Actors take a 'Break'

PASADENA, Calif. — In its first season, all the action in "Prison Break" swirled around a big conspiracy involving evil Vice President Caroline Reynolds (Patricia Wettig) and the murder of her brother, Terrence Steadman (John Billingsley), for which one of Our Heroes, Lincoln Burrows (Dominic Purcell) was wrongfully sentenced to death.

Lincoln couldn't possibly have done it, because Steadman isn't dead.

But that's what set the entire story in motion. A story that left us cliffhanging last spring when the veep had the president assassinated and one of the regulars discovered that Steadman is alive. And that's a bit of a complication because neither Wettig nor Billingsley will be on "Prison Break" this fall — they'll both be on other shows.

"I had to make a choice. And it was kind of hard for me to choose against my husband and his good writing," said Wettig, who'll be in the cast of ABC's "Brothers & Sisters," executive produced by her husband, Ken Olin.

And Billingsley is in the cast of ABC's "The Nine." But at least we sort of know what will happen with his role on "Break."

"I believe that they have hired a John Billingsley look-alike," he said. "I actually auditioned for my own role with a little pencil mustache and an eye patch, but I didn't get it."

He wasn't altogether kidding, although executive producer Paul T. Scheuring was when he said, "John Billingsley, as far as we know, was never actually on the show. You never really see his face. So if he was on the show, he did some wonderful work, but you couldn't actually see him.

"But the long and short of that is that we recast that role."

The brother will be played by Jeff Perry, who, we're assured, "just does a fantastic job."

That was the easy part. The harder part — the evil-vice-president-turned-evil-president — has yet to entirely resolve itself.

"With Patricia, she's not out of the picture yet. Let's just put it that way," Scheuring said.

In the short term, making her the president means that "access to her is much more limited, conveniently for us," executive producer Matt Olmstead said.

In other words, the character will remain an unseen presence on the show. But, having moved into the Oval Office, she'll be inaccessible to the characters in "Prison Break."