plastic. I can’t remember who exactly was in that room, but I was on the other side of the wall with other people at Video Village, and I watched myself blow up. It was crazy.

The way it came off on the show was brilliant. I didn’t know when exactly it was going to happen because we did this sort of slow burn into what’s going on with him. It starts off a little comically as he’s pouring his coffee, and then, “Oh, here’s Raymond doing some extra work or what have you.” Then I went through what I felt would be the stages. I had researched the things that can happen before a heart attack or a stroke, so I was just playing that progression of different little things happening and big things happening in my body. Then we needed, of course, to have a moment of stillness before where it’s almost like, Oh, this has passed, right? There is a breath or two of everything is static, and then kaboom. I have to say, I was even sort of shocked. I don’t know if my mom has seen that episode yet. She hasn’t told me.

You better give her a call after she does. 
Yeah. I don’t think I’ll warn her, though. She’s seen a lot of things happen to me onstage and on TV and screens of various types.

Lorraine is played by your wife, Elizabeth Marvel. I know you’ve worked together a lot in the past, but with Presumed Innocent, I was wondering if the kitchen-table conversations between them are at all like the ones you have in real life.
Obviously, not word for word, but I was following my wife’s lead. It’s so easy acting with her. She’s so honest and such a brilliant actor that I just sort of go with it. But, yeah, you see a lot of Bill and Elizabeth having a conversation, and that’s really how we would do it if we were in those circumstances, I suppose. If I was a lawyer and she was my wife, talking about a certain case that was very personal to us, I would imagine it would be very similar. It’s an absolute joy working with my wife. I have the greatest job in the world when I am acting with my wife because there’s no better partner.

In that final montage, Raymond and Lorraine are seen gardening. Do you garden much in real life?
No, we don’t. We don’t have a garden. But we have a lot of plants that Elizabeth keeps in the house in our apartment here in New York, and that’s about it. We lived in Vermont for 13 months during the pandemic, but we did not garden then. We were faking it.