The Stakeout

Training Day stars Bill Paxton and Justin Cornwell shatter the mold of TV’s buddy cop show (and lots of other stuff)

- Fred Schruers

Bill Paxton cracks the the door to a room where Justin Cornwell is being interviewed, pokes his head in and raises his eyebrows “Here’s Johnny!” style. “He’s learning from the worst,” volunteers Paxton regarding his young co-star. “He’s learning from me.”

This is the Paxton, Cornwell explains, who sometimes emerges “when it’s been 14 hours of shooting and we’re all kind of in that mode, just laughing. We feel like a family in those moments.”

The jovial scene at this 35-room, 1920s mansion high atop the Pacific Palisades is a far cry from the gritty streets of L.A. where Paxton and Cornwell stalk, slap and trade gunshots with the crooks in CBS’s Training Day. Veteran actor Paxton, as a similarly veteran cop named Frank Rourke, is tasked with breaking in new partner Kyle Craig (Cornwell), who poses as a fresh recruit. Rourke is the insult-slinging, seen-it-all rule-breaker; Craig is a heroic do-gooder assigned by suspicious LAPD brass to uncover Rourke’s trespasses on the job. In a key complication, Craig’s dad, killed on the job years before, was Rourke’s partner at the time.

When reconfiguring the storyline from the original hit movie of 2001 (Antoine Fuqua ’s Training Day), Fuqua and fellow producers, including industry fixture Jerry Bruckheimer, did some script-flipping themselves. The show is what its makers call “a reimagining” of the original, and begins 15 years after the movie’s conclusion. This time, Ethan Hawke’s role in the film as newbie cop is played by African-American partner Craig, and Denzel Washington’s Oscar-winning role of veteran cop is Paxton.