Brenda Strong – The 100

By: Lisa Steinberg

Q) You were a desperate housewife, the wife of an oil tycoon and now an ice queen. Talk about the rich body of work you have had throughout the years.

A) I feel so incredibly blessed to be able to embody what I feel are really interesting women, definitely diverse. There are common themes I find in them, but mostly if you compare Mary Alice against Nia you’d go, “What?” They are not even the cut from the same cloth. So, I’m really lucky to have had such diversity in my career and I feel like often times we kind of get typecast. This opportunity to step into a very raw fierce leadership role in Nia was something that I was actually asking for. I remember it was over Christmas 2014 I sat down with my representation and said, “This is what I want.” I said I wanted to play a queen and be a part of a serial sci-fi series. I kind of outlined my appetite of what I wanted to play to make me feel challenged. Jason (Rothenberg) offered me this role and I was like, “Oh my gosh! You just ticked off two or three of my goals for this year.” So, I was very excited to join this incredibly talented cast and excited to be a part of something with such extraordinary production value on television. I think CW is knocking it out of the part and Mark Pedowitz, in particular, is the leader of that vision. I just feel really blessed to be able to challenge myself in this way. I loved having to go through the makeup and hair process and discover who Nia was. It took a while to figure it out, but with Jason and the makeup/costume department we really found her. It was exciting to me to explore why she is the way she was.

Q) Do you think Nia’s problem or her agenda with Lexa is solely about power or an underlying personal issue?

A) The more underlying personal question is one to direct towards Jason. He may have a more complex history than I was privy too. I do know her main conflict is with Lexa and she wants to remove her from power and take the power for herself. She is a fierce smart cunning leader and I think ultimately if you look at the thematic overlay of the show it is all about survival, safety, revenge and loyalty. I think Nia really wants to do the right thing for her people. Living in a colder climate I am sure they have a problem running out of resources and she sort of realized that if she doesn’t take over more productive land than her people may die. So, I think it is absolutely a necessity for her to try to take over the area that Lexa (Alycia Debnam-Carey) is kind of in charge of. I also do think it is power and there may be something more driving underneath. Ultimately, I think her main goal is to protect her people so they can survive.

Q) The culminating scene of episode 304 is a huge battle. What was it like for you to sit above this big arena and watch this fight scene unfold?

A) There are elements that harken back to civilizations that we have had in the past. When I first stepped into the arena…I’ve been to Rome and I’ve seen the Coliseum. So much of the production design harkens back to a very brutal, not too distant past as human beings in history. There was a sense of brutality, excitement, fierce moments that you start to kind of…It’s like when you get blood in your mouth…there is something that is inside of us as humans that you may be “civilized,” but given the right circumstances we could become uncivilized quite quickly. So, it was exciting for me to play a character that was much more in tune with that animal quality of survival of the fittest. It was an exciting episode, for me, all over for many reasons: from an acting perspective, a socio political perspective and from the epic nature of what it represented from a historical sociological exploration of loyalty. All of those things! It was a very, very exciting thing to be a part of it.

Q) Do you think Nia’s kind of thirst for power leaves her a bit naïve or vulnerable in the end of the episode?

