CraveOnline: You can't hit anyone with that piece of plastic.
Robert Knepper: Oh, you'd be surprised. I've got something planned. He's going to give somebody a good wallop. It'll be more like an embarrassing thing, just see him go badadada.
CraveOnline: Has T-Bag been called to the yard yet?
Robert Knepper: He's about to be. He's about to be and he doesn't want to be called because the guy that wants to fight him, you don't want to fight this guy. He's worse than T-Bag. When I first started the show, they said, "Beware the little guy." The little guy in Cook County Jail, that was the guy who'd just walk right into razor blades. He wouldn't care. The big guys are smart. They've had more history of fighting. T-Bag was always the scrapper probably. This guy in the prison, he's also a scrapper so T-Bag knows, "Nah, I don't want that."
CraveOnline: You're in the Hitman movie also?
Robert Knepper: I don't know the video at all so I don't know if that character is in the video. The script is so good, it holds up so well on its own and I didn't have any time to research the video game. His name is Yuri Markov. He's head of the FSB which used to be the KGB. I just modeled him after Putin. He's a guy who's a company guy. He's a guy that wants to be president probably some day of Russia and will do anything and everything to get up there, including some pretty bad stuff. Having a presidential candidate knocked off and have somebody imitate him, it's all just interwoven in this nice little story about people coming to terms with this hitman, realizing he doesn't want to be a hitman anymore. But it was great. I just immersed myself in Russia for about three weeks. It's night and day trying to get that damn dialect.
CraveOnline: Harder than the southern dialect you do as T-Bag?
Robert Knepper: But [Russian]'s like climbing Mount Everest. That was amazing. Romance languages, Spanish to French is kind of easy. They all have the same vowel sounds. But generally, the structure, the grammatical structure is usually the same. But Russian, I can't detect anything from listening to that. Everything was syllable by syllable. I haven't looped it yet. I haven't done the ADR. I'm going to do it next week, but I think it's going to be okay. I'm not going to be too embarrassed about it. I don't think anybody's going to say, "Well, he must be a Russian actor. I don't know where he's from but he's obviously Russian." They're not going to say that but I'm not going to be embarrassed by what I did.
CraveOnline: Was there a lot of action in your Hitman role?
Robert Knepper: Yeah, that's a big action film. That's a big, splashy studio picture. I mean, the first day I shot, there was one line of stage direction. "Yuri Markov comes out of his office and is kidnapped by Agent 47, the Hitman." That on Prison Break would take about an hour to shoot. We took a day and a half to shoot that one line of stage direction. Walking out, we had this Kafka like hallway, with light streaming through. No one's in the damn place, go to the stairwell, look up, is there anybody there? Go up another stairwell, look out. Hitman suddenly flies backwards hung by his feet, puts a wire around my neck, holds me up, trying to keep on living. It was great. And it was great because it was Bulgaria and it was a French crew as well, so we had a great combination of all these nationalities, wine for lunch, all that kind of stuff.
CraveOnline: You did that just this past hiatus?
Robert Knepper: Yeah, it's amazing how fast films come out now. That was originally going to be released in October but I think it's coming out November 21st now.
CraveOnline: You squeezed it in?
Robert Knepper: Yeah, we had mid-March 'til end of June.