I finally have a bit of a breather and some time to get back to posting Sci-Fi Blasts From The Past. Again, these are interviews that previously appeared in print only and never on-line. Today, my chat with the lovely and talented Elizabeth Henstridge from Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Enjoy!
A brilliant bio-chemist with not one but two PhDs and who specializes in human as well as alien life sciences, Jemma Simmons was trained to look at a problem in a very straightforward manner. However, since becoming one of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., she has had to widen her scientific approach in order to help come up with less-than-traditional solutions to decidedly unusual problems. Jemma and her fellow agents, including her work partner and best friend Leo Fitz, have risked their lives more than once to save humankind from threats posed by the terrorist group Hydra, while also dealing with the growing emergence of Inhumans (ordinary humans who possess a dormant alien gene that, when activated, gives them extraordinary abilities).
Sadly, no good deed goes unpunished, and at the very end of the two-part second season Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. finale S.O.S., Jemma is pulled into an ancient Kree monolith and transported through a portal to another planet. It was quite a surprise not only to the S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, but also the actress who plays her, Elizabeth Henstridge.
“I read the script for S.O.S. without any prior warning, so when I turned to the last page and read what happened, I was shocked,” recalls Henstridge. “However, no one had really told me that anything bad was going to happen, so I took that as a very good sign that maybe my character was still alive. I had no idea, though, until we returned for season three what happened to Jemma and where she was. That was true of the rest of the cast; none of us knew what was going on, because at the end of last year we had no idea if there was even going to be a season three.
“So it was a mix of shock and excitement for me, and the thing is, as a lover of this show, I want it to be the best it can be. As such, it was also one of those moments where I thought, ‘Well, if this is the end for Jemma, then what a wonderful tag for the show and what great drama we can get out of this.’ Of course, I was also hoping that I’d still be on the show, but you never know. At some point your time could be up and there’s nothing you can do about it. I just think what happened with Jemma was pretty cool, which is why the tag is such a brilliant mechanism for drama, and I was quite flattered to be involved.”
Jemma was marooned for six months on a primarily sunless, desert-like planet, but she was not alone. She eventually encountered astronaut Will Daniels, (Dillon Casey), part of a scientific team that traveled through the portal in 2001, at a time when NASA possessed the monolith. Will was the only surviving member of the NASA mission, the rest having died after being driven mad by an evil entity living on the planet. Despite a somewhat uneasy first meeting, he and Jemma began working together to stay alive. The two subsequently developed feelings for one another, and Jemma was determined that she and Will would one day return home. Their experiences on the planet are chronicled in the third season Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episode 4,722 Hours.
“I felt incredibly lucky for the opportunity to be challenged with such an episode,” enthuses Henstridge,”but it wasn’t just with the acting side of things. It was a tremendous undertaking for everyone involved, including the director as well as the writers because the same [creative] mechanisms used in previous episodes didn’t apply here. Those templates were kind of out the window, and we had to figure a number of things out as we went along. The continuity alone was insane and brought with it all these challenges to the entire cast and crew. It was like we were all on this amazing rollercoaster ride that everyone was totally invested in and up for, but at the same time also very much afraid of.
“Funnily enough, that ‘fear’ brought us all together, and we just got on with the job. Filming-wise, we moved more quickly along than I’ve ever moved before. We shot a lot of scenes in the desert, where it was between 105 and 110 degrees [Fahrenheit] and there was no shade, which was a major asset acting-wise. Sometimes you wonder with a scene how you are going to get to some of the emotional points, but in this case you simply got there organically. Naturally, it’s nowhere near the same as it would be in real life, but there were times when I felt scared and exhausted. So the kind of rigors of filming meant that with a lot of the moments, I really didn’t have to do much acting.
“I also was very fortunate to work on this episode with Dillion Casey, who faced a huge challenge in that he was new to the show and its crew. I’ve been working with this crew for three seasons now and they’re like my family. So when Dillion joined us, we all wanted to make him feel very welcome and safe. He hit the ground running and did a fantastic job. It was a tricky character for Dillion to play, and there were a few different ways that he could have taken it. This show is really fast-paced, and for someone new coming in, it can sometimes be tough because we’re all in the stride of it now, Dillion kept up, though, and I think he’s really pleased with how the episode turned out.
“That’s the other thing, you film something and then you have no idea what it will end up looking like. We shot 4,722 Hours during the daytime, but in the episode itself, day plays for night and everything was tinted blue. So there were a great many unknowns going into it. With the CGI [computer-generated image] work, Mark Kolpak [visual effects supervisor] created the most incredible moons as well as landscapes when there needed to be more landscape. Again, everyone played such a huge part in the making of this episode, and I’m just so relieved that it was well-received. Naturally, our week-to-week episodes are the heart and soul of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., but it’s really nice to get to do more of an experimental episode, and for fans to then enjoy watching it.”
