The worst part of this week's Heroes episode, by far, was the lack of Jack Coleman on screen. We need our weekly HRG fix!

Fortunately, this is unlikely to be a regular occurrence. And at least our friends at BuddyTV sat down with the Heroes star recently. Here are excerpts from that interview:

What was it like coming back after the strike and going into this new partnership with Sylar?
We were gone for so long it just seemed like forever, so when we came back it took a couple days to get the wheels working and the joints oiled. It was laid on me pretty early that HRG was going to be in partnership with somebody very different, and at first I thought it was going to be Claire.

When it turned out to be Sylar I thought that was very cool. I was a little concerned about the transition from mortal enemies to cooperating on a mission together. That worried me a little bit to start out that way, but I think the fact that they have the two of us kind of scheming against each other even as we work together, I think that works well.

Are we going to see more of that back story with HRG's relationship to these villains?
You see a little of it. There's not all that much. What you will see more of is in a great episode, it's episode eight, and it's a flashback episode that's kind of a prequel to the pilot. It sort of dovetails into the pilot, and you see how, for instance, HRG and Elle are complicit in sort of the creation of Sylar.

It's a really good origins episode of how Sylar got to be the way he is, and the relationship between HRG and Elle. It was hinted at last year when Suresh says to me, "You know her?" and it's like, "Oh yeah." It's never really explained in what form, how it is that I knew her, so you really see more of that. In that episode you will also see Knox and see where he came from, so you do see the villains there. But there's not a tremendous amount of HRG and the villains back story.

Matt Richenthal is the Editor in Chief of TV Fanatic. Follow him on Twitter and on Google+.