`Blue Interviews - Julia Stiles & Co.

Panic attacks are in keeping with a character who has a checkered past, which is so disturbing for Blue that she has had to resort to denial, even repression (i.e., forgetting).  I agree that flawed characters have a visceral realness that makes them more compelling.

What Julia Stiles says reminds me of this bit from Gillian Flynn Author of "Gone Girl":

I have a soft spot for losers, and dopes, and people who do the wrong thing... They're fun people to write.

  

I love the complexity of Blue's relationship with Arthur.  It's an emerging, evolving one:  Arthur unwittingly, at least at first, untangles Blue's defense mechanisms by engaging her services not for sex, but for a make-believe relationship.  The irony is delicious, however, as Blue is called upon to pretend that a real relationship exists between them, on an evening when Arthur's two adult children are over for dinner. 

  

It must be rare for actors to work with their real-life family members, and also play characters who have that same family relationship.  There seemed to have been a hint of nervousness in Jane O'Hara in acting with her sister, but otherwise she and Stiles pull it off rather naturally and effectively.  Lara and Blue have a genuinely caring relationship, in ways that I imagine mirror their real lives together.

  

I love interviews with actors, as I get insight not only into their characters and the drama, but also into the experience of working with one another.  Uriah Shelton is one half of a central relationship for Blue in Season 1, and while more relationships have emerged and evolved in Seasons 2 and 3, mother and son remain integral to the fabric of the story.   

  

Shelton is a delightful actor, and comes across as a believable 15-year old (now 17-year old).  I was serious about that very scene he refers to:  I thought that for the sake of decorum, Rodrigo Garcia filmed Blue and Roy in passionate foreplay separately, that is, from Josh watching them off to the side.  But for the sake of believability, instead, apparently they were all on the same take. 

  

I really didn't pick up Shelton's accent, but this interview illuminates those words that he has to articulate more deliberately perhaps, so as to stay in keeping with his character.  Words like "home," "get," and "around" are draped in Southern culture for him.  Similarly I speak to culturally-derived pronunciation of names in Key & Peele on Race Relations.