It’s 11 am in LA and I’m chatting with Gale Harold about The Secret Circle’s Charles Meade and where the show will take his character over the remaining episodes of the current season. Initially billed as the witchy teen drama’s ‘Big Bad’ Charles has instead evolved into one of the show’s more complex and human individuals, albeit one with a couple of major misdemeanors to his name. Fans of the show will know that Charles is responsible for the deaths of both Amelia Blake and Nick Armstrong over the course of the season. In the land of TV, bad deeds rarely go unpunished for long, and I begin by asking Gale if he sees some retribution for Charles coming down the line any time soon.

“I think the most straightforward answer to that question is Charles’ retribution is to be left to be Charles, you know?” he says with a laugh. ‘Specifically? I think that something, or several things will happen. It’s just a matter of time. He’s always looking over his shoulder. Things have moved on from some loosely formed plan with Dawn to Charles being on his own. Then there’s this situation with his daughter too. If you’ve got a daughter in high school and you killed her friend’s mother …” he laughs.

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The first time we met Charles Meade, the character played by Gale Harold in The CW’s Thursday hit “The Secret Circle,” he was watching impassively as a young mother was killed in a house fire he set by magic.

Since then, though, the character has had his hands full with his willful daughter, Diana (Shelley Hennig), and his occasional partner in malice, Dawn (Natasha Henstridge). Fans may soon see Charles making some more decisive moves.

“I can say that there are other people who are trying to get in my way, trying to grab my lunch off my tray, and that’s going to cause trouble,” Harold says. “I hope that what we see is people learning who’s really running the show here, and that’s Charles.”

“Circle” co-creator Kevin Williamson says he cast Harold to bring a sense of menace to the show after admiring the actor’s work in the Showtime drama “Queer as Folk,” where he played gay ad executive Brian Kinney.

“Brian was the most energized, while simultaneously being threatened, character that I have ever played,” Harold says. “Brian knew what he wanted, and he was very good at getting it, but at the same time a lot of people wanted to get him out of the way, including some of his good friends and his father. There’s a parallel there in that Charles is taking what he wants, but what he doesn’t have that Brian had was an almost unflappable self-confidence, at least on the surface.”

After that cable series ended, Harold played Susan’s house painter boyfriend on “Desperate Housewives.”

“Marc (Cherry, creator of ‘Housewives’) had tried to bring me on before that and it just didn’t work out because of the scheduling,” Harold says. “I really dig the way Marc writes, and to be asked to work on a show that has that kind of profile was very flattering.”

Favorite book: “At the moment the book that I am wrapped up in is ‘A Violent Life’ by Pier Paolo Pasolini. I highly recommend picking it up, because it’s off to the races from the very first page. One of the things that had a huge effect on me was an early short story by Dylan Thomas called ‘The Dress.’ Anyone who is into frightening and passionately charged storytelling should check that one out, too.”

Favorite movie: “Certainly ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ is up there. You had these two incredibly compelling characters who ran across each other and the dynamic that they brought out of each other and the fact that they were naively willing to go to such extremes. That movie goes so deep and it does it so seductively. So much of what they do is horrible, and yet you’re falling in love with them.”

Favorite recording: “I want to recommend one that a friend of mine just released. The band is called Electric Flower, which is the title of the record, too. My friend Josh Garza is the drummer, and I’ve been listening to that pretty much nonstop. The guitarist is Imaad Wasif. It’s a 10-inch EP with three songs on it, and I think it’s going to lead to something bigger.”

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Quick Excerpt: Harold began his television career playing uber-gay bad boy Brian Kinney, acted in a number of small independent films, did a little Tennessee Williams on stage, and starred in the short-lived Fox crime drama Vanished before joining the cast of Desperate Housewives as Susan’s (Teri Hatcher) artist boyfriend, Jackson Braddock. But what role would he most like to play that he hasn’t yet?

“Sam, the Burl Ives role in Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer,” he said firmly. “What Burl Ives brought to the studio when he was doing those voices… I mean, you think Brian Kinney had an impact? For anyone who grew up in the United States around the same time I was growing up, you’d know that voice, have seen the Christmas special with the stop motion animation. It’s an iconic role. That’s what I’m interested in.”

Read the entire interview/article here: Gale Harold’s dream role would take him from Wisteria Lane to … Christmas Town?