Showbiz Junkies did transcripts of the videos they posted last week
Behind the Scenes of Revolution with Elizabeth Mitchell - Here
Elizabeth Mitchell (‘Rachel Matheson’), Stephen Collins (‘Dr. Gene Porter’), and writer/executive producer Rockne S. O’Bannon from NBC’s Revolution made the trek to the 2014 WonderCon to tease the final four episodes of the second season of the sci-fi drama. The fate of the series hasn’t yet been announced, however Mitchell, Collins, and O’Bannon didn’t allow the fact they are unsure of whether the show will be returning for a third season temper their enthusiasm for discussing the series which has a passionate, social media-active fan base. Without giving away major spoilers, the Revolution stars and executive producer touched on what viewers can expect for the remaining season two episodes and even confirmed that they’ve pitched ideas for season three to the network.
In addition to taking part in a panel with fans of the series, the cast and executive producer sat down to chat about the show with members of the media. Relaxed and looking gorgeous, Mitchell had our small group of journalists laughing as she described Charlie and Rachel’s relationship as well as how she was able to get her way when she suggested a change in dialogue.
Elizabeth Mitchell Interview
Executive producer Rockne S. O’Bannon described Rachel as a lightning rod, so what can you tease about the final episodes of season two and what sparks she’ll be setting off?
Elizabeth Mitchell: “Rachel and her sparks… She’s a catalyst for change, right, so I like that. That’s nice. She’s down a road of people finding their conscience right now, which my dad is very unhappy about because he likes me as a cold-blooded killer. I don’t know what that means except that he’s a huge fan of sci-fi, Sarah Connor - that’s his world and his genre. That’s what I grew up loving because, of course, dad likes it. I was like, ‘Yeah, this is fantastic.’ So, for him, Rachel finding her moral center, he’s like, ‘She’s not going to kill people anymore?’ I was like, ‘Dad!’ But mom my is like, ‘You know, it’s lovely to see a conscience start to be re-introduced to the show. It’s lovely to see people trying to fight good against evil, rather than everybody being grey.’ So I think Rachel’s trying to lead people down a better road. She’s not really sure how to do it. She’s going to get pretty unpopular before anything good happens from it. But it is interesting.”
At this point how much input are given into what she does?
Elizabeth Mitchell: “Oh, I don’t have any input. No. If you dislike Rachel, it’s not my fault. [Laughing] The same if you love her, it’s not my fault either. It’s one of those wonderful things of I just don’t. Now, if something comes up that I - and I’m really good about this because I think writers they need to be up here [indicating over her head] for us as actors…we need to look at their words and figure out how to make their vision work. It’s their vision. You know, they come up with all this. They work long, hard hours to figure it out. But if there’s something that in the drafts that they’ve written if I feel like it’s not flowing, I’ll call and be like, ‘Hey, can I say something else here as well as what you said here?’ Five times out of 10 they’ll take what I’ve said and they’ll let me do that. And I don’t ask very often. ‘I think 20 years is plenty of foreplay,’ love it or not love it, that was what happened in the moment with us. I felt like it was kind of fun and Eric [Kripke] said, ‘We’ll keep it.’
I don’t really have any input, but if there are improvisations that happen between scenes with us, then sometimes they keep them which is nice. [Laughing] I think it’s probably because I was taking my shirt off at the same time. Maybe I need to do that for all my favorite lines.”
Charlie and Rachel have had a difficult relationship…
Elizabeth Mitchell: “Yeah, they have because Rachel’s a terrible mother.”
Now that Charlie has killed Jason, does she lean on her mom at all?
Elizabeth Mitchell: “No, I don’t think that she’s going to do any leaning. But there’s a huge cathartic moment for Charlie coming up that is not with Rachel that is absolutely worth watching. You know, Tracy [Spiridakos], she’s been so phenomenal this season. I love watching how she’s evolved with this character and the direction she’s kind of been very determined to push her in. I think Rachel offers her support, but it’s like the dead-beat dad who’s like, ‘Now I want to be in your life.’ ‘Well, I’m 50 so I don’t know what to tell you.’
Maybe. We’ll see. I think she’s there and she tries. Definitely. She provides a net for Charlie to fall and I think that Charlie knows that it’s there. Whether she’ll lean on her or not - who knows? It’s hard to lean on a screwdriver so we’ll see.”
