'The Killing's' Eric Ladin: 'I was in awe' after reading the season finale

So, we couldn't get Eric Ladin to reveal anything about how "The Killing" ends its first season.

"Oh yeah, no worries. We can just end this thing now -- might as well, right?" Ladin jokes. "No need to wait for Sunday."

When Zap2it talked with Ladin on Friday (June 17), however, he would at least tell us what his thoughts were when he read the script for Sunday's season finale, in which we will (presumably) learn the identity of Rosie Larsen's murderer.

"I read it, I called three cast members, I read it again, and then I literally -- I was in awe. I was in shock," he says. "My wife said, 'Well, tell me about it.' And I said, 'Nah -- I'm not sure you're going to want to know. ... It was great. It totally took me by surprise. I did not think it was going to be what it was."

The end of last week's episode seemed to point to Darren Richmond (Billy Campbell), the boss of Ladin's character Jamie Wright, as the killer. Based on Ladin's reaction to the finale, though, we wonder if that's really the case. We'll find out when "The Killing's" finale airs at 10 p.m. ET Sunday.

We also talked more with Ladin -- who asked us to share his Twitter name, @ericladin, with you -- about how he sees Jamie, whether we might see him again on another AMC show, "Mad Men," and his starring role in the video game "inFAMOUS 2," which was released earlier this month. Some highlights:

On Jamie's tenaciousness: "We make mention of it in [episode 4] in which I'm at a bar with the mayor. [The character] grew up in kind of a white-trash area. Jamie didn't have it easy. He didn't grow up wealthy and was always kind of scrappy. ... In a lot of the research I'd done for the role and books I had read, that's an attribute you have to have in order to be successful as a political operative. So I just wanted to make sure it was all justified. As sort of cutthroat and immoral as it sometimes might seem, I feel like at the end of the day Jamie usually justifies his decisions."

On Season 2: "We know the show's coming back, but there are no conversations on who's coming back or in what capacity. ... We're waiting until the finale airs, and probably most of that information will get sorted out."

On the insane -- and real -- apartment with a glass-bottom pool where billionaire Tom Drexler (Patrick Gilmore) lives: "It's such an amazing location. I had heard about it; everybody kind of knows about that apartment in Vancouver. It's an actual apartment, and it's a very well-known kind of bachelor pad. ... It's the entire top floor of this building, and the apartment below it is where Joel Kinnaman and Brendan Sexton III lived [during filming]. They were roommates."

On working on "inFAMOUS 2": "I did another video game a couple years ago called 'Left 4 Dead 2,' and I only did the voice work. So that was just going into a voice booth, I never met the other actors, and did four hours at a time. This game was much more work-intensive. I had two or three pre-production meetings with the developers, and then I worked with the other actors the entire time -- not only in the voice booth, but also on a motion-capture stage. ...

"It's so different than TV and film, in which you're given props and wardrobe and set design and all these things that put you in an environment. In this, you're wearing a leotard with ping-pong balls all over it. You kind of have to go back to when you were 7 or 8 years old and just use your imagination. And that makes it fantastic. Once you allow yourself to do that, the process is really, really incredible and freeing."

On "Mad Men," where he's played Betty's (January Jones) brother William Hofstadt in a handful of episodes: "I'd love to [do more], and I've made sure [creator] Matt Weiner knows that. I love working with Jon [Hamm], I love working with January. But that show's like most of these shows now, especially AMC shows -- you just don't know. If anybody was at the forefront of the secretive train, so to speak, it was Matt. So until I get a call that says, 'Hey, are you available?,' I probably won't know. But it sure would be a pleasure."