Adam Baldwin hardly needed any arm-twisting to reprise his role as the snarky mercenary Jayne Cobb in Universal’s major motion picture, Serenity. “Jayne is such a fun character to play,” enthuses Baldwin. “He loves to eat, fight, sleep, drink and loves to love and hate. It is really an actor’s dream to be able to play a guy like that. The cast and the world are also like a family. It has been an underdog family that has been struggling to stay afloat, struggling to stay in the air, and we’re still flying. I am just glad Jayne is a part of that.”
    Serenity is based on the critically acclaimed and short-lived television series Firefly, which Fox pulled the plug on after only a handful of memorable episodes. Baldwin was in his trailer when the bad news broke.
    “One of the production assistants came knocking on the door and said ‘You should go to set. Joss says we’ve been cancelled,” recalls Baldwin. “We had felt it looming. We weren’t living in a vacuum. We had seen the ratings hovering the high twos to three million, which is my mind is a lot of people. We kind of felt it coming although we had been hoping against hope that the quality of the show would carry us forward. That wasn’t the case.”
    But shortly after a conversation with creator Joss Whedon , Baldwin was convinced they might someday hit the space ways again.
    “I went to find Joss, ran up to his office, and Firefly co-executive producer Tim Minear was in there,” he explains. “At that point, he wasn’t going to let it go. He said ‘I am going to get this thing up and we’re going to keep it going.’ You are probably filled in on how he went to other networks, which didn’t work but he wouldn’t let it die. And we’ve ended up in the air, and flying in the only venue left available. You have to give lots of props to Mary Parent at Universal. She was the executive over there who helped shepherd us through and helped us get a greenlit. I heard she said it was a no-brainer especially when they saw the DVD sales.”
    Even Baldwin was floored by the numbers. “It is huge,” he concurs. “We all absolutely acknowledge that.” The sale of those DVDs, which is credited to the Firefly fanbase, was one of the main determining factors in the movie being greenlit at Universal. “They said, ‘Wow! If they can sell that many units on a cancelled show, there must be something there.’”
    Picking up months after the series finale, the movie Serenity once again features the ship’s crew pulling off a simple caper which hits a major snag when the cannibalistic Reavers show up.
    “Reavers are men gone wrong,” offers Baldwin. “They are savages and you don’t want to encounter them. They are barbarians out on the edge who will do horrible things to you.”
    Unfortunately, their criminal escapade also catches the attention of The Operative, an Alliance agent currently tracking down the enigmatic fugitive River Tam.
    “Things go wrong,” confirms Baldwin. “Things are at the mercy of human whims, greed, sins, and desires and these things go wrong for us in many different elements in the film. When I see a film, I like to see people struggling to solve the problem. It is their struggle that is interesting to me.”
    Baldwin prefers not to let any Serenity spoilers slip, but he doesn’t mind dishing dirt about himself, or rather what makes the man called Jayne tick. Motivated by greed, Jayne first encountered Captain Malcolm Reynolds while hijacking him. Mal simply bought him off.
    “He’s a practical man who takes it a day at a time,” offers Baldwin. “He’s animalistic in the sense that when he sees something he wants, he tends to take it and worry about the consequences later.
    Despite a public shouting match between Jayne and Mal over how to handle River’s situation, Baldwin agrees that the two men have an unique relationship. “Jayne is loyal to a point as long as it serves him,” explains Baldwin. “He’s devoted to Mal and, yes, they have this sibling rivalry where Mal is the smarter brother while Jayne is like the dumber back-up brother plotting the capture-the-flag game and then you have the other who bulls through to get to the flag. There’s also money and sex. Primal is another good word for him. He has a common sense about inherent good and evil.”
    As for whether Jayne is the same man-for-hire he was before jumping to the big-screen, Baldwin says “Gosh, I don’t know. I don’t see much change in Jayne. There’s a nice continuity of carrying on from the series into the film for Jayne and most of the characters. We had 13 episodes to workshop this thing, who we are, and what we’re about. I mean, I get a cool wardrobe (“I have a hat, and it’s a pretty hat,” he chuckles) and the props and weapons are cooler.”
    Essentially, that means Jayne is still an insensitive lug and, as the team’s muscle, has his fair share of confrontation and scraps. “There’s some fun tuff and action-y bits,” explains Baldwin. “How could you not have Jayne and Mal without action? We have action figures coming out for crying out loud! That’s a clue!”
    “I do some falling around and stuff,” he adds. “Look, if you come out of an action sequence without a few bumps and bruises you are not doing your job. Like I said, cuts, bruises, scrapes, and dirt. .. it is all good.”
    Baldwin, who beefed up for the big screen adaption, used his gun-slinging childhood heroes as a template for his character. “I grew up watching Westerns with my Dad,” he says. “We’d go see Clint Eastwood, William Holden and John Wayne stuff. I said ‘Boy, I’d love to play guys like that.’ All I did was throw a gruff voice on him, go to the gym, and off we go. There is Jayne.”
    If only writer/director Whedon could just as easily throw on a fresh coat of paint and not worry about attracting more than just the already devoted Browncoats (the unofficial name for Serenity fans). “Joss’ challenge was to craft a screenplay that would invite those who hadn’t seen the series into a world 500 years in the future,” says Baldwin. “I think he’s accomplished that. The early set-up of the movie will get people hooked and the characters are introduced early. I can’t talk about the story or I am a dead man. It has beauty, action, humour, sexiness, great special effects, it is realistic in that it is a sci-fi adventure, you have a movie that is not as sterile as some others. Humanity doesn’t live in sterility and perfection.”
    With no television suits to intervene or interfere, Serenity also ventured on the grim and gritty side of the universe as it was always envisioned.
    “It definitely goes to some dark place in the end,” says Baldwin. “Our goal is to obviously make a couple more of these and not many movies that end on a downer get that. I’m not giving anything away but it was thrill ride for me.”
    Baldwin continues to enjoy a successful career, and Serenity will only help the Chicago native reach a new level of fame when his action figure invades stores this fall. “Ah… immortality,” chuckles Baldwin about his plastic doppelganger. “It is a great thing. I finally made it. I have an action figure! Whew! I think it is great. I’m looking forward to getting my own cereal too. Jayne Cobb cereal in the shape of weapons and hats with pom-poms!”