ABOVE: Watch Josh Duhamel and Dean Winters on Global’s The Morning Show.
TORONTO — Actor Dean Winters has a message for the more than 10,000 people who follow him on Twitter: Keep your expectations low.
“I get people yelling at me on the street: ‘How come you don’t use your Twitter account?!'” Winters said Monday in Toronto.
His co-star in the new series Battle Creek, Josh Duhamel, is more active on Twitter.
“In this day and age I guess it’s more of… I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, to be honest,” said Duhamel, who has 945,000 followers. “It’s sort of a necessary evil. If you do it, do it all in or don’t do it at all. You can’t really do it halfway.”
Winters, 50, simply isn’t interested in sharing every moment of his life on social media.
“It’s become a little much,” he said. “A lot of the mystery in life has just evaporated.”
Winters recalled being asked to live tweet during a show he was on.
“I was like,’No I won’t do it.’ Why would I live tweet during the show as Dean when someone is trying to buy me as that character?
“I find it feels borderline disrespectful to the craft.”
In Battle Creek (debuting Sunday on Global), Winters is a police detective in the titular Michigan city who is forced to work with a charming FBI agent, played by Duhamel, 42.
Already earning positive reviews, the 13-episode series comes from Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad) and David Shore (House).
“They took something that I feel like we’ve seen for years, a successful formula — two guys out fighting crime — but this felt like it was a little bit more tongue-in-cheek than what I had seen,” Duhamel told Global News.
“It was more about the characters and the total difference in these two guys. It was as much about the humour as it was about solving crime.”
Duhamel, who has starred in movies like Safe Haven and Transformers, was anxious to get back on the small screen.
“With movies there’s a beginning, a middle and an end. You just go do it. It’s like an adventure and then you come back home and you do something else,” he explained. “There’s something about TV that I love. I love that it feels like a job, it feels like a family that you go to every day.
“There’s a comfort about it that can make for better work if you keep pushing to make it a great show.”
Duhamel, who is married to pop star Fergie, said he is mostly recognized out in public for his work on Vegas or All My Children.
“If it’s a young kid, it’s Transformers,” he said. “If it’s a 54-year-old woman it’s probably All My Children or Vegas.”
(Actor Timothy Olyphant said fans frequently mistake him for Duhamel. Duhamel’s reaction? “Does he really? I didn’t know that. That’s funny.)
Winters, familiar for his roles on Oz, Rescue Me, Law & Order: SVU and 30 Rock, said fans recognize him for several different things.
“It depends on where I am. In New York it’s really more Oz and 30 Rock,” he said.
Everywhere else, he added, it’s Mayhem — the character he plays in a popular Allstate advertising campaign.
“It’s just the way it is.”
Duhamel, whose ancestry includes some French Canadian, was born and raised in North Dakota, just 64 kilometres south of the Canadian border. It’s not surprising, then, that he’s interested in polar bears.
In 2008, he travelled to Churchill, Manitoba as a guest of Polar Bears International and, last year, he pledged support for a campaign to move a polar bear named Arturo from a zoo in steaming Argentina to one in Canada.
Duhamel described his Churchill journey as “one of the most amazing things I ever did.
“It was really, really cool,” he said.
Although Battle Creek wasn’t filmed in the titular city, Winters is well aware of its reputation as the cereal capital of North America (both Post and Kellogg have factories there).
His favourite cereal? “Frosted Flakes,” he replied without hesitation.
“Growing up, it was Frosted Flakes.”
As for Duhamel, “it’s a tie between Fruity Pebbles, Lucky Charms and Cap’n Crunch.”
Battle Creek premieres Sunday on Global.
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