 Summer
Glau Conference Call: January 31, 2008
To get out the hype that a new episode of Terminator: The Sarah
Connor Chronicles airs on Monday, FOX allowed several websites
and members of the press to participate in a special telephone press
conference with Summer Glau (Cameron).
In this conference, Glau talked about her character (of course!),
her evolution, and of course, she talked about comparisons between
Cameron and Firefly's River Tam.
TerminatorSite's Craig Byrne was one of those who participated
in the conference call; here are some highlights...
For starters, Glau spoke about the deadpan delivery of Cameron,
which provides humor to many scenes. "It was [Josh Friedman]'s
idea, and it was a fine balance from the pilot to the series, deciding
exactly how Cameron was going to relate to the people around her,"
Glau says. "I think we all felt that it was a great comic opportunity.
It’s been really fun for me."
She does, however, explain that it's not all done for laughs. "I
never want to ask the audience to laugh at me because then it just
doesn’t feel real, and so I just approach everything and try
to be really sincere, as Cameron would be. She’s so –
I think that is what is so funny about her is just that she can’t
be anything but genuine. She’s very open, like a child. She
absorbs the behavior around her and tries to understand it as best
she can, and sometimes it ends up being extremely funny."
From the series pilot, Cameron has become a part of John and Sarah
Connor's lives, but do we know exactly where she fits in? "I
think that we do work as a dysfunctional family right now, and I
think it is sort of a mystery at this point if Cameron’s intentions
are what she presents them to be. I don’t even really know
what’s going on with Cameron. I do know that maybe she has
a mysterious past. And it’s unclear what she ends up being
in the future. But at this point, I think that all three of us,
as far as what I know from the script, we are all fighting for the
same goal, but that might turn out to be sort of a front. Cameron
might have come back from the past for a different purpose."
Unlike Lena Headey's Sarah Connor and Thomas Dekker's John, Cameron
is a character never before seen in other media - although Glau
is asked if she feels any comparison to Arnold Schwarzenegger's
robotic protector from T2. "Arnold Schwarzenegger is
such an icon," she says. "He’s such an action hero
that Josh Friedman decided to take the Terminator on a completely
different path. We’re not trying to recreate Arnold Schwarzenegger.
We’re doing a completely different Terminator, and that makes
me feel safe because I don’t have to try to follow in his footsteps.
I’m just doing something different."
Still on the subject of comparisons, a journalist asked Glau how
Cameron compares to her previous role, River Tam of Firefly and
Serenity fame: "Well, you know, I played River for a
little bit longer," Glau says. "I think I know more of
her moves at this point, but River was all about finesse and creativity
and using her form as best she could because she wasn’t the
strongest person in the room, and she wasn’t the biggest girl
in the room."
"Now playing Cameron, I don’t really break a sweat because
she just gets to pick things up and throw them and bash through
walls. I don’t know. I think it would be an ugly fight,"
she continues. "It’s funny because I actually see some
similarities between them. They’re both kind of foreigners
in their surroundings. River was never good at being able to relate
to people around her, and she always seemed to be somewhere else
in her mind. And Cameron is the same way. She’s from a different
place. She’s from a different time. She’s not human. She
doesn’t really know how to relate to the people that she’s
living her life with now, so in that way they’re similar."
"But River was so emotional and so vulnerable, and Cameron
can’t really be those things. That was the biggest challenge
for me when I first was cast in the role was trying to define how
I could make her relatable and how I could relate to her as an actress,
so it’s been an interesting balance. I’m still finding
out who she is, and I think that she’s constantly growing.
She’s constantly changing from scene-to-scene and absorbing
human characteristics, so I think that she will continue to become
more relatable as time goes on," she says.
One vulnerability Cameron might have is the way she feels about
John. Is it merely a protector role, or could there be a budding
human-robot romance? "The writers are keeping me guessing,"
Summer reveals. "At this point, I can’t tell. I know that
it’s a possibility. And I think that in her own way, Cameron
does love John because, when I think about it, her entire existence
is to protect him. Her purpose in life is to keep him safe and to
be with him always. I think that she does love him, as best a robot
could."
"At this point, their relationship is very complicated. John
is still trying to figure out how he wants to treat her and what
his relationship with her should be. It’s really complicated,
but I think that anything is possible at this point," she says.
Glau confirms that her characterization has changed a bit from
the original series pilot - something that was very noticeable in
"The Turk" when her character didn't seem to fit in as
easily in a school setting. "We did make some changes,"
Glau confirms, "and people will notice that from the pilot
to the series, we were experimenting with Cameron quite a bit, and
we wanted her to be able to seem human. We wanted especially John
to be fooled by her, so that he would let her into his life. And
so in the pilot, I do act very human. And then as I go through the
series, it appears that I’ve taken steps back and that I am
acting more like a terminator would. We did that for several different
reasons, but I know for me it’s fun because I get to take more
time for her development, her human development. I think that it
also is funny and I think once her cover was blown with the Connors,
she kind of was able to drop that persona and become who she really
is around them, if that answers the question."
Be sure to watch an all-new Terminator: The Sarah Connor
Chronicles Monday at 9PM on FOX!
Return
to the TerminatorSite home page
|
