Kring: Yes, we shot a two-hour pilot and then cut it down to an hour for screening purposes. And so the characters that Greg Grunberg plays and that Leonard Roberts plays will be introduced in—Greg's character in the second episode. Leonard comes in in the fourth and fifth episode. There were various reasons. There were some story reasons why we cut it down. But for the most part, we sort of felt that screening an hour was about the limit for a screening. It will air in the hour form, yes.

Greg Grunberg: Wait a second. Why am I finding out now? [Laughter.] Can I just say, for superstitious reasons, I'm extremely excited that I'm not in the pilot. I wasn't in the pilot of Felicity. I wasn't in the pilot of Alias. I was in the pilot of Lost, and then I got eaten. So I'm excited that I get established in the second episode. It's a good thing. Superhero stories seem to have an audience anytime. Did you see a year that yielded Superman Returns and the third X-Men movie as being particularly fruitful for selling this show?

Kring: It turns out that there seems to be a zeitgeist that's tapped into. When I first thought of this idea, I had no awareness that there were these things looming out there. I think there's a kind of cycle where people tap into these kinds of stories. It seems to be something that I was interested in as well.Do you think it has something to do with what is going on in the world?

Kring: Looking at the world and what's happening in the world and the world that we live in, I think that the complications that we all sort of face, in a world that seems to be out of balance and global warming and diminished resources and terrorism, there's a sort of a sense that people want a wish fulfillment, that somebody is going to rise up among us, just like you and just like me, and actually be able to do something about it. And so I was sort of trying to tap into that.It seems like all the characters are headed toward the inevitable meeting place. How long do you project it's going to take us to get there, where everybody is together?

Kring: Well, in the pilot we sort of point to the fact of how people are going to cross. One of the things that I wanted to do was start a show at the very beginning, to create a saga that literally started at the inception of when people discovered these things about themselves. And so with one person in Tokyo and another one in West Texas and another one in New York, all sort of happening on the same day, it's kind of illogical to see that they would come together that quickly. So you don't have it all planned out yet?

Kring: We're several episodes into writing these scripts and breaking these stories, and they've started to cross in these amazing ways. For me, that was one of the things that was—I was hoping that would be the most fun to watch, is when you pause at an idea of an office worker in Tokyo and a teenage girl in West Texas. One of the central questions of the show is "How will these characters cross?"It's interesting that you don't even know yet, and the writing team is putting it all together as you go.

Kring: For me, that's the fun of watching it, is guessing and participating in trying to predict what's going to happen and talking about it with your friends and all that. But five episodes into this thing, most of the characters have really started to cross in interesting ways. Are they a team? Will they become a team, and is there a team leader?

Kring: No, there's no sense—it's not like the Justice League, in that respect. They're just people that have awakened to these extraordinary abilities. No, they're not going to necessarily form a team. They'll come together in small ways and in small pockets. And just like all shows when people come together, you'll have to find ways to break them apart, to keep the drama alive.

Grunberg: Are we going to get to wear tights?

Kring: A lot of Spandex, a lot of Spandex in your future. They all seem like they want to fight evil. Are they each responding to something they're feeling inside?

Kring: Well, the pilot sort of poses a kind of an idea. It's buried in there a little bit, but it's there. This idea, as I was speaking about the world being what it is, that somehow nature or evolution has provided that there are these people that are cropping up. There could be hundreds of them, to take man to sort of the next evolutionary rung.So some of them may turn to the dark side?

Kring: The truth is, the evil is sometimes within us. So if somebody is inclined to do good with this—if you can walk through walls and you're inclined to do good, you may walk through a wall and save somebody. If you're inclined to do something evil, you may walk through a wall and rob a bank. So I think we can expect that some villains will arise who are actually people who have developed these abilities.When I watched this I was immediately thinking, "Aw, like X-Men, OK," because of the storyline that they have. But they also have backstories on all of their characters of where their abilities came from, whether it's Magneto or Wolverine or whatever. So do you have the backstory on how they got their powers? Are their abilities mapped out eventually, that you'll show us as the show goes on? I mean, they don't just wake up in the morning and have these powers out of nowhere.

Kring Well, right now they do. [Laughter.] The abilities I tried to sort of match to the personalities.Were you a comic-book fan?

Kring: I don't have a genre background. I was not familiar with comic books and all of that. So I approached this from what I kind of knew, and that was character. So each of these characters' abilities is actually kind of an extension of who they are and what their life is about. You take a single mother who is trying to make ends meet, who literally finds that she can be in two places at the same time. Ali Larter, what was interesting for you in this project?

Larter: What I think is so interesting too, and why I was attracted to playing this, is because we're trying to understand what's happening to us. Because it's not—our powers aren't all of a sudden we know what they are. So it's all internalized. And we're trying to get our kids to school, and we're trying to deal with all these things that are happening in our life, while this is growing inside of us. So we're not in total control of it yet. So I think it's that exploration which is going to be really interesting.

Milo Ventimiglia, why did you take this part?

