Ask Scottish actor Laura Fraser about the future she concocted for her character on Breaking Bad the executive-slash-black-marketeer Lydia Rodarte Qualye while waiting for each new script, and youll get a modest goal in reply: To stay alive a little longer. Fraser says it with a laugh, indicative of the thrill she gets from the high-tension scenes her neurotic newcomer has been subjected to so far. Its also a sign that this crucial new player is as much a mystery to the woman who plays her as she is to us. Yet that hasnt stopped Fraser from turning her into an alternately magnetic and pathetic presence on the show, able to hold her own alongside the compelling core cast.
Ive seen the first four episodes of Season Five now
Youve seen more than me, then! [Laughs] Im dying to see more. I dont have TV set up here yet, so we have to wait till Monday night to watch it on Amazon.
They really threw you right into the deep end, didnt they?
I know! [Laughs] I had no idea. I knew from the audition scenes that she was quite an interesting, certainly imaginative, quite impulsive character, very unlike anything Id had the opportunity to play before. I knew she was going to be highly strung, but I became completely highly strung doing this role. Like, fuuuck! The writings just astonishing. Its an invigorating experience, working on Breaking Bad, Ill say that.
Walter Whites 10 Lowest Lows on Breaking Bad
By my count youve had four scenes in the season so far, and in every single one of them youre convinced youre either about to get arrested or killed.
Yeah, although I feel Lydia would be just as high strung if someone told her they didnt have what she wanted on the menu.
Which literally happened.
Yeah, thats right, actually!
Breaking Bad has a smaller, tighter ensemble than a lot of comparable TV dramas. How does it feel to be added as a main player this late in the game?
Its strange experience, being an outsider coming in when theyve been together for years. At first I felt, Im an interloper. Its tightly knit family what am I doing here? But the cast were all so welcoming, and its such a lovely crew. They were incredibly warm. After wed done the first scene, I was like, Okay, Im in. Its alright. I was pretty nervous, I have to say. I didnt have to act nervous for the first scene I was shooting. It helped me along.
The audience had to hit the ground running with Lydia, too. We really had no chance to get to know her under normal circumstances, since right away shes in such dire straits. That has to create a lot of pressure on you to win the audience over.
One relief was that I didnt have to worry about making her likeable. Shes so clever and bright, and yet so odd. I liked her, but sometimes she can be such an asshole that she just makes me laugh to play her, even when Im about to die. Its a trip.
Lydia greatly expands the canvas of the show. Shes our entry point into Madrigal, which takes the whole operation to a literally global level. Were you conscious of your role as a way of broadening the story?
I was trying to figure out storylines in my head, but I didnt have a clue. Where is this going? Where is she from? What happened? Theres no answers. Even on set, people are just giving you their guesses as to where they think Lydias come from. You hazard a guess from the writing, and each episode, as you get it, I was able to gather a bit information and go, Oh, well, Ill throw that out. Each episode that Ive read, as Ive received it a few days before shooting it, I was like, Holy fuck! Id never see it coming. Its constantly surprising.
I find it refreshing how Vince Gilligan will say, No, we really havent made our mind up about this or that. So many shows feel the need to insist that they know exactly where theyre going at all times, and thats never been the case with Breaking Bad, to its benefit.
Yeah, youre absolutely right about that. I do feel that on set theres this heightened sense of urgency, because I dont know whether Im going to live through the next scene.
Thats how we in the audience feel, too.
Its almost like people are disappointed if no one dies that episode. [Laughs]
The thing I kept circling back to when thinking about Lydia is that despite all her nervous energy, shes still the lynchpin of a billion-dollar drug empire, and a successful executive in her own right. There must be something to her we havent seen yet.
Im under the official secret pact here. Ive got nothin to give you. How do you talk about it without talking about it? Beyond that episode, without revealing anything . . . you may, or may not, be on to something there. [Laughs]
Very politic of you. I wanted to talk to you specifically about the scene in Lydias house, when Mike is about to kill her. Lydias a character I had no prior relationship with in fact, in her only scene before that she came across as resolutely horrible so to suddenly find myself empathizing with her so powerfully was both moving and upsetting. What kind of effect did it have on you after the cameras stop rolling?
After I do anything like that, I get an adrenaline buzz. When Im doing the scene, my heart . . . physically, I feel a semblance of what I think I would actually feel in that situation. Even as a kid I would always imagine horrible circumstances in which I would find myself in my head, and imagine how I would feel, and act it out a bit for myself, because I was a bit of a freak like that. I love doing things like that, and I get a real buzz from it afterwards. But I also worry about the things that I use. For example, in that scene, the little girl was my little girl in my head, because the girl who was acting the part of my daughter had the same birthday as my own daughter. I sometimes worry about using the truth, thinking thats a bad omen. But I think Id do that anyway, even if I wasnt an actor imagining horrible scenarios, how Id feel if this person died or that person died, or torture. Horrible stuff goes on in my head sometimes. So I try not to worry about the worrying. Ultimately I get a buzz from doing it.
Id like to commend you on your fluent German.
Oh, God. They asked me in the audition, and I did a tape. It was an email: Do you speak German? I was like, Absolutely, yeah . . . I speak some German. Ive done it in school, when I was 12, like I learned Ich heise Laura. Basic German. So I thought, Oh no, whats coming? It was corporatespeak in German. It was a nightmare. It took me days to learn that little paragraph. Now I bore my family with it. Its my party trick.
So much of Breaking Bad revolves around little details, and in the case of you in this episode, it was the mismatching shoes. I could feel your discomfort with every step.
For a control freak like Lydia, the self-disgust that she felt for making such a foolish mistake like that. Its all falling apart!
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar