On Sale October 27, 2010

Source: Wildstorm

Alternate worlds are going to be an even larger aspect of the Fox sci-fi series Fringe when the show returns for a third season on Sept. 23. That means playing a totally different character for most of the cast, including Jasika Nicole. She worried in the beginning about how long her role, a junior federal agent named Astrid Farnsworth, would hang around. “I still take the PDF file and I search for Astrid and I make sure she doesn’t die. You never know!” she says. But her patience has paid off over that slow build, getting to play both Astrid in our world and the very cold and enigmatic Astrid of the alternate universe. She talked at Comic-Con last week about the differences between those characters and what family member she looked to for inspiration for alterna-Astrid, so read below for her thoughts.

When the third season opens, Nicole says, the loyal and warm Astrid we’ve seen for a couple years now will have a closer bond than ever with Walter Bishop (John Noble), since he’s lost the support system he’s had because of the revelations to his son Peter (Joshua Jackson) and FBI Agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv). She also says we’ll get to see Astrid’s home this season. “Her apartment is like a hippie den, and she’s got like eight rugs on the floor and all these lamps and rich colors. I would never have known her apartment looked like that,” Nicole says, laughing.

This year, though, she has a whole other character to talk about with the alternate-universe Astrid. Viewers had a chance to meet her in her beret and combat boots briefly in the May season finale, but they’ll see a whole lot more starting in September. “She’s tricky but she’s really cool. She’s so guarded that it’s a little bit easy to play her because I don’t have to relate to anybody. It’s like performing monologues, which is an interesting thing to do in a television show,” Nicole says.

“It’s really just playing a completely different charter, almost in a different show. The alternate universe is so different — none of the characters she interacts with are the same. It’s like doing a regional theater show for summer stock where you’re doing seven different shows at the same time, and you’re rehearsing one show during the day and performing another one at night.”

Nicole’s favorite aspect of playing alterna-Astrid is that she doesn’t make eye contact with anyone, something only sharp-eyed viewers aw in the season finale. “She speaks toward them and she’ll look at them, but not when she’s speaking,” Nicole explains. “That’s really funny to play because people get uncomfortable when I’m doing that in a scene. She doesn’t really respond to their facial expressions or what they’re doing. She’s not interested in that. She’s only interested in relaying the information that she has for them.

“That was something my sister does that I always thought was really interest. She’s not quite as high functioning as Asperger’s, and that was one of the first things that we knew that something was up with her: She would talk to you looking at the side of you, and then she would look at you, and then when she’d start talking again, she would look away. We just thought it was a quirky thing, and come to find out that’s one of many, many different things that kids who have autism tend to get. I’m trying to not incorporate everything about my sister, but just things that I know really well to take from my own experience and put into alternate Astrid.”

Source: USAWeekend

FBI agent Olivia will struggle to escape from the alternate universe in season three of Fringe, according to show bosses.

Speaking to SFX, executive producers Jeff Pinkner and J.H. Wyman revealed that the season two cliffhanger will not be resolved for some time.

Wyman explained: "We had conversations with Anna about how we were constructing roles for her. We know we've written Olivia as a character who's burdened by her job, and the Cortexiphan experiments done to her as a child are really in one way or another a form of child abuse.

"They robbed her of a lot of choices in her life. She's grown up in that shadow and to subconsciously be prepared, like a soldier, for an oncoming something.

"She wears the dark clothing and doesn't form relationships easily as she's very protective of herself and her emotions, while at the same time being a protector of everybody else. We knew we wanted to create her doppelganger unburdened by those same responsibilities."

He continued: "We're always trying to broaden her emotionally, since a major part of our storytelling, especially about the alternate universe, is about the choices that we make. We talk about Olivia and the concept that she's the way she is because of what happened to her in her own life.

"When Olivia gets there and starts to see all these things that weren't in her own life, it's going to cause her to look at herself. And hopefully we'll break her down to build her back up and she can self actualise."

Meanwhile, Pinker added: "We're not shying away from exploring the other universe and we left Olivia in a condition that it would feel like a shame if the very first thing we did was bring her home."

Source: DigitalSpy

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