Tony Almeida

Speaking of 24, this man right above, Carlos Bernard, is so hot! I love his character Tony Almeida. I swear if that man's character dies in this season because of his injuries he suffered in the first episode, I will be forever heartbroken.

January 15, 2006
Character
Surviving So Jack Bauer Can Live Another Day
By COELI CARRON
Day 1 of "24" - the Fox series that each season chronicles an eventful day in the life of the Counter Terrorism Unit - Tony Almeida was inscrutable and shadowy, a guy who would almost certainly turn out to be a mole. The next season, Day 2, he fell in love with his colleague Michelle Dessler and, a proven good guy, was handed the reins to the agency. On Day 3, married to Michelle, Tony almost lost her to a deadly virus and then committed treason to save her from the clutches of bad guys. And on Day 4, disheveled, haggard and broken, he emerged a third of the way into the season as still the only guy that Jack Bauer, the unit's star agent, trusts with his life.
"There are not many shows that allow you to play that kind of evolution in a character," said Carlos Bernard, who plays Tony Almeida. Day 5 of "24" begins tonight, and Tony returns not as an agency employee but as the owner of his own security business.
Mr. Bernard's Tony Almeida and Kiefer Sutherland's Jack Bauer are the only characters who have endured from the beginning of "24." "It has to do with the style of the show in that, between every season, there's this year-and-a-half-or-so gap, and you're able to imagine the change in the character and work in what has happened in between," Mr. Bernard said of the plot developments that have shaped his portrayal of Tony. "Between the third and fourth seasons, I was obviously put in jail, was released, started drinking and my marriage had broken up. There was all this I got to feed into the character."
Howard Gordon, an executive producer of "24," said, "Because we get only one glimpse of this one day in their lives, we have this obligation to dramatize how people have grown in this time." Mr. Gordon has high praise for Mr. Bernard's acting. "It's a charisma thing," he said. "Even just the way his head is slightly cocked, his voice is always a little bit low so you find yourself leaning a little bit forward to listen to him."
The performance is so appealing that it may have extended Tony's life span. "On several occasions, Almeida has survived first drafts where he died," Mr. Gordon said. "And then we said, 'Aw, we can't kill Tony.' He's kind of the character with nine lives."
Mr. Bernard's character is also unobtrusively Hispanic, in contrast with many Hispanic characters on television whose ethnicity, Mr. Gordon said, "becomes their kind of character, rather than the situation they're in." The low-key approach suits Mr. Bernard, who grew up in Chicago and whose mother was from Madrid. "I like that, because you know what? There are Hispanic-Americans in the workplace and it's not an issue, they do their job," he said, adding that the only time Tony spoke Spanish on the program was during the first season, when he questioned a colleague - "very briefly, just to drive a point home to her" - who had betrayed the team.
But as a cast member of a show known for being highly capricious with the lives of its characters, Mr. Bernard is hedging his bets. He's shopping around a dramatic series, set in Miami, with a Cuban-American lead character. "The show is not about him being Hispanic, but it does deal with his back story of having shelved his culture to get ahead in the American world and having to reconnect with that Spanish culture he put aside," Mr. Bernard said. "My run on '24' is going to come to an end, obviously. The show is going to end or I'm going to be killed off."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/arts/television/15carr.html