Despite the hopelessness of Jemma’s situation, Fitz (Iain De Caestecker) never gives up on her. He eventually discovers how to reopen the portal and, with help from his friends and colleagues, manages to do so. In season three’s Purpose in the Machine. Fitz travels through the portal and rescues Jemma. It is no surprise that being off-world for so long has affected her physically as well as mentally, and while grateful to be home again, Jemma will never quite be the same. That is not necessarily a “bad” thing, as Henstridge explains.
“This experience has definitely made her more worldly, no pun intended,” jokes the actress. “Jemma has been through a lot and survived it all, so she no longer has this kind of naïve glint to her. For me, there’s an acting challenge that comes with that, in that I don’t want to lose the essence of who she is. Jemma is certainly stronger than before and more streetwise, but deep down she’s still the same person. So this season I’ve had to find the balance between my character having her little eyebrow-raising or eye-rolling moments, and her then being very strong and very secure in herself.
“What hasn’t been a challenge and will never be a challenge is working off Iain, who plays Fitz. Whenever I have scenes with him is when I really find my character. Jemma and Fitz do need each other, and I need Iain if I’m to be her, so to speak. If I’m having a difficult moment or not quite sure how to play something, I can always speak to Iain about it. He and I will then run through the scene a few times and find different moments to play off of. That’s true of our entire cast, but Fitz and Jemma are two people who definitely have something special and kind of make each other in a way.”
The evil entity that threatened Jemma and Will was, in fact, an ancient Inhuman that was banished through the portal. Hydra was originally established to retrieve the entity for the organization’s own agenda. One of Hydra’s leader’s, Gideon Malick (Powers Boothe], holds Jemma hostage and forces Fitz to accompany Grant Ward (Brett Dalton) back to the planet to track down the creature. In the season three mid-year finale Maveth, it is revealed that Will has been taken over by the entity, and when Fitz kills him, the creature transfers into Ward, who has already been killed by Coulson (Clark Gregg). Unbeknownst to our heroes, the now-possessed Ward returns to Earth, as does Fitz and Coulson. Will’s death, while sad, actually provided Henstridge with the chance to further strengthen the bond between Jemma and Fitz.
“Going into season three, Jemma obviously had a secret that she had hidden from Fitz about Will,” notes the actress. “She was carrying around so much guilt from putting Fitz through the pain of her disappearing as well as her falling in love with someone else, and then coming back home to a world that confused her for a while. Then, however, Jemma began confiding in Fitz about this other life that she’d lived and this other person that she loved. In doing so, Jemma sees Fitz’s understanding and compassion as well as unconditional love for her, and starts to fall more in love with him. She never fell out of love with Fitz, though. She just got taken away from him for a bit.
“It was so wonderful to be able to play, or at least try to play, all the different emotional layers that the writers put in there. Then, of course, in the mid-season finale, Jemma realizes that Will didn’t make it and he isn’t coming back. She knows that he must be dead, because Fitz would never have come back without him. In that moment, Jemma understands that she has lost Will forever, but also that she still loves Fitz. That was a tough scene to play, and I hope that that came across to the viewers. We’ll see this in later episodes, but Jemma isn’t mad at Fitz. Yes, she’s devastated about what happened to Will, but she’s also grateful that Fitz made it back, and that Ward seemingly didn’t.”
The evil entity’s return to Earth is sure to be just one of the many problems facing Jemma Simmons and her fellow Agents of S.H.E.I.L.D. in the latter half of season three. Henstridge is unable to divulge any spoilers about what the future holds, but the excitement in her voice hints that it is going to take fans on a wild ride.
“I think we’ve grown stronger and stronger with every episode, and each season I feel like we come back in a different league to the previous one,” says the actress. “I never thought I’d want to play a character for this long, but the writing is just so brilliant and the storylines are, in my opinion, just so rich, that I care about all the other characters as much as I do Simmons. So when I read a new script, I’m interested in finding out what’s happening with everyone, and constantly surprised and shocked at all the twists and turns. I’m here for the ride just like everyone else watching. I just happen to be a few episodes ahead.
“As an actor, you spend so much time auditioning and 99% of the time you don’t get the job, but when you do, and when you get to dig deep into a character, it’s the best thing. I thank my lucky stars every time I drive onto the S.H.I.E.L.D. lot because it’s exactly where I want to be. If you’re passionate about something and you get to do it every day, you’ve hit the jackpot. I mean, talk to me in 20 years and I might feel differently,” says Henstridge with a chuckle, “but after three seasons, I’m so very thrilled to still be here.”
Steve Eramo
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