Sendhil Ramamurthy, Heroes
If you thought the return of NBC's Heroes last week served up the series' most riveting episode to date, brace yourself for a bit of future shock. Tonight's episode (airing at 9 pm/ET) follows Hiro, Ando and others five years into what we have seen is a very bleak future. There, unexpected alliances have formed and life-and-death decisions hang in the balance. Sendhil Ramamurthy, who plays Mohinder, calls this latest outing his personal favorite of them all. Now, the actor tells us more about it, lets slip a taste of Season 2, and details the onus of being deemed "sexy" by TV Guide.
TVGuide.com: I have to say, there's leaving people hanging with a cliff-hanger, and then there is leaving people, like Mohinder, literally hanging....
Sendhil Ramamurthy: Well, clearly, yeah! You have no idea how many people walked up to me on the street [during the show's hiatus] to say, "Is Mohinder dead?!" I didn’t know what to say, it was really hard. I had one woman almost in tears, thinking Mohinder was dead. A lot of people assumed he was. When I read it, I thought I was!

TVGuide.com: Were you disappointed at all in Mohinder those past few episodes, seeing him fall prey to Sylar so easily? Or did the drugged-tea twist redeem him for you?
Ramamurthy: For a guy who's supposedly so smart, he's been duped a lot, and that was a concern. But the way I tried to approach it was that he comes from a good place and he has a good heart, and he's ready to believe in people. But when the writers came up with this twist where he stops being taken for a sucker, I was really, really psyched. And it only gets better in the rest of the episodes. The character has rounded a huge corner.

"It was kind of a fluke," he said. "When I went in for this part, it actually was written as my father. The character was 55 years old. The father who died was the original character. I thought it was a mistake. I left the audition, went outside and called my agent. I said, "There are a bunch of older guys here, and me. I know you haven't seen me in awhile but come on - I haven't gotten that old.' "

The agent told him not to worry about it.

"Tim Kring (the show's creator) liked the audition and he actually went back and rewrote the entire pilot," said Ramamurthy. "He changed the character to be the son of the (older) guy."

Kring gave the casting story an added twist. Asked what impressed him about Ramamurthy's audition, Kring said: "Well, some of it is fairly obvious. I found him charming and striking.

"It was written for a 55-year-old man and he brought this whole other angle to it that I never ever imagined," said Kring. "A light bulb went off. I thought this was a lot more interesting if he was talking about his father and his father died and he followed in his footsteps. I could work with the archetype of the idea of a son trying to fulfill a father's destiny."

"That plays into what the show is. A giant archetype. I think part of the show's success is that people really get who these people are because they are big giant archetypes - the cop, the cheerleader, the dreamer. In other series, you can't tell one character from another."

Ramamurthy's audition also led Kring to add a narrator. Ramamurthy, whose family is from the southern part of India, said he uses a British accent and a British-Indian accent at times.

"He has one of the most beautiful speaking voices on the planet," said Kring. "It is so gorgeous. There was no narration originally. It wasn't in the script. It came because of him."

Ramamurthy, however, doesn't know what he is narrating. "I'm assured that is going to be explained," he said. "I don't know what it is - if it is coming from a journal. I have purposely not asked. I don't want to know yet."

Save the cheerleader, save the world? How about trying to rescue everyone who's trying to save her?

That's the job of Dr. Mohinder Suresh, a scientist who's taken over his deceased father's job of finding those humans with DNA that gives them superpowers. Unfortunately for them, they're being hunted down and murdered.

Found in "Heroes," airing Mondays on NBC, Suresh is played by Sendhil Ramamurthy, who has adjusted well to not having a superpower. "In the beginning, I was totally bummed. I won't lie to you," he says. "I was like 'This sucks! All of my friends are gonna make fun of me. I'm the only one that doesn't have a power!' But now I like the fact that the audience sees these things through my eyes. ... I think if everybody had a power on the show, it would become 'The Justice League' or something like that."

For someone who's on the hottest show around, it's amazing to learn that Ramamurthy never intended to act professionally. "Tufts (University) is a liberal arts school, and to graduate, I had to have an arts credit. And so I just took Intro to Acting because I thought it would be easy," Ramamurthy says. "I'd never acted before my junior year in college. I took the class because I thought it would be an easy A, and it wasn't. It was actually a lot of work."

Despite not being enamored with the class, he discovered that the actual acting process was something that snagged his imagination. Having auditioned for a play as part of a class assignment and being cast, he initially didn't want to do it. "I was like 'This isn't what I planned on happening,' " he said.

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Birth date: May 17.

Favorite actresses: Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett in "Babel," Kate Winslet in "Little Children."

Favorite actor: Marlon Brando, Sam Rockwell ("The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy").

Favorite movies: "On the Waterfront"; "Withnail & I."

Sibling: One younger sister.

Higher education: Tufts University, majored in history.

Hobby: Tennis: participated in competitive tennis as a youth