Ventimiglia: There's the fear and exhilaration, too, of understanding you can fly or you're unbreakable or you're hearing voices. How do you deal with that? Are you afraid? Are you completely elated about it?

Leonard Roberts, why do you like the role you play?

Roberts: I think it will be interesting in time to see that there are people who have come to terms with their powers, and they're in full control of them, and they know how to make it work to their advantage. And to meet someone who is new to it and is still discovering, that can pose for something interesting to see too. Did any of the actors do any research into anything to do with your characters' abilities? And have you had any fun and/or scary physical challenges on set, like running through fire, doing wire work, or whatever your character calls for?

Ventimiglia: They pushed me off of a 15-story building and said, "Hey, can you fly?" [Laughter.]

Hayden Panettiere: There's definitely been some physical—my character is pretty physical. I've had a couple of body pieces—body parts that have fallen off or gotten chewed up, popped out of place. It's been fun. It's been really physical. And I'm a really physical person, so I enjoy it. I don't know how much research you can do into someone who can heal themselves.

Roberts: I'm looking to get arrested.

Panettiere: If anyone knows anybody who has my power, please do let me know. Masi Oka, having heard you on Scrubs, we know your American accent is great. When people in Tokyo pick this show up—I assume it will be shown in Japan at some point—are they going to think you sound funny in Japanese? Do you have an American accent in Japanese? The second question is, are you at all geeky like your character? Are you a Star Trek fan in any way? Because people will think you are, whether or not.

Oka: [He speaks in Japanese.]

Roberts: Translation: He keeps it real. [Laughter.]

Kring: He speaks no English at all.

Oka: I don't think there will be any issues at all. I can speak to people on the phone in Japan. They understand me. My collect calls go through, whatever. [Laughter.] Anyways. No, and I'm also a big geek. I love comic books. I grew up on the Japanese manga. So I can go all the way through the old JoJo, Fantastic Adventures, The Orange Road, to the modern stuff like The Monsters and the Death Notes and all that stuff. It's kind of an extension of me, which is kind of cool. Can you talk a little more about the character of Hiro? He seems to be sort of the one who gets that he's going to have a mission, more than any of the others. It almost seems like a way in for the audience.

Kring: Let me start that. Actually, the character of Hiro was sort of—he came along late in the game in terms of writing this script. After sort of reading it myself and giving the script to a couple of friends to read, there was a tonal issue in the script where everybody was dealing—my first impression of getting these abilities would be that they would be—if any of us woke up and discovered something, we would approach it in a very realistic way. We would try and deny it or go to a doctor or go to a shrink or something to try to figure out what it was. And so what I ended up having was a lot of characters who were dealing in a very kind of intense, angsty kind of way with this discovery. And I felt that I needed one character who embraced it in a really positive way and saw it as the greatest thing in the world. And I felt that tonally the show needed that balance. And sure enough, with every screening we've seen, the response to that has been fabulous.

Oka: And the direction of, you know, where the character Hiro is going is great. It's called Heroes. Is that sort of implying that everybody is always going to use these powers for good at all times?

Kring: No, I think it started off, you know, with early—very early discussions with people. I've been at NBC now for about eight years, so I'm very well entrenched in the—with all of the executives there, so I had multiple discussions about this before I even went in to pitch it. So they knew what was coming. I'm kind of curious how the pitch session went for this thing. You know, did you get stares? Exactly how did that go?

Kring: The idea—very early on in the show, you'll begin to see that there are—there is a dark side to these abilities as well. And some—because as I said, I'm sort of positing that it could be you or me or anybody who has this, it's very much about free will. And if you are naturally inclined to be good, then you veer in that direction. So some of these heroes could be villains later?

Kring: Yes, yes. And some may take that arc where they start off as good and end up bad, and vice versa. I'm wondering what the cast thought about the reaction after going down to Comic-Con?

Kring: Yeah, we were there. They reacted very positively.

Larter: It was amazing.

Tawny Cypress: It was completely crazy—2,000 seats and 600 people waiting outside the door to get in. Then to come back and find 200 people were still waiting halfway through just to see if somebody would get up out of their seat so that they could come and see it. They really reacted to Hiro, you know, which is a given. I think everybody really reacts to Hiro. I mean, I really react to Hiro. So—but they—it was an incredible experience.

[Oka pumps his arms up the air, everyone laughs.]

Kring: I thought they reacted well to literally everyone. It was really terrific seeing a real audience watch the show.What were some of the comments that fans made?

Santiago Cabrera: I think one of the great reactions that you got is how "with it" they are, because there's things that me, as an actor, maybe that you think it will take time for them to discover. But they're so on top of the plot and on top of our stories. Personally, for me, for example, they completely understood the character and knew where everything was coming from. Then you'd ask them, "Where would you like it to go?" And they all had opinions, but it was pretty much where, at least for now, we know it's going, so—and you know, they were really excited about it.

Grunberg: Some of us had to stay behind and work. [Greg Grunberg and Hayden Panettiere point at each other.]

Ventimiglia: But then some of us represented for them.Did any ideas come from the younger potential audience?

Kring: Yeah, a big segment of the audience, especially younger audience, that wants a show to be less spelled out for them. They want to have questions, and they want to participate. They want to set their TiVo, or they want to talk to their friends the next day. They want to guess where it's going. I think yesterday's response was a big sort of validation of that. With any of these kind of shows, genre shows, high-concept shows, it's all about execution. Are there rules to doing a genre show that a savvy audience expects?

Kring: First of all, I wouldn't lean too hard on this being a genre show. I think there are certainly genre elements, and we're not denying that or trying to run away from that. But because we're asking people to log onto these characters and invest in these characters, I see it much more as a very real character-based show. So are you drawing on people, friends, about how to proceed with this? Are you studying the genre?

Kring: Like you said, there are bigger genre elements. And a large chunk of the writing staff and the upper writing staff are from various shows like Lost and Alias and Superman. So I'm sort of surrounded by comic-book geeks, who seem to sort of steer me in directions when we're veering too close to things that have been done before or steering me away from things that shouldn't be done. Has anyone warned you about how this show will be dissected and parsed and how quickly this audience can turn on you?

Kring: Yes. I mean, you know, listen, I'm beginning to sort of get a sense of that just from reading various things on the Internet. And you know, a part of—I think part of my job, because my job is so focused on what was ahead, oftentimes as—when you're running a show and you're writing a show, you're two months ahead of where the audience is reacting to. And so it's very dangerous to sort of get pulled back in and sucked back into dramas that you were—that are behind you. And I think, you know, you want to sort of keep it—it's a judicious sort of, you know, involvement that you have with the Internet and with the people on the Internet. You just want to try and sort of sense what the bigger issues are and stay away from the minutiae.[WARNING: Spoiler follows.] The cliffhanger at the end, you think all along that Peter is the guy who can fly, and then it turns out to be Nathan. Does Peter have powers of his own?

Kring: Right. Yes, he does. Yes, absolutely.

Ventimiglia: When I first read the script, it suggests that Peter is an empath. He physically feels people's true emotions, true potential in life. So where Peter was the guy who is thinking, "All this flight, everything is happening to me," his close relationship with his brother is actually telling his brother his ability. So you start to wonder, "Well, what happens when Peter comes into contact with other people? Is he going to empathically be able to help them or even ultimately take on their powers or think he has those powers?" If you thought you could fly but you never have, wouldn't you, like, jump off a stage rather than a 20-story building? [Laughter.]

Ventimiglia: Probably. You know, that's the question that's asked in the pilot. You know, Peter says to Nathan, you know—Nathan says, "Why don't you go jump off the Brooklyn Bridge." Peter says, "Maybe I ought to start with something smaller." I think he has this faith, this belief he can do it. And ultimately when storylines are crossing and Simone brings him into Isaac's loft and he hears about Isaac painting this pictures of the future and he sees himself wearing the clothes he's in, jumping off of a building, I think he's just like, "Heck with it. Let's go for it."

Roberts: Yeah, go big or go home. That's one of the things I was really drawn to is that with faith, you don't take a small step. Faith is about a big step. Can you talk about doing India and Tokyo and how you created those scenes?

Kring: Well, we shot the entire pilot here in Los Angeles. And up until very recently, with special effects, these things weren't possible. But now the CGI has gotten so sophisticated, and also economical, so it can be done on a television budget, we were able to shoot plates and place our audience in India, in Las Vegas, in Tokyo, in New York, all with the sort of miracle of special effects.

Sendhil Ramamurthy: My parents were shocked when they saw the India scene. They asked—they were like, "You went to India to shoot?" I was like, "No, we shot it on the backlot of Universal."

Ventimiglia: The Psycho house was right next door.

Ramamurthy: It was amazing.

Grunberg: We did that on Alias. We never ever left Burbank. They're just incredible with what they can do. Adrian Pasdar, why did you want to sign onto this project, and how big a draw was the ability to fly?

Pasdar: It was just a great script, and I really responded to the writing, first and foremost. The character development is always something that seems important initially but gets lost a lot of times in pilots. This seemed to be the big draw for the writer, the creators and the rest of the cast. The character involvement and the development of that is paramount to the people that are making the show. I wanted to be involved in something that was part of that, and I wanted to be a part of that. And flying? Yeah. I mean ... [laughter] who doesn't want to fly?Quick question for Hayden. For a young actor, you've done some really painful roles: Lies My Mother Told Me, and now this character seems kind of tortured. What's it like to play that kind of a tortured role at your age?

Panettiere: I think it's realistic. I think—you know, I think the great thing about doing a television show is it sort of gives you the insight of what's really going on in people's minds, things that you don't necessarily see from a normal teenager. I mean, I think my character has, obviously, something else that she has to overcome and learn about, but I think my character also deals with a lot of just normal teenage angst, normal—you know, trying to find their way, trying to find friends, trying to find the person that she wants to be. And you know, I think it just gives you a little more of an insight. I think it's 150 percent normal, what she feels. And I think it's definitely how teenagers feel. I just don't think you hear about it or read about it or know about it as much.