A) Ultimately, I can’t speak to the end of the episode, but I think when anyone is myopically focused on the destruction of another it creates vulnerability and that speaks volumes about what is happening currently in our world. Whenever there is a positon that you take as the righteous position you create a vulnerability and that is beautifully explored through this characters’ arc. So, yes, I always think that if you have great strength you have to have great vulnerability because otherwise it’s not interesting for an actor to play. She is extremely vulnerable, which is why she has to be as strong as she is and vice versa. Her vulnerability makes her strong and her strength makes her vulnerable. It’s just really fun to have an opportunity to play a character that seemingly on the outside is so impenetrable and then to find out even she is vulnerable to life and circumstances. As my aunt says, “None of us get out of this alive,” and everyone in this environment is fighting for survival. It is kind of survival of the fittest and a lot of those alliances are very tenuous. Who can you trust? That’s the underlying theme of this entire series is, who can you trust, who has integrity not only with themselves, but with others. I think it is an exciting landscape to explore and I think Jason is doing a great job of exploring it with these characters and these particular arcs. I do want to call out Dorothy Fortenberry who wrote the episode. She was there for the episode and making sure everything was in line. She was a great resource for me and it is always great when you can work with the writer of your episode because it makes everything so much more rich because they have an eye for the storyline coming next and it informs the work to be so much more specific. It is a ride. Do. Not. Blink. I’m so excited! The editing is amazing. It’s a tour de force of talent. I can’t wait to see it all cut together and see how it is done. I’m very excited for the next episode because I think it is so interesting on a personal and epic level for the show overall. For certainly Clarke’s (Eliza Taylor) character! I think there is a lot of soul searching that she has to do on the show, particularly in this episode.

Q) Now that you have played an ice queen, is there another challenge you see for yourself?

A) I would love to go into outerspace. I would love to do something that has to do with another realm, whether it be Star Wars, Marvel or mythological. With my stature and my background, I learned how to do broad sword in college. I was a dancer. I have a lot of skills that would lend to a more epic environment and thankfully Jason was smart enough to intuit that. So, I would love to play on a grander scale with a character that I could really develop over time. It would be so much fun for me to kind of use that action adventure epic Greek God in me. I’d love to take a more Shakespearean viewpoint in my career. A little less small town street and a little more global. Costumes please!

Q) The costume you wore for “The 100” was incredible. Talk about the process in developing the look.

A) It was so interesting because it really was an evolution. The first thing I did was to go the costume department where they put on this leather coat that had these long wing like arms. They found these pants and they deconstructed them and put ice clamps on to the pants. So, even my clothing became weapons. Then, they started layering things with fur and leather. I felt like I was wearing an animal when I was walking around, which lends yourself to feeling pretty badass if you think about it. You can’t walk through a doorjam because you have to kind of go in sideways. You think, “I’m taking up some space here. I have to own it!” The boots certainly make you walk differently than if you were walking in high heels. To be able to feel the ground in a way because of the boots they gave me it informed the way my character moved. Then, as far as the makeup and hair, it was quite an evolution. I think we played with tests for about thirty-two hours. I kid you not. We would try different things and then send them to Jason. We’d get feedback and try more. Thank God we had a little bit of time to develop her and they had already kind of established the markers of what ice nation people looked like so we could build off of that, but it really was an evolution. If anyone could see in my phone, I have little photographs where I’d think, “Oh that’s cool.” I loved the evolution and then you get to the Queen Nia we eventually landed now. I think if we had more time we would have kept playing because it was so much fun. It was definitely one of those things that is exhausting if you don’t have time, but exciting if you do. Tanya Howard, who is the department head, did my makeup. She has the patience of a saint and kept trying things. It’s such a creative process and I have so much respect for her because she kept finding innovative ways to invoke what an ice queen would look like – not your typical queen, but something very raw and real.

Q) What have you taken away from your experiences on “The 100?”

A) I think that what I took away from the show is how much respect that I have for any creator of a series that can maintain their vision with integrity. I think Jason has such a commitment to really playing full out. The team he has assembled from the directors he has to the DP’s to the production designers to the art directors to the music…the music is so vital. To be a part of something that you actually respect and would watch it, whether you were on it or not, is always a gift. I feel the thing I took away most was an appetite of wanting to play very fierce, interesting, leadership women who stretch and force me to use more of myself than I normally would in a non costumed environment. There are different challenges to every role, but being able to be a part of such a rich textured environment was such a gift to me. I really enjoyed playing her as long as they would let me. It’s pretty cool (no pun intended). Also, learning another language was a real challenge and something I enjoyed doing. Being able to learn about that construct was good. It kind of evoked a little bit of history because I was a voice major in college. So, I ended up learning a bunch of different languages to sing in. So, it was nice that I had that phonetic background to fall back on.