How is Rachel going to be tied to the nano storyline in the final episodes?
Elizabeth Mitchell: “You know, it involves a long walk and knocking on a door. That’s all I can say.”
Have they given you a heads-up at all about a season three?
Elizabeth Mitchell: “You know, they’re so excited to tell us but I think that we’re still waiting to hear and I think that pitch is happening now. So, I don’t know. I hope.”
Do you ask?
Elizabeth Mitchell: “Yeah, I ask all the time and they’re like, ‘Oh, it’s great. It’s great! We have to wait. It’s great.’ And I’m like, ‘What kind of great?’ But yeah, from the final episode it absolutely sets up season three and gives you an idea of what’s happening. I liked it. It’s very, dare I say, very Stephen King in a way.”
Will we see the group all back together again to fight against the Patriots?
Elizabeth Mitchell: “We will see the group all back together again. What they’re fighting against, I don’t know. But Monroe… It’s fun having everyone together. It’s especially fun when Stephen [Collins] kind of came into the fold. He’s just really neat. And David [Lyons] is such a pleasure to work with, so it’s just a nice group of people. We like each other and we enjoy playing with each other because the characters are at such odds, but we’re not as a cast and that makes it even more fun because you can get in there and just kind of go crazy on each other and then afterwards you’re like, ‘Oh, are you okay?’ It’s nice.”
Will we see any additional tension between Rachel and Neville [played by Giancarlo Esposito] now that her daughter killed his son?
Elizabeth Mitchell: “You know, we don’t have as much tension between us as we would like. We like to play together. I mean our big scene that we had together was cut so - this is a while ago - we don’t have as much together as I would like. I like Giancarlo. He’s a lovely little Zen dude. I enjoy him. He’s incredibly talented but he’s also a kind guy. I like him.”
What was the cut scene?
Elizabeth Mitchell: “Oh it was during season one it was this big, ‘Rachel.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah?’ We had fun doing it. He walked forward, I walked back. There was a bomb. It was really fun. We had a good time.”
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Stephen Collins Discusses Revolution and the End of Season Two - Here
Stephen Collins admits he binge-watched the first season of NBC’s Revolution when he found out he landed the role of ‘Dr. Gene Porter’ on season two, and after sitting through all of the episodes Collins became a diehard fan of the series. And at the 2014 WonderCon in Anaheim, CA, Collins talked about what life is actually like on the set and how much he admires his Revolution co-stars.
Stephen Collins Interview
So the whole group will be back together fighting the good fight?
Stephen Collins: “It is a great group of people. You know, I’ve been on enough shows and been around enough television sets that there’s almost always somebody, at least one person in the cast that everybody kind of rolls their eyes about and goes, ‘Ugh.’ Maybe with love, maybe without. But there’s nobody like that on this show. It really is an extraordinary group. And the thing that shocked me about Liz [Mitchell] is that I expected her - just having seen her work - to be very grim and very serious, and one of those very kind of, ‘Hi, how are you?’ never cracking a smile on the set kind of people. And she’s like this [friendly and happy] on the set all the time. In the grimmest scenes she’s [happy] right up to, ‘Scene three take four,’ and then she goes to this place of Rachel-ness. I don’t know how she does it. Actors processes are all different, but Liz more than almost anyone I know stays upbeat and bubbly and silly. Then as soon as that clapper hits and they say action, goes to this place of Rachel who is outwardly so serious all the time. But within that energetic range she has eight cagillion colors. I love working with her. She’s a really great acting partner.”
We hear that there’s so much happening in the final episodes. What can you tease about what’s in store for you?
Stephen Collins: “Well there’s a lot of pure survival going on because the patriots are really pulling out all the stops. And so for Gene, it’s very elemental. One is that he’s tired. He’s the oldest one and there’s part of him that’s just done. I mean, how much can you get up and run away and kill? So he has his own internal battle going on too because there’s a part of him that just can’t do it anymore. And one of the things that I think is interesting about the last couple of episodes is the ways in which the different characters kind of challenge each other to find a way to keep going. And Rachel’s very instrumental in that.
