When Fringe premiered back in September, it was hard to predict where the show's storylines would take the characters since the show was very much an experiment itself. With reality competitions and game shows dominating the airwaves, at first it appeared that Fringe went completely over the heads of mainstream TV viewers. That is until fans took notice of the mysterious Massive Dynamic and the scientific "patterns" that FBI Special Agent Olivia Dunham, scientist Walter Bishop, and his son Peter were investigating each week, which expanded upon the worlds of The X-Files and other shows like The Twilight Zone, plus movies like Altered States. In other words, it was too interesting to pass up since we live in a tech-savvy age that’s speeding into the future at breakneck speed.

When we first met actor John Noble, Fringe stars Joshua Jackson and Anna Torv were breaking his Walter Bishop character out of a mental hospital in order to make use of his Einstein-like mind that was formerly exploited by the government. Now that fans have gotten to know the eccentric Walter Bishop while John Noble has settled into the character, after investigations into electrical phenomena, radiation, and bizarre parasites, Bishop is heading back to where he came from on November 18 in "The Equation" to solve the case of a serial kidnapper.

When we chatted with John Noble late last week on a conference call, we quickly learned just how fast technology is moving, how he feels about the food Walter likes to eat each week, and what types of "fringe" science he's into in real life.

THE DEADBOLT: Do you have any say over what type of food Walter is looking for from episode to episode?

JOHN NOBLE: [laughs] No, but it’s very funny - this week we had a week where we hadn’t been filming, we’ve been doing a lot of preparation for the next episode and also ADR and publicity - but I had a chance to look at the blogs going on and there’s blogs about what Walter is going to eat, it’s very funny stuff. There was one I tuned into and it was going for pages, and people having such fun at what Walter is going to have to eat next. I think they finally finished up with a cheese steak. So let’s see if the writers put it in.

THE DEADBOLT: What’s the weirdest thing you’ve learned so far on the show?

NOBLE: I get more interested in the neural aspects of it, I suppose, than say the parasitical elements of it. So when it goes to that sort of neural stuff, it’s a little strange in that sense. I get very excited by it. Obviously the parallel universe episode we did, which was called "The Arrival", was probably outside of the realm of what we normally think about. Although I have to confess I had a very similar conversation about parallel universes with a friend of mine, sitting in the university campus thirty years ago looking at the stars. So it’s an interesting thing to revisit that. So that was kind of memorable for me.

THE DEADBOLT: What are your personal views on fringe science? Are you into UFOs, Bigfoot, and things like that?

NOBLE: Not UFOs, not that. I don't have anything against it, it’s just not something that tantalizes my imagination. I think I’m much more fascinated by what we’ve discovered through quantum mechanics and so forth. What was started off by Albert Einstein, essentially, has just opened the floodgates into a new world and we suddenly find out that we can bend time. And string theory, it just means that anything is conceivable and I find that fascinating. We don’t even know what black holes are, you know what I mean? To me, I get excited by it.

THE DEADBOLT: Well, isn’t that the theory that we only use about ten percent of our brain, or something like that?

NOBLE: Yes. But, you know, we’re moving exponentially. So fast that today’s technology is out of place by next week and it’s an exciting time to be living and keeping up with these guys. I don’t know, I’m glad to be alive to observe it. I think I’ve lived in amazing times.

Other Conference Call Highlights:

John Noble on how he approaches the role of Walter Bishop:

"It’s as much fun as it looks like. It’s an absolute hoot playing. Of course it has some serious aspects, but I treat it as a hoot to play. Preparation? Well, that’s probably the hardest bit, getting the timing right and doing the preparation on the scientific work. But working on Fringe is a great job. It’s a great group of people to work with and amazing scripts from the minds of J.J. Abrams and the other people, they’re geniuses. Getting inside their heads must be a strange thing to do because they’re always coming up with something different. Overall, it’s a fantastic experience."

Noble on Walter’s dark side:

"It’s the dark side of stuff isn’t it? I guess it exists in all of us. But with Walter, and because of who he is and how he is, and how bright he is and how disturbed he is, it surfaces a bit more often and a bit more radically than it does in most of us. I didn’t find it that hard to find. I mean, when I’m doing a scene I take each second and look at what’s going through at that point and sometimes those reactions just come out out of frustration, the character’s frustration, or out of his greater purpose or whatever, out of his madness. But it’s certainly interesting to play him and it shocks the people I’m playing with at times. You see these shocked reactions from the other actors [laughs]. But that all works, too."

On the upcoming Walter moments on Fringe:

"I guess there's always two things - the sort of bleak and dark moments that you see sometimes and there’s also the comedic moments. We’ve just really finished off the final episode that will be going on in December, and there are a lot of Walter moments in there, just him being inappropriate really and there are a couple of quite - The next episode, which goes on next week, we see Walter from a different angle, very vulnerable. He goes back into the asylum again and we see a very fearful man return for a while, although he does have some wonderful moments early in it. But when he goes back inside he turns back into this incredibly fearful, stuttering fellow that we saw when we first met him. So it’s a very interesting journey that we see Walter go through.

"And he also solves these things, either because he had done them in the past or because he simply has the intellect to think now. We’re getting more episodes where Walter hasn’t done that experiment at some time. But he has the mind to be able to see a way through it so that’s the sort of thrust of things we’ll expect to see in the future. The relationship with the son, of course, there’ll be a lot more of this as we go through this season and the next seasons after that. You’ll see the ensemble of actors interact a lot more than maybe we’ve seen at present. The relationship with the Olivia character will become more like relationships when people know each other for awhile and start to kind of have an investment and care for each other. We’ll certainly see that in the first episode coming back next year, where we all bond together to support Olivia and she for us."

John Noble on his favorite scenes so far:

"Well, anything to do with the cow. I adore working with the cow. The cow makes me laugh; I don’t know why. Everyone gets all sort of gooey and funny when the cow comes in. And then, of course, I got to milk the cow and they asked, "Do you need some coaching to milk the cow?" And I said, "Certainly not, I can milk a cow. I’m a country boy." So that was great fun milking the cow and I don’t know...

"The one where we were in the pilot eating Chinese watching Sponge Bob and that cow was on our necks. That was the funniest thing, because it was nuzzling up against us trying to get the Chinese food. That was just funny doing that scene at four o’clock in the morning. Those sorts of things, there’s a whole lot of them. One of my favorite games at present is to try and make Broyles laugh because Lance Reddick plays him seriously. So I go out of my way whenever we have a scene to try and make him laugh. Of course as actors we have great fun with this because in rehearsals I can see it, but as soon as the cameras roll there’s no way. No. It’s going to make absolute headlines across the nation - 'Broyles smiles one day'."

Noble on Walter’s relationship with Olivia and Astrid:

"It’s one of the things that’s had to come slowly. We have a man who’s obviously - I don’t think he will ever be particularly good with women anyway. I think he would’ve been a horrible husband. Not because he’s a bad man, simply because he wouldn’t have thought to be nice. And then he comes out and he’s confronted with these two girls and he doesn’t know how to talk to girls. So it’s taken time to - He still can’t remember Astrid’s name, which is one of the great joys, is keeping on with that name business.

"She is such a funny girl, I can’t wait to see what they come up with for her eventually. But she’s a very funny woman. The one with Olivia is fascinating because my sense is Walter starts to feel almost paternal towards her but obviously you can’t go into that path. And just occasions I can see Olivia wants to ask Walter something then she’ll back away. I’ve seen several times that’s happened. Somewhere down the track I think there will be a coming together of those two. And I don’t know this for a fact but I just feel it, it’s something that Walter and Olivia would need to do."