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Living on a fault line- Shiri Interview
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Thanks to Jaymz for sending this in! NZ Herald - Saturday, February 19 Living on a fault line The X-Files meets Dawson’s Creek in Roswell, the latest high-school drama to spirit our teenagers away. Frances Grant makes contact with the star. Journal entry for Saturday, February 19: Four days ago, midway through an interview with Shiri Appleby, the phone line died. After that things got really weird. We got reconnected and there was this background static - like there was a “force” operating on this phone call. “Spooky,” I say to Appleby, who plays Liz Parker, a human teenager who discovers three of her schoolmates are extraterrestrials. She laughs politely, she’s probably used to the odd paranoid journo. “After working on the show for at least six months now, I’ve seen so many things that it makes it hard to think that there’s not something else out there,” says the 21-year-old, who grew up in the San Fernando Valley. Cool! What kind of things? But like her character Liz, who is trying to protect her three alien friends from detection, Appleby is good at keeping secrets. Too much information might spoil the plot. There’s one thing she can let us in on right away, however: why the aliens are always getting stuck into Tabasco sauce. It’s just a matter of possessing an otherworldly palate. “The aliens like the combination of things that are very sweet with very spicy.” And there’s another question which gets an outright answer. Which is the coolest teen drama on the box - Dawson’s Creek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Roswell? “Roswell, of course.” So that’s official. Aliens aside, the show takes a more realistic approach to the state of adolescence than many other teen dramas have done, says Appleby. “It’s written in such an honest way and they’re not really trying to make teenagers so mature or so worldly and experienced. They’re actually allowing us the opportunity to show how scared and frightened we are growing up in different aspects, like how we’re frightened of these aliens, the aliens are frightened of themselves.” The show’s six young actors are encouraged to voice their opinions about the dialogue, she says. “If we read something and it just doesn’t seem, like, realistic, the writers are very helpful in changing it because they want to portray teenagers in the right way.” Appleby began acting in telly commercials at the age of 4. She has had guest roles in shows such as ER and thirtysomething, but the part in Roswell, which she went through eight auditions to land, is the big break. The challenge of a role which is more than a one-off is keeping the character fresh, she says. “And showing she’s a lot more three-dimensional, she’s an intelligent and a deep person.” She’s not the kind of impressionable person who hears intergalactic listening devices in every international phone call. Who: Shiri Appleby |