Now that comic book heroes are leaping on and off both the big and small-screens, actor Matt Keeslar has found his own super hero niche in former Lost writer, Javier Grillo-Marxuach's comic book-to-TV adaptation of The Middleman. Taking a page from the classic Batman series of the 1960s and the old Avengers from the UK, The Middleman takes on a variety of quirky villains with the help of his cool, calm, and collected sidekick, Wendy, played by Natalie Morales. It's not often you get to see someone fight a gorilla in a track suit or two heroes being tracked by trout-eating zombies. Now that The Middleman has already debuted on ABC Family, the new series will be giving young comic book fans even more small-screen super hero goodness on Monday nights.

With the second episode of The Middleman set to air on Monday, June 23, The Deadbolt took part in a conference call with The Middleman himself, actor Matt Keeslar, to find out what's in store for the series and what it takes to be an effective super hero in today's expanding comic book market.

THE DEADBOLT: Since the comic book fan base is so passionate, did you feel any pressure playing a comic book character?

MATT KEESLAR: The short answer to that is no. I didn't feel a lot of pressure coming from the comic book fan base. I think that, like all fan bases, some people will love The Middleman and some people will have difficulties with it. It's a bit tongue-in-cheek, this comic book super hero, so, it is, in a way, both an ironic statement about comic heroes in general, and also a really passionate and loving look at comics and all of their multi-facets. It's a loving portrayal, but also a lampoon at the same time. We're taking a look at it through the eyes of Wendy Watson, your average, everyday art school graduate and how she sees the iconic comic book character played by myself, The Middleman.

THE DEADBOLT: In today's world what does it take to be an effective hero?

KEESLAR: In today's world, I think that a hero has to be savvy of the world's events and the fact that the world is getting smaller. That a hero in the present day has to be able to draw from many areas, and you'll see that in The Middleman. The reason that he is effective is because he can speak Hebrew and Chinese, he can fight in a Kung Fu style, yet is very interested in art and artists and is offended when somebody is plagiarizing Wendy's paintings. He's a person who takes in the full picture, the big picture of what's going on in the world, and I think that that's what makes an effective hero, someone who understands the interrelatedness of humanity and the fact that our global world is getting smaller and smaller.

Other Conference Call Highlights:

Matt Keeslar's favorite part about working on The Middleman:

"My favorite part about working on the show is the great group of people that Javier, the creator, has assembled for us. It's an amazing crew, a really terrific cast. Natalie Morales plays Wendy the lead in the show and she's a very talented newcomer along with Brit Morgan and Jake Smollett, who are also young and very talented actors. We have Mary Pat Gleason, who is playing my android assistant, Ida, and she's a really fun terrific actress to work with, much more experienced than probably any of us on set. The writing team has been really terrific, too. They put together what I think are progressively better scripts, even though I was much enamored with the original pilot script. I think that the scripts have gotten better and better as they've taken more chances and looked at new and interesting ways of spinning the iconic comic book hero."

On how Javier Grillo-Marxuach approached him for the role:

"I was sent a script that my manager said you have to read, because it's great. I sat down as soon as I got it, read it that night, called my manager and said okay, I want to play this part, and I didn't really care that much about what channel it was going to be on, or any of the other details involved. All I knew was that this was a great part and a great part for me to play. So I think the next day, they set up a breakfast with Javier and I met him for coffee and he basically said we really want you to play this part. That you're going to have to go through the whole audition process so that ABC Family can feel like they're participants in this process, but basically, you're the guy that we want to do this. I felt very confident going into the audition, even though it was quite a strenuous audition. I had to learn a lot of dialogue, but I felt, from the get-go, that this was a part that I could really play and I could do justice to."

On how The Middleman will evolve throughout the season:

"The evolution of The Middleman throughout the series is kind of tricky, because he starts off to be so enigmatic and the man of mystery. There are a lot of things about his back-story, his history that you don't really get to know about throughout the course of the series, but, as the series progresses, you see how The Middleman is kind of trapped by his job. That he has a hard time having a life outside of fighting comic book evil, and is hemmed in by the impractical life of constantly having to save the world. So, when relationships develop, he often has to cut them short, because he can't really devote his attention to anything other than his work, which is, I guess, a difficulty that many superheroes would face.

"The Middleman, in particular, sees himself as one of the rugged individualists, sort of like a Randolph Scott character from a western, and has chosen a life of solitude. That is explored more and more throughout the course of the series and the difficulties that would ensue from somebody making those choices, so there's a loneliness that he would ultimately experience, although we never get too much into the melodrama of that, but it is a part of who The Middleman is. The fact that his real family is Ida, his android, a dominating schoolmarm android, and his sidekick, Wendy, who is the only one who is really able to have a life outside of The Middleman organization."

Keeslar on the difficulties of translating the story from the comic to the screen:

"A lot of those difficulties are handled by the writers, the writing team, but just as an actor, I think that when I read a comic book and I see the picture of the person there and the comic book artist has already made the person's not only what they look like, but how they express themselves and their different gestures and looks in the comic book. They work well for exactly that medium. They work well for pictures in a book, but when you actually translate that to humanity, to a real living, breathing human, you have to be much more subtle with your choices as an actor, because otherwise, it would look all eye-popping, manic acting, more like pantomime than actual acting like a human.

"That was difficult for me to say okay, this is the way that Les McLain and Javier saw the comics and saw the hero in the comic book, but I, Matt Keeslar, am not that person at all, and my interpretation is going to be that of an actor and using an actor's imagination to come up with the way that The Middleman would react to a certain situation, or the way that he would express himself, and that's always a difficulty. It's not as difficult when you have a novel. I did an interpretation of Dune where I played a character that was in the novel, and you get an idea. Although they do give a character description, you get more of the thoughts and feelings of the character, the internal monologue, which is actually very helpful as an actor to get an idea of what the person is thinking in their heads. But to actually see the character in a picture can sometimes be distracting and lead an actor to making bad choices, choices of playing heroic rather than playing a human. That was my initial challenge was to make The Middleman less comic book and more human."

Matt Keeslar on some of the wildest stuff he's had to do:

"In one of the episodes we battle trout craving zombies, people who have been bitten by Peruvian flying pike and have turned into zombies who crave the flesh of trout. Natalie and I were covered in fish gore and then tracked down by these trout zombies, so that was an odd thing.

"I had a scene where I had to fight 100 Mexican wrestlers in a sandy Aztec pyramid set, which was a lot of fun, kind of hard work, but also pretty silly. The fighting styles ranged everywhere from WWF to Kung Fu. In general, The Middleman's naiveté also beats him to make a lot of unintentional double entendre about sex, sexuality, and his own lifestyle choices, and those have been probably some of my sillier utterances throughout the show."