A conversation with Randy Quaid

The Sci Fi miniseries “5 Days to Midnight” will air over five consecutive evenings from Monday, June 7, through Friday, June 11. The series follows a discovery by a college professor, J.T. Neumeyer, of a police file that outlines the chilling details of his death — which will occur in five days. As the events noted in the file begin to happen, he takes steps to stop the ultimate event: his murder. The miniseries stars Timothy Hutton (“Nero Wolfe”) as Prof. Neumeyer; Nicole deBoer (“The Dead Zone”); Gage Golightly (“Long Shot: Believe in Courage”); and Oscar, Emmy, BAFTA nominee and Golden Globe-winning actor Randy Quaid (who stars in the upcoming release “Treasure Island Kids: The Battle of Treasure Island” and the 2005 releases “Brokeback Mountain” and “Ice Harvest”) as Irwin Sikorski, a homicide detective hired by Neumeyer to track down the clues found in the file and solve his murder before it actually happens. “5 Days to Midnight” has been called a cross between the film “D.O.A,” in which a college professor learns he’s been poisoned and has just 24 hours to find the antidote, and the TV series “24,” in which a story is followed for one full day, or 24 hours, with each episode representing one hour of that day. In “5 Days to Midnight,” the professor who is looking to save his life has five days in which to do it, and the Sci Fi Network will take 5 days — June 7-11 — to air it.An interesting aside is that the 1988 version of “D.O.A.” (first released in 1950) starred Dennis Quaid, Randy Quaid’s full-time brother and sometime co-star (e.g., “The Long Rifles”), as the hapless and possibly doomed professor.

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Randy Quaid says one of the reasons he wanted to play Detective Sikorski in the film is that, “He’s a character you can’t really be sure of. Is he the good-guy detective who saves the professor’s life? Or, since the details of the murder first turn up in a police file, does that mean the police are involved? Is Sikorski involved?”

Quaid says the twists and turns catch you by surprise.

“Just when you might think that you’ve got this angle all figured — well, it turns out that you don’t.”

Quaid also says that when he first got the script, he thought “OK, I’ll look through it, and if I don’t finish it right away, I’ll pick it up later.”

But as soon as he started reading, “There was no later. I read it through from first page to last.”

Randy Quaid was once asked in an interview in which character category does his actor persona feel most comfortable: Hero, Villain, Lover, Comic? He answered, all of the above.Does he still feel that way?

“Oh, sure,” he says. “If I like the part — if I believe in the part — it doesn’t matter if he’s a good guy, a romantic guy or a bad guy. As an actor, the challenge to me is not so much to make you believe what he is, but rather, who he is.”

By the way, since that earlier interview, a new category has emerged: Yodeler. If you saw the Disney animated flick “Home on the Range” earlier this year, the yodel behind Yodeling Slim’s vocal gymnastics was Randy Quaid’s.

In Focus

Oscar and Golden Globe nominee Kathleen Quinlan (“Apollo 13,” “Family Law”) stars in the Lifetime Original Movie “Perfect Romance,” airing June 7. Henry Ian Cusick stars as the surprise “Mr. Right” who appears in her life. The film focuses on a divorced mother, played by Quinlan, who uses the Internet to find the “perfect” husband for her divorced daughter. And to her surprise, her cyberspace cupid leads her to a “perfect” romantic prospect, but he doesn’t turn out quite as he had expected.

“What I loved about this film,” Quinlan says, “is that it reminds us that in a world where there is so much sadness and so much to be afraid of, that good things do happen to people. And that romance is still something we can find even if we’re not consciously looking for it. And,” she adds, “even if we think we’re too old for it.”

Quinlan says one of the discoveries her character makes about herself is that “she’s a woman who hasn’t lost the ability to love, and hasn’t lost the need to be loved.”When not acting, Kathleen Quinlan enjoys being a homemaker in the literal sense of the word. “My husband and I enjoy going into a house and remaking it, top to bottom, from the structure it was to the home we want it to be.”

Dial Tones

•The new Fox series “North Shore,” which will be shot on the lovely island of Oahu, will debut June 14.

•Drea DeMatteo, who plays the whining and unwitting FBI snitch Adriana LaCerva on HBO’s “The Sopranos,” is expected to sign for a major role on the NBC “Friends” spin-off, “Joey,” starring Matt LeBlanc.

•Hollywood’s rumorists are hinting that Brad Pitt (“Troy”) and wife Jennifer Aniston (“Friends”) Are looking for film properties they want to do together, a la the old Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy pattern of making flicks both separately and in tandem.