Carl Lumbly, who plays CIA director Marcus Dixon in ABC’s spy drama Alias, told SCI FI Wire that he asked for more action scenes in the upcoming fourth season after spending most of the third giving orders from an office. "I think last season for me, moving from the field to administration, was a curve ball," Lumbly said in an interview during the network’s fall press preview in Los Angeles. "I think as both an actor and a character, there was a struggle going on."

Lumbly said that it was his own frustration as an actor that helped him understand the character’s place on the show. "This past season, while I may not have been as thrilled with the role or the tasks that the character had, a lot came out of it for me personally in having to tackle that and in the idea that a lot of us have jobs that we don’t love every day," Lumbly said. "You still have to do justice to it, and you have to do honor to it, and, especially in our case, you have to save the world and you have to be bigger than that."

The fourth season of Alias starts filming in July, but the new episodes won’t be shown on ABC until January 2005 to avoid having to air reruns during the season. For his part, Lumbly said he thinks the midseason, no-rerun approach will be good for the show in the long run. "I think the idea of airing it consecutively makes a tremendous amount of sense," he said. "Also, I think the idea that we are going to start shooting it at the end of July, but they won’t start airing it until January, there will be a lot more work that can be done in that prelude period that will make each episode, I think, even better." Alias will air in its usual Sunday 9 p.m. ET/PT timeslot.