Jas Player by Paul Simpson
As an actor, Gina Torres has displayed many different facets in her genre roles – from the ass-kicking heroine of Cleopatra 2525 and the no-nonsense Zoe on Firefly, to the seemingly charming (but maggot-faced!) Jasmine in Angel‘s fourth season. We caught up with her during the final week’s shooting on Serenity, the first movie featuring the characters from the short-lived Firefly series…

What’s the filming on Serenity been like?
It’s been wonderful. It’s been really quite extraordinary,  It’s been great fun working with everybody again – we all came back. Joss wrote a brilliant story. Fans of the show will not be disappointed, and people who have not yet discovered the show will not be alienated. It pretty much covers all bases. I was actually amazed that he could do it – it took him a while, but I read the script, and I couldn’t believe that he had done it. He did a beautiful job of walking that tightrope, and I think if people who did not discover the television show come and see the feature, they will go out and buy the DVDs to spend more time with these people.

In a sense, this is the third introduction for the characters, since Joss had to create a second pilot for Firefly with ‘The Train Job’ anyway…
Yes, unfortunately FOX, the network, did not believe that the pilot was flashy enough and did not contain the elements that would grab an audience straight away. They were really on the fence about picking us up as a series at all having viewed the completed pilot, because they didn’t understand it. It wasn’t what they had in mind when they thought of science-fiction – a bunch of good-looking people running around. We weren’t all sleeping with each other! They were trying to figure out how they could sell this, and they just didn’t know. So Tim Minear and Joss Whedon got together over a weekend and wrote ‘The Train Job’ and hoped that they had inundated it with enough of the elements that FOX were looking for to jump-start this television show – and upon reading that script, FOX went ahead and picked up the show.

Did you think that Joss would be able to bring Firefly back?
I know that he fought very hard to get the series moved to another network. He met with quite a few different networks, and at one point, he said, ‘I’m not done with these characters, and if I can figure out a way to present it as a low budget feature, that’s what I’m going to do’, I don’t think that realisation came until perhaps a good seven months after the show was cancelled, and we all had dinner and he said what his plan was. We all thought that would be great, brilliant and right. I always thought that the scope with which he saw the series would lend itself to a feature film and that these characters could be bigger than life. And then he pulled it off. He found Mary Parent at Universal who as passionate about this project as he was, and made it happen. I think we were all relieved – we felt like it was an interrupted haven. We had all started to really reach and hit our stride as a cast, as a writing team. It was all really starting to gel. You can see from the episodes that it just got better and more interesting. It was great to revisit, and put a bow on it. That was more than any of us expected, and we were more than willing and happy and joyful to come back.

Could there be further adventures after this?
Oh yes. There’s room for one more caper! One more heist!

What was the attraction of the part? You’ve done a number of roles within the genre…
Isn’t that odd? It was not my intention. I’ve often felt that I am the Alan Rickman character from Galaxy Quest. ‘I’ve done theatre – how did this happen?’ I was actually quite done with my time in the genre, and my agent called with the outline of the pilot with character descriptions. She said it was for Joss Whedon, and I said I don’t care, I don’t want to do this any more. I wanted to go back and do other things, closer to what I was trained to do. She said ‘I think you should read this’. It was about eight pages long, and I read the character description of this woman, who was engaged in these very complicated relationships. She had a husband, and she was second-in-command to a captain that she was undyingly devoted to, and committed to, but there was no sexual aspect to it. Mal and Zoe understood each other in a way that Zoe and Wash could never understand each other and the reverse was also true. The human aspect of that, and the emotional challenges of that was what ultimately sold me. Then I thought, ‘Hey, what else is going on in this world?’ It was so unlike anything else I had ever envisioned or read, that it kept me turning the page, and finally at the very end of the synopsis was a sentence that simply read, ‘In this future, there are no aliens or mutants…’ I thought, okay, that’s it. It’s us. It’s human people, it’s survival at a basic level. I thought that was great. I met with Joss and read with him and the rest is history. I think he said that he thought that I was his Zoe when I walked in the room, and that makes me happy!

How long was there between finishing on Firefly and starting on Angel?
A couple of months. Firefly was ‘Merry Christmas, you’re cancelled’ and I think I got the call for Jasmine around March.

How was Jasmine presented to you?
They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. It was very funny. I started getting these calls; Jeff Bell, one of the head writers on Angel, called me directly, and I think I also spoke with Tim Minear as well. Part of this was fuelled because Tim wrote a few of the episodes on Firefly, and there was one episode in particular, ‘The Message’, where it looked like Mal and Zoe might have had a date. We’re at a carnival, picking stuff up. I had always wanted one scene where you see Zoe just completely femmed out, with a dress or a skirt, and her hair down. Just not how you’re used to seeing her – it could happen, on a day off. It would shock the audience – Oh wow, there really is a woman in there! They fitted me with a skirt and a really beautiful top, and I showed on set – and both Tim and Joss went, ‘We can’t do it. It isn’t going to work – you and Mal picking up this coffin with you in a skirt. Sorry, you’re beautiful…’ so they brought out out my regular costume, and I pouted for a few minutes for their benefit.
    So when they called me about Jasmine, they pitched as having all the attributes that we weren’t allowed to show with Zoe! ‘She has great, sexy clothes, her hair is always down. She speaks several languages, we might get you to sing a song, and she’s worshipped by the world. She has all these acolytes…’ So when I show up on my first day at work, and the cast kneels before me, I thought, ‘Alright, we’re even!’ Of course she ends up being evil, but how delicious for me!

What did you think of her as a character?
What was wonderful about playing Jasmine – and when you play anybody you have to firmly believe what your goal is, what your reason for being is – was that she believed with every fibre of her being that she was doing the best thing for the world. Everybody was enamoured and happy and loving each other and living together – okay, so people get eaten along the way… What a commentary on world events! We sacrifice our young every day for the sake of peace – this is what we have to do.
    I thought her fate was hilarious. It’s like the classic Bill Cosby joke – ‘I’m your father, I brought you into this world, I can take you out!’ A fist through the head… well alright. The gig was up, she really had nowhere to go after that, it all sort of went wrong. It was fine!

You’ve done a lot of athletic roles – is that something you enjoy or is it something that comes with the territory?
It certainly comes with the territory. There is a therapeutic aspect to it, pummelling people and what-not. It’s fun. When you reach the end of a physical scene like that, whether it’s a fight or running down the hallways, there’s a great sense of accomplishment. Nobody got hurt. There’s just as much acting involved in a fight sequence because you have to see those punches, and really make people believe that there’s damage being done. That’s challenging because you’re really trying not to hurt anybody, and you’re trying not to make a whole lot of contact. It’s tricky, so I take quite a bit of pride in the fact that I can do it, and do it well, but it is exhausting.
    How did this happen? How did I arrive at this place where people have come to know me as this strong action chick? It’s very odd but it’s fun, and liberating. Most importantly, it gives young women a sense of strength and emancipation, and it speaks to the possibility of a life outside of their own. I think that’s what makes active women, physical women, so attractive to the world. It’s a fantasy to some degree. Who doesn’t want to witness that kind of strength?

Will you look for something markedly different once Serenity is over?
Always. Always. I’m an actor so I look for things that I haven’t done yet. I look for ways in which I can grow and hone my craft. Every situation is a learning experience and so that’s what I look to do. I’m looking to go back on the stage. I would love to do a musical again. I would love to play a mother, somebody’s wife – someone that doesn’t carry a gun! All these things. There’s a lot to do out there. I think part of the reason why I’ve been cast in the roles that I have been is my physicality – I’m quite tall and quite strong, so they go, ‘Okay, Gina looks like she can kick some butt, so let’s put her in this role.’ But I’ve always tried to play these women with many layers so you know that there’s a lot more going on in there than just getting the bad guy, and I hope that comes through.

Catching Up With… by Tara Dilullo
There may have been demons, vampires and monsters aplenty on Angel. But only one human villain cut them all down to size with one glorious, steely-eyed glare – Lilah Morgan, played by Stephanie Romanov. Lilah was the nastiest legal shark at Wolfram & Hart and she knew how to work an evil plan to her every advantage. While she never did best Angel in their ongoing battle of good versus evil, she sure did have fun messing up his goodie-goodie plans. Angel Magazine touches base with Stephanie to talk about the lawyer that everybody loved to hate.