We had a scene that I don’t want to say I enjoyed - I enjoyed it when it was over - very, very tough emotional scene between us in which she basically says, ‘Look, you’re the one who’s been telling me to have faith and now I’m telling you that you have to. You can’t give up.’ That’s the essence of it. When we were shooting it, Liz, as she does often, from take-to-take she’ll do something very different from what she did before or just a little different. She always keeps it fresh. In the middle of this take in which the script said something like, ‘Dad, I’m telling you…,’ she said daddy. She called me daddy and she knows I have a grown daughter, and I think she just knew as a daughter herself that that would get to me - and it did. That’s the kind of generosity in a way that not all actors have. She knew it would affect her to say it that way. Something so simple, the difference between dad and daddy, but daddy is much more vulnerable and it just hit me between the eyes or in the heart or whatever. It’s the kind of thing that Liz does when she knows the scene is difficult and she knows that you’re trying to dig down deep anyway, and she just surprises you with a little thing like that which can make all the difference.
I love her as an acting partner because she’s always so emotionally available. The whole cast is, there’s no slouches in this cast, but playing father and daughter is particularly…it’s an interesting bond. And then with everything that happened with the reveal that Gene had been working for the patriots and the fact that Rachel almost killed him early on in the season. She was willing to put a bomb down a chimney that would have killed him but it turned out he wasn’t there, so there’s a lot of stuff between them.
But the last couple of episodes have some really…I don’t think of the show as an action show and yet it is in part and there’s a terrific sequence that takes place on a train that when I saw it in the script I thought, ‘You’ve got to be joking. On a train? You’re going to take all of this stuff and then put it on a moving train? Do you know how hard that is to shoot?’ To shoot anything on a moving train is to say, ‘Let’s make it 50 times more difficult than if that train isn’t moving,’ because of matching and just getting the camera into place. Our grip team created a 70′ crane that actually the end of it was two railroad cars down from where we were shooting this. It took two big guys - it had these two huge handles on it - these two like bodybuilder grips, they were hanging on this thing and moving it because on the other end of this thing is the camera moving up and moving down depending on what they did. Over to the windows and coming up over the top and seeing Miles and Charlie shoot it out with patriots, it’s so cool. When people ask me what it’s like doing the show I say, ‘Among other things, the eight year old in me that always just wanted to play Cowboys and Indians is like in heaven.’ Here we are on a train taking the shotgun that has real charges in it going, ‘Boom! Boom!’ It’s just that eight year old part of us that I think, for guys at least, made us want to become an actor. It’s so much fun to play in your friend’s house when you’re eight and think, ‘I get to do this for a living.’
There’s a lot of very, very complicated, cool…it’s the combination of action with the interior fight that’s going on within every character that’s really cool. I think it’s going to be really interesting. They won’t let me say anything more about what’s actually going on, but I’m looking forward to it. That’s one of the things that I love is that I look forward to watching this show. I’ve been on shows where I didn’t care that much, but I’m into it. When I got hired I thought I’d watch the last few shows of season one that I wasn’t on. And I did watch the last few and then I went back and watched them all from the beginning. I got into it totally like a fan. When I went to the set the first day to work, I had just watched 22 hours of the show. It’s like, ‘Oh my god, you’re Liz Mitchell. Billy Burke!’ I was like a fan, so it took a while to break that down because I was so excited to meet everybody.”
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Revolution Executive Producer Rockne S. O’Bannon Talks About the End of Season Two - Here
As Revolution cast members Elizabeth Mitchell and Stephen Collins and executive producer Rockne S. O’Bannon were attending the 2014 WonderCon in Anaheim, CA, Eric Kripke was pitching the network ideas for season three of the dramatic sci-fi series. NBC hasn’t confirmed whether the show will return, but Revolution has really found its footing with this second season which O’Bannon promises will go out with a bang.
Rockne S. O’Bannon Interview
What can you say about the rest of the season two episodes?
