Timothy Hutton On 'Leverage,' Filming In Prison, Elisabetta Canalis

Season three begins with Nate in prison and we found this amazing place that was built and never finished here in the Portland, Oregon, area this very high-tech prison that they never completed. But this one wing was and now it's used — a lot of the prison is used for office space, which is kind of unusual but this one sort of wing we took over and there weren't any real inmates. But we had many extras for those scenes, and we filmed those scenes you know here in Portland. Each show is a 7 day shoot and I think we were in the prison 5 of those 7 days, and it was a great — for me it was a great way to start the season three to have Nate in jail. If he's going to get out of jail has to be — it has to happen after he takes care of something that's very important to him that's going on inside the prison.

Well yes, working with Elisabetta was great and she's going to be doing more shows with us as the season goes on because she's set up as a very central figure. You know audiences when they see the first show they'll see that Nate makes a deal that the rest of the team is not very happy with. But Nate makes a deal, it's kind of blackmailed in a way in to accepting the deal to go after someone. And she's the one who presents the plan. And they have these kind of secret clandestine meetings throughout the season. Working with her was great. She's just such a lovely person and she brought great excitement when she came to the set. She was so excited to be in the show and she worked so hard and she was worried that her accent was too thick and you know one of the great things is her accent. And you know she's working very hard to minimize the accent. We all wanted her to have the accent. So anyway, we're all looking forward to her coming back. I've already seen a couple of the shows that she's in and she's just great in the show and she really adds this amazing kind of dangerous, you know, 'spy in from the cold' element to the show.