Filming In Brooklyn

I’m a bit overloaded with interviews and screenings from the New York Television Festival, so I’m going to do things a bit out of order and jump right to Saturday night’s screening of Tuesday night’s episode of Fringe.  There’s really no sense in going to an advance screening if I don’t write about it before it airs, is there?  This post will contain my exclusive interviews with a few of the cast members.  Next up I’ll be posting a partial recap of Tuesday’s episode over at FringeTelevision.com.  And last I’ll post the post-screening Q&A with cast members and a couple of key production people back on this site.

The evening started with one-on-one red carpet interviews of some of the show’s main characters.  Sadly, neither Joshua Jackson, Anna Torv, nor J.J. Abrams could make it, but I was able to speak with some fabulously interesting people who also star in the show.

First up was Jasika Nicole, who plays junior FBI agent Astrid Farnsworth.  She’s absolutely beautiful in person, as well as incredibly enthusiastic.  She has the shortest bio of all of the main actors on the show, and seems to really be enjoying this moment.

Filming In Brooklyn: In the pilot you were mostly in the lab, assisting.  We want to know if your character is going to be more in the thick of things in future episodes.

Jasika Nicole: Oh my gosh yes. I know she was kind of ancillary in the first episode which was totally fine because there’s a really big story that they’re trying to get across.  But Astrid is so smart and she is such a smart alec.  And she has such a nice connection with Dr. Bishop just because she’s around the age of his son and he doesn’t have a good relationship with him.  And there’s a little bit of…he’s trying to educate me because I’m new at this and I want to learn things so Astrid ends up having a lot of tricks up her sleeve.  She’s really really gonna pull off some surprises within the season.  And I wish I could tell you more, but you’ll see.

FIB: Do you ever get to shoot scenes outside of the lab?  Do you ever get to go on location?

JN: Not so much. I wish that I did.  Because I live in Brooklyn and we shoot a lot in Brooklyn actually.  Which is really really neat and I would love to see more parts of Brooklyn.

FIB: Do you ever get grossed out by the things you have to shoot?

JN: You know, I thought I wasn’t [going to] because I’m totally into gore and blood and I figured if I could see the behind the scenes part it’s really not going to freak me out, but we did this one scene with an eyeball and I could not believe how real it was! I mean we did another one with a beating heart on a tray – it was just incredible! And each time the very first take is me going [sucks in her breath]!  I mean I really can’t control myself ’cause it’s shocking.  It’s so good. They’re really good about keeping it as real as they possibly can.

FIB: So there aren’t many special effects added to the lab scenes afterwards?

JN: No! There’s a lot of very in-the-moment stuff that’s happening that we just have to navigate ourselves around and act like it’s everyday work for us, but it’s still blowing my mind. Every single episode.

Next we spoke with Blair Brown, who starred in The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd as well as about a thousand other TV appearances and movies.  She looked stunning in a simple black dress and jacket, and a necklace by a Brooklyn designer (she couldn’t recall which one).  She brings an incredible amount of depth and gravitas to the character of Nina Sharp on Fringe, whose life was saved by her employer, Massive Dynamic.

Blair Brown: Filming In Brooklyn?  We were just filming in Brooklyn the other day.  We were in an area called Ditmas Park on Thursday and the edge of Prospect Park and it was spectacular.

FIB: Have you been doing a lot of on location shooting so far?

BB: Actually all of my work has been on location except for one day at the studio.  But the best part about working in a place like New York is, I didn’t even know about Ditmas Park, and now I want to go back.

When we were shooting in the park the other day Joshua Jackson and I were shooting a scene, and we couldn’t see [what was going on behind us], but the crew was in fits of laughter. It was like the history of transportation behind us. At one point a girl on a horse came by, then a father  with a girl on a tandem bike, and then a young Hasidic Jew on roller blades. You couldn’t have planned to have those extras.

FIB: How far back does your character’s history go with the other characters?

BB: Well, I know John Noble‘s [Dr. Walter Bishop] goes way back.  I think we’ll come to discover that there is something there between John’s character, William Bell, and myself. That we are peers, and something went down. We’ll find out what that is. I think what’s so interesting is how J.J. [Abrams] plays with what’s happening on a macro scientific level and what’s happening just person to person.  And that’s really just the fun of it all.

FIB: Since the pilot have you filmed any more scenes with any other parts of you being robotic?

BB: No we haven’t.  But I’ve developed a glove fetish.

Next to cross my path was Mark Valley, who plays the recently deceased (or is he?) FBI agent John Scott.  If someone could please make sure that my husband is out of the room, I’d like to comment that Mark has the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen and a jaw worthy of a Flintstones character named something like Rockjaw Quartzstone.

FIB: OK, all I’ve seen so far is the first episode, and we all know how things end for your character.  And yet, here you are…

Mark Valley: Yeah, I don’t know why they keep inviting me to these parties. My character’s dead!  It’s strange.

FIB: How far back does  your character’s history go with the other characters?

MV: I think the main character Olivia is going to find some things out about John Scott that she wasn’t aware of. Whether or not he’s a good guy or a bad guy. Who is he actually working for, is it Massive Dynamic or is it a government agency?  Is it the FBI or somebody else, we don’t really know yet. All in all I think John Scott is a very simple guy caught up in some complex circumstances.

FIB: Well, that’s how you have to see him.  You can’t see him as a bad guy.

MV: You know, I was watching this one interview with Javier Bardem and he had this one acting teacher who said [doing Javier] “You have to be your character’s lawyer.” So he’s innocent until…

FIB: Going back to the relationships between the characters, how far in advance do you find out?  Like are you told in the beginning that you have this history with this character? Or do you find out as you go along?

MV: Really the only thing you can count on is the script.  And the subsequent rewrites which are inevitable.  You don’t really get this lecture where somebody calls you in to their office, where J.J. [Abrams] says “Let me show you the special path of your character’s life.” What I find kind of interesting is that even if I did know that stuff, it’s more fun to imagine it.

FIB: But do you ever get to a point in a script where you say “Oh wait, I would have played that scene differently three episodes back had I known that this scene was coming, had I known that I had this prior relationship with this person?

MV: Oh yeah.  Yeah, that definitely happens.  But then again it kind of inadvertantly makes the actors’ performances a little more complex, because you think “Wait a minute, if that was that, then why did he act like that?”  And it raises even more questions so we all end up kind of winning in the end.

Originally posted on Filming In Brooklyn