Sienna Guillory & Clea Duvall Talk Acting Challenges And Virtuality
Written by Ian Cullen on June 25, 2009 – 10:05 pm -
Yesterday SciFiPulse was part of a press call with Sienna Guillory and Clea Duvall, two the female leads from the new Ron D. Moore Pilot Virtuality. The pilot, which airs on Friday night at 8pm EST centres on the crew of the Phaeton who are on a 10 – year journey through space towards a planet that may be able to sustain life. Their journey is not a straightforward cake walk, and to help alleviate pressure the Phaeton has a special Virtual Reality entertainment system installed for the recreational use of the crew. However one of the more interesting twists to this show is the fact that the entire mission and lives of the Phaeton crew is being broadcast back to earth. Just like Big Brother.
Virtuality as a series is likely to use a lot more green screen than you’d normally see in a science fiction series, perhaps with the exception of the Sci-Fi Channels hit series Sanctuary. When asked about the acting challenges of green screen Sienna Guillory revealed that acting against a green screen felt liberating to her in a lot of ways.
“I think in a way, when you’re working with green screens, it’s hugely enabling,” Guillory told reporters at a telephone news conference, which included SciFiPulse and many other websites. The actress went on to add that Green Screen offers the actors no limitations in terms of their performance, and actually opens up the imagination. Guillory also added that working with Ron D. Moore proved a very creatively rewarding experience for her and the other actors.
“The fact that there’s nothing there to limit your imagination or to limit where you see yourself or how you see the scene unfolding can be a helpful thing, so you just imagine it exactly the way you want it to be, rather than kind of being held back by the physical limitations of a set.”
Virtuality proved to be somewhat of a new, but still positive experience for Clea Duvall who found the improvisational nature of the show, and finding her characters place in the ensemble to be a useful tool to add to her skills as an already accomplished actor.
“On Virtuality, for me it was so much about getting to know the people that I was working with and getting comfortable with improv, which is something that I’ve never done before, but Peter Berg likes to work that way, just sort of letting scenes run and seeing what happens. So it was a lot of kind of on-the-job training on this one. Any preparation I did had to be sort of thrown out the window and just putting the trust into my fellow actors and my director.”
One of the things that Virtuality uses is a type of Big Brother confessional, which required actors to talk directly to the camera, which is a very intimate thing to do, and is technically known as breaching the fourth wall. In the pilot Siena Guillory has a few scenes like this and revealed to reporters what she felt her characters motivations were during these scenes.
“ I decided that she hated having her privacy invaded, but at the same time she was desperate for adventure. She’s kind of complex, an introvert and oversexed. But for me, those moments of intimacy were vital because there are so many big ideas at play within the script and the story. It’s absolutely vital that we’re all regular people, telling human stories.”
Although Virtuality was filmed as a back door pilot, the last a knowing whether it was going to be picked up as a series didn’t stop Ron Moore from giving actors little clues about their characters. A fact which Clea Duvall pointed out when asked.
“There were little bits and pieces that we were given because I think we all had the hopes that it would continue. But they, Michael and Ron, didn’t really give away much. I think that we were all under such pressure to just do what we were doing, that thinking into the future was overwhelming at times. But there’s definitely a lot more to the story that, fingers crossed, we may be able to tell.”
Related posts:
- Virtuality Pilot Brought Forward
- Review: Virtuality – Asking the question, “What is Reality?”
- Virtuality To Air On July 4
- Virtuality Not Quite Dead!
- Virtuality Series Still Possible Says Moore
Tags: Clea Duvall, Fox Network, Ron D. Moore, Sienna Guillory, Virtuality
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