Rockne S. O’Bannon: “[...]Everything absolutely comes to a head in these last four. Everything for this season and actually for these two seasons, there’s things in the final episode that actually harken back to the beginning of the series. You can almost look at these first two seasons as kind of like the first chapter of an epic saga, and things take a big turn in episode 22, not only for our characters but just in storytelling itself. You have to take a step back and look at it as kind of a grand, mythic saga. We really just turned the corner from chapter one into chapter two. All of the characters, there’s something life-changing for each of them. We saw a kind of hint of that in the last episode with Charlie having to kill Jason. That obviously sets her on a course. But it’s a real curious change in her which you wouldn’t necessarily expect, which is good. And then the episode upcoming, Miles is the one who has this very significant life-changing event. And then Rachel’s kind of our lightning rod for both of our key story threads, one of which is the nanotech and the other is the patriots. And so, yeah, she’s kind of attacked by both sides, by both of the storylines which starts her down quite an unusual path. So, no, they are really just really big episodes.
For me the fun is I wasn’t on the show the first season, I was doing my own show, and then I came on the second season. I was a fan of the show the first season so for me it was like I was a fan who gets to write my own show. It’s so much fun to see the plan for it, to see where it’s all headed.”
Jason is the son of two powerful people. What are the repercussions and how will the tensions shift as we go through the final episodes?
Rockne S. O’Bannon: “Yeah, the number one thing in the first two minutes of the following episode Miles makes the point, ‘You know who we have to get before he gets us is Tom Neville.’ When Tom Neville finds out, obviously there’s at least two levels of dynamic going on. One is he’s lost his son who he’d obviously always had love for him and great hope for him, but took him completely for granted. ‘I’ll hug him when all of this is over.’ Now that’s all gone - that’s part one. Part two is when he finds out who is the one who did it, just his natural instinct for revenge. He’s lost in this season the very thing that drove him initially which was his family. It’s gone. It’s going to make for a really interesting free agent next season, but a free agent who’s coming from a place of real anger.
I think one of the things that to me is exciting is I really enjoyed his journey this season because we got to have a Tom Neville story because he was off on his own. He’s been the hero of his own storyline. But I just always loved Tom Neville as, like you saw in the pilot, the supreme kind of villain character. And so this is an opportunity to really spin him back into that. I just can’t wait to see Giancarlo [Esposito] get his teeth into that.”
The buzz online is that JD Pardo’s character’s not really dead. Is he dead?
Rockne S. O’Bannon: “We have the advantage that we have the nanotech which has proven itself able to bring people back. Having said that, we’re incredibly judicious about not just waving our magic wand and saying someone’s alive. That’s not to say that JD hasn’t returned to the set since his demise, let me put it that way. But, yeah, again where he fits into the puzzle these last four episodes is absolutely and key to spinning us into the next season. That’s all I’m saying.”
Monroe is kind of getting the taste again of wanting to be in power. Does that come up again in these last few episodes? Is there a power struggle?
Rockne S. O’Bannon: “There definitely is. I mean, these last four episodes the patriots make their ultimate play. They really make their last push and it all centers on Willoughby, which has been kind of a punching bag all season and is now just threatened in the most extreme way. But, if our people can take down the patriots, there is an infrastructure that’s been built and prepared for a real long time to then be leaderless. I think Monroe starts to see that because he’s a man with great ambitions to rebuild what he had, but to do that from the ground up again would be incredibly hard. But to do it with the foundation of what the patriots had could be easy. I think, to me, that’s one of the things that’s keeping him in the fold with our folks. Plus, he really is hoping to obviously lure Miles back as a sidekick. They really have a really interesting kind of complex friendship. It’s the deepest friendship relationship that either of them has, but it’s obviously incredibly fraught. It’s good fodder for what we’re doing.”
Is it difficult to find the right balance when figuring out what direction to go with Miles?
Rockne S. O’Bannon: “This season, for us, was really about that, was a man who was pulled in both directions. Obviously, he’s very drawn to protect his family but on the other hand would love to just kind of bow out and not be part of any of it.”
How much does the nanotech play out over these last episodes?
Rockne S. O’Bannon: “Nanotech is huge. It’s been kind of studying mankind, specifically through Aaron. But these last few episodes it starts to kind of suspect that having studied the humankind for a while - and even though we are its creator - it starts to find us sorely lacking. And what exactly does that mean, because it’s not a matter of just destroying humanity but what does it mean and how do you relate to your creator when you begin to suspect that your creator is less than you are? Those two stories which have been building separately but paralleling all season collide essentially at the end.”
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