Mary in Brisbane
A little recap from the Supanova Con in Brisbane.
Just to let you know that they were very strict and no photos/recordings etc were allowed. Mary does not want to be taken out of context so I will try and only mention things here that I would think she would find inoffensive if I misquoted her.
Saturday’s talk:
Mary comes in and the first thing she tells us is that it’s the emcee’s birthday and she goes on about it being her birthday and that she wasn’t going to tell us how old she was. Then she says we probably know anyway. Yep, sorry Mary, we do. She admits she’s a bit jetlagged as she had only arrived that morning. She talked about Australia for a while. It was apparently her first visit ever to the country. She said she knew and worked with a lot of Australians over the years (Michael Rymer and Dean Semler sprung to my mind) but she had never had the chance to visit before. She went on about how beautiful the country was and how lucky we were. She turned this into a joke as she then admitted she had only seen from the airport to the venue but she was sure it was beautiful and said it reminded her of BSG’s Earth. (I’m hoping she meant Earth 2 - LOL.) Then she asked for questions.
I won’t be able to match up each question to her correct response. I thought on Saturday that she was misinterpreting some of our questions and there was a bit of a language barrier thing happening. (She confirmed this somewhat on Sunday.)
There was the question about whether or not it was true Laura Roslin was written for her. We all know this is true but anyway, she did go into the Donnie Darko thing a bit. She said that Donnie Darko had absolutely no budget and that she had to drive herself to work and that she kept getting speeding tickets because of the way she drives. So cute. Someone asked about being in Sneakers and that it must have been a spin out to star with Robert Redford and the rest of the famous cast. She mentioned that the biggest difference was just the budget and went back to talking about DD again a bit.
A couple of stories she told we all know, such as the one when she was sitting in Spargos and was approached to star in bsg.
She said that the BSG cast was the best cast she had ever worked with and that she had never encountered anything, other than DWW, that had brought her into contact with the fans and had become such a phenomenon as BSG had. Someone asked whether she liked the finale and she said she had enjoyed it because she had got to go outside. She said she liked the fact that Laura had died and that it would have been very rude to people who were really suffering cancer if some ‘sci-fi’ thing had happened and miraculously cured her. Someone asked if there were any cut scenes that had ended up on the editing room floor that she was upset about. She said from an actor’s POV she never rewatched the show and didn’t really think about that type of thing.
I asked about Passion Fish and how I saw a lot of similarities between May-Alice and Laura and I asked if she could talk a bit about making that movie.
Her answer was that she also many similarities between the two. She said that May-Alice was so angry. She said that she had a lot of people help her prepare for the role and that she had so much more understanding and respect for paraplegics and people in those types of situations. She said she wished she’d played May-Alice after she’d played Laura as she would have been so much better in that role now. She said that, in particular, she had thought a lot about May-Alice the day she filmed the ‘I’m coming for you all’ scene.
Someone asked about her input into Laura Roslin and she told the story about her and David swapping emails and Ron stepping in again. Someone asked if there were moments she didn’t agree with and she brought up the abortion storyline. She said that, given her age and the era she had been brought up in, she had fought for women’s rights her entire life and she had found that difficult.
She talked about Caprica briefly and that she was unsure at first but had now got into it.
She said that Laura should have stolen the election and she shouldn’t have let Bill talk her out of it but she understood it was the right thing for Laura to do at that time.
The guy sitting next to me asked if there were any roles she had passed on and regretted, especially if the movie went on to be a big hit. This was a real language barrier thing as it took her three times to get with what he was on about. Very funny. She said that there were heaps but she couldn’t think of one in particular as she tried to block out such things.
A girl asked about Laura and Bill’s romance and how it was the best romance ever filmed. She said that they tried to make it believable and that Michael Rymer had been one of the ones pushing the a/r romance. She said that they worked extremely hard to make it true and real and not to force it.
She mentioned that in the beginning Laura was very maternal and was the one talking about ‘making babies’ and that Bill was a bastard to her and that somewhere during season 1 they swapped roles and you saw how soft Bill was through all his other relationships. She said Laura had no other previous relationships.
Sunday:
There’s a screen on the stage and the emcee says that he has the pleasure to introduce the woman who is just the other side of the screen and she pops her head out and waves before quickly jumping back behind. So cute. The emcee goes on about how much grace and class she has introduced to the sci fi genre etc etc. She comes out and pretends to trip up the stairs. She mentions that Kevin Costner was good at pretending to fall and that he did it in DWW. She mentioned that KC is still one of her close friends. She said that KC was extremely like John Dunbar in real life and that he had written himself almost in that role.
She said she was still getting used to our accents and had been having trouble the day before (see I was right about the language barrier thing with the questions). She told a story about how her assistant told her that Anzac Day was coming up and we would have a public holiday for it. She said she thought her assistant had said ‘Insect’ Day and she was like, ‘Australians have a public holiday celebrating insects????’ It was hilarious.
Anyway, she asked for questions and someone asked about the finale again. This time she was so cute because she goes ‘she may have died but she died happy as she was in love’, drawling out the love to be lurve. She said Laura had given in and fallen in love for the first time in her life. She said how she had concentrated on playing Laura in pain and hurting all the time and that she had stifled her own natural tendency to move around and be exuberant to keep very very still and to show that every small movement for Laura was painful.
She also said it was a much better death than in Independence Day when she said ‘you blinked and I was dead’.
She said that Laura was the only character to have ever got married after she died.
She told the story about Eddie’s tears in the raptor making her cry and she kept faking Michael Rymer’s accent yelling ‘cut, Mary you’re supposed to be dead’. Then she was doing her impersonation of MR again saying ‘it’s wrapped’. She sounded more like a Kiwi and it was very funny.
Someone asked about her and Baltar and she talked more about her and James. She said that she thought he was a wonderful actor and that she would feed off him and let him lead their scenes. She said she usually just stood there and played Laura refusing to back down in their scenes.
She told the Spargos story again. (She did apologise to those who were there the day before for repeating her stories which was sweet.)
She talked a bit more about DD and how she ‘got’ it. (I wish she’d explain it to me.)
She said that Ron had no plans on getting Laura and Bill together until her and Eddie started acting together. She said that Ron could see how well they worked off each other and started writing the romance. She said they really wanted it to be a ‘layered’ relationship and real and true.
She said that Laura understood Bill’s decision to put her in the brig. She said Laura would have done the exact same thing if she’d been in Bill’s shoes and that Laura was thinking ‘you’ve thrown me in the brig, but I understand, and I find you really cute’.
She was asked if she liked to play villains. She said that now she was older she was enjoying playing roles that, although not villains, are not always sweet all the time (I think she was probably referring to the Closer) and that she had trouble playing them when she was younger. She said she was always taught to be a nice girl and smile. She said she was a cheerleader and the prom queen and a water ballerina so she was always supposed to smile. She said now that she had played Laura Roslin she thought she could play any ‘tough’ role (made me think about the comment yesterday about May-Alice). She said Laura Roslin did whatever she wanted and if you didn’t like it, she’d airlock you. So, I sort of got the impression that Laura has empowered Mary as well.
The girl next to me asked what she was going to do from now on and she mentioned the new season of the Closer. She said she was unsure how many more they wanted her to do. She said nothing was made in LA anymore and most jobs took you away from home but she confirmed she was staying there for a while so that she could be close to the writer who was working on the show she was intending to produce and star in. So, fangirls in LA have faith.