Aaron Stanford, Amanda Schull, Emily Hampshire & Terry Matalas – 12 Monkeys

By starrymag | April 18, 2016

Q)  I read that there’s going to be a lot more time travel in this season of 12 Monkeys. What kind of time periods are we looking at? What would (we think it would be)?  

Terry Matalas:  This season, we really kind of jump into the wish-fulfillment aspect of it where we go to – many times, we go to the 40s, the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, and we really embrace the nostalgia of those places. It’s been a lot of fun.

Q) Emily, you’re the only one that can kind of keep track of all of the timelines all of the time. Can you talk a little bit about it?

Emily Hampshire: She’s like the living embodiment of our show runner Terry Matalas because I don’t know how he keeps everything in his head timeline-wise but he does. So thank God I don’t have to really do that for real. But I like that aspect of Jennifer a lot because I felt like in Season 1 that there was something about her that I felt wasn’t just crazy, that knew more of the truth of what was going on, and then Season 2 you find out she’s much more connected to the methodology of the show than we thought. So I didn’t really have to keep everything in my head. I just had to say the lines. So it was easy for me but kind of brilliant thing of Terry to create.

Q) Are you able to wrap your head around everything that you’re saying? Or do you spend a lot of the day going, “I have no idea what I just said.”

Aaron Stanford: No, we are able to keep it in our head. There’s a really long complicated writer’s process that has to happen a long time before we shoot it. So by the time we do go before cameras, we have, we know it all.

Emily Hampshire: I don’t know what I’m saying. It does take me a while to kind of break down Jennifer whenever I have a rant or something. I have to figure out what her real – what her logic is in saying all these things, like ‘horsemen of the apocalypse’, and just like these (ranting) things.

Aaron Stanford: wonderful dialog that can often get confusing from a scientific standpoint. But we have some wonderful resources at our fingertips with Terry and the other writers who are willing to answer questions and hash things out and help guide us through some challenging bits that they have very thoroughly researched.

Emily Hampshire: Oh yes. And my point is that I can’t do it without like sort of knowing what I’m talking about. So it takes a while to do that. And then when I do it, know what I’m talking about, then I can do it.

Q) What is so cool about this show and because you have the luxury of time travel, you can kind of redo the choices you’re making in life. But could you comment about those choices and how they will play into Season 2. It sounds like there’s a lot more that they have to make this year.

Amanda Schull: I think for Dr. Railly, she doesn’t have as many choices available at her disposal by de facto that she’s now living in 2044, which is – she has limited amenity at her disposal on how she can go about accomplishing the mission. She has now – she now needs to rely on a very different skillset than she had in Season 1. But Cassie is nothing – is not adaptive. And she is very capable of succeeding in environments that a lot of people wouldn’t be able to thrive in.

Aaron Stanford: And there’s always the moral choices that she has to face, which is, you know how far is she willing to go now? You know, how much of her humanity is she giving up for this mission? Yes. Cole has to face a lot of moral choices this season as well. At the beginning of Season 2, he’s really a changed man and his world view has broadened and his perspective is a lot wider. And he really wants to go about things in a much different fashion than he did in Season 1. And he has come up – he comes to begin a lot of choices that he has to make. He’s put in situations where he might have to take a life or do something violent and he has to make a choice whether or not he wants to engage in that behavior.

Emily Hampshire: Season 1 we know that there’s this old Jennifer who is this wise woman who has this army of women. And so how does young crazy Jennifer become this wise old woman? And I think that a lot of the journey in Season 2– that Jennifer is really kind of discovering herself and then growing up and becoming who she is kind of destined to be.

Q) Continuing talking a bit about how the scope is changing this season, it’s like it was really a bold new to kind of move away from, not completely, but kind of shift the focus from the virus to time and kind of dealing with that. So it’s almost a new, like a big new part of the show, I guess. It has changed a lot. So Terry, can you talk about kind of the idea to shift to that? And then the rest of you, kind of how it’s going to affect your characters in this season?

Terry Matalas: It was always the plan since Season 1. It’s the reason we introduced the Army of the 12 Monkeys, the way they are, and have their connection to time travel, their ambitions to use the machine, the witness seems to know the future, and there’s this thing, the Red Forest, and it’s house made of cedar and pine. So we’ve always kind of set these things up to be part of the show. And we do get back to the virus in the episode you haven’t seen yet, that that does – it is a component of the show but it is part of a much bigger conspiracy. But we never thought it would be a status-filling show to go from lab to lab every week looking for virus. It’s not – we’re not the time travel show and not the virus show. So it was something we knew from day one we had to do.

Q) And then, like I said, the actors, can you kind of talk a bit about how it’s like affecting your character this season? Because obviously goals are changing.

Aaron Stanford: And I think also, it knocks us completely off-balance because suddenly we have to question everything that we thought we knew. We thought we were coming to some sort of a solution. We thought we were finding answers to some of these riddles. And once we got close, they all ended up spinning off into infinite new questions and riddles. So it’s just – it makes the journey that much a longer and more difficult.

Amanda Schull: I think the tag theme on Aaron that it – having all these other questions asked, and all these other puzzles and riddles introduced, it opens up our world and our scope and our capabilities, and it gives us a lot of freedom, and it gives us so much more story that we can expand upon. And as an actor that’s so exciting to not be able to predict where or when you’ll be from one week to the next, and to have each script be its own entity, its own world that you can just dive into from episode to episode, what a beautiful gift to be able to be comfortable in the bones of your character but then get to expand on this incredible methodology and go on a journey every seven days. It’s a really nice treat.

Emily Hampshire: I mean for Jennifer, it’s definitely — the virus and stuff in Season 1 was something outside of her that she was kind of a part of. And Season 2, I think this is the way into Jennifer and how she is really connected with the methodology of the show in such a much more profound way than we thought before and that she is connected deeply into time.

Q) I don’t want to say that Cassie and Cole are strange but they’re not in the same place for quite a bit into Season 2. And one of the things that I noticed that was so profound is in Season 1 they’re much more tactile with each other. It’s not unusual for them to touch each other at least put the hand on the arm, and things like that. And we go for a little while where they don’t even touch each other, like it’s almost a physical barrier between them.  Was that something that you guys worked out that you would try to sort of physically convey that they just in a different place with each other? Or was that all written and you were just kind of leading from the script with that? Because it was very powerful that I just kept waiting like, “Touch her arm,” or your know, “Do something.” And there was just nothing there. Was that hard to do? And what kind of went into that? 

Aaron Stanford: Well, that’s an interesting observation. I think you’re absolutely right. But it’s not something that, at least I actively thought about or planned out. I think it was just sort of a natural thing that happened given where you find the two characters at the beginning of Season 2. There’s that great inversion of the characters where, you know, Cole has come around to her way of thinking, and suddenly she is radically changed, and she comes around to his way of thinking, who he was before he met here. And they end up diametrically opposed. So yes, there is that tension and that animosity. And I’m sure that sort of manifest in a physical way.

Amanda Schull: think Aaron is right in that, you know, we’re mentally and physically worlds apart as these characters begin second season. And for the two of them to get back on the same page, it’s going to require some time, some understanding, and I think a lot of patience and joint mission going for both of them. And I do think it’s an interesting observation.

Q) Season 2 has many different character interactions that we haven’t seen in Season 1. Can you just go through what viewers can expect going into Season 2 between this new character interactions?

Aaron Stanford: I think there are some surprising dynamics. I think there are some characters that you would think don’t like each other, could never get along, will get along; and some characters that have famously got along are going to be at odd. It’s an amazing cast. And they all have great chemistry with each other in different ways. So it’s fun to pair them up.

Q) But in your preparations as for your own self and what your characters lack and everything, your characters have a lot of times nearly given up but always find a way to sort of pick themselves up and keep going.  And I was just wondering to know what drives them, in your minds, to do that? Why do you think they’re not going to give up and they don’t give up? 

Amanda Schull: I will say for Cassie, I think that she has this endless quest to solve. I think that comes from being a doctor and her need to heal. I think that she wants to understand things and she’s spurred by this need to be educated on things, and then solve the problem. And I think that that’s part of the reason why she agreed to go on this mission with Cole from – starting from the very first episode of the very first season with the pilot. She was intrigued and she was willing to take that leap of faith two years later to meet him at the hotel because she needed to know.

Aaron Stanford: I think Cole’s motivations changed radically. In the beginning, it’s sort of his lack of hope that gives him strength. He wants to be done with it. He wants to go, complete his mission, kill this guy, and erase himself. And through his experiences, he changes his entire world view. And discovers help, and he values life, and he wants to cling to it, and he wants to – he wants other people to share that same feeling that he has. So, in terms of motivation and hope, it’s a very interesting journey for him.

Q) For Emily, I’m just curious, what version of Jennifer do you enjoy getting to play most? Your kind of crazy side, or did you like getting to play her more normal side as well this season?

Emily Hampshire: I enjoy the most about Jennifer is that I do get to play all the sides of her and all the different versions of her. And I love that each episode or each new kind of version of Jennifer is, it reminds me of like being a teenager when you’re trying on roles to figure out who you are. And I love getting to go through all that might – it’s weird because when I think I don’t like one, I then by the end of episode end up, or later on in the season end up falling in love with that. Or like even playing old Jennifer, first I was kind of like I wasn’t sure. I like to play young Jennifer better because I was used to it. And then playing old Jennifer, I felt like I didn’t know what I’m doing. And then ultimately in the end I ended up loving old Jennifer so much. So I really can’t pick one. And when you say like seeing Jennifer to me, that’s – there’s always just Jennifer pretending to be other part of herself.

Q) Can you guys talk about Deacon being part of the team and kind of how that’s affecting everyone quite a bit this season.

Amanda Schull: I think Deacon’s role is a real wrench in some plans that a lot of different characters thought they had figured it out.  Ultimately, I think he makes – well, I don’t want to say the biggest, but a very large – he makes a very large impact on Cassie’s character. And this is because she didn’t know him at all. She has no frequencies, ideas of who he is or what he’s done. And she’s thrusting to this world where he is very comfortable and very capable. And he provides her a bit of an education.

Aaron Stanford: He has a history with Deacon and I think he feels he knows him better than anybody else on the team at this point. And he doesn’t trust him and knows that relationships with him usually lead to no good.                          That being said, there are some – they do have some interesting moments with each other where there might be some sides to Deacon that are revealed that Cole was not formally aware of.

 

 

*CONFERENCE CALL*