Duvall and Guillory on the Virtues of Virtuality

It’s been more than a year since we began talking about this far-reaching new project by Battlestar’s Ron Moore. As early as May of 08, snippets of information about the intriguing characters reached the web as casting sides were dolled out to actors auditioning for the roles.

There was the ship’s therapist who was using a reality show as a means of getting the crew to open up. A married couple who like to have sex in unusual places, a ship’s doctor who himself is dying and the first gay couple in space.

Then casting was completed and some people, like the folks at Futon Critic got a first look and they liked what they saw. By December, though, things were looking rocky and word of a retooling began to circulate around the web.

Finally, in May of this year, we were told that Virtuality would be a movie event on Fox. With that, all hopes of the show going to series were dashed.

It’s been a long wait, folks, but the time has come. Ron Moore’s Virtuality airs tonight on Fox and so the stars Clea Duvall and Sienna Guillory sat down with reporters to talk about, this much talked about, project.

On their characters:

C. Duvall: I play Sue Parsons, who is the ship’s pilot. She definitely has sort of like a cocky, hotshot attitude, which was pretty fun to play.

S. Guillory: My character is Rika. She’s an exo-biologist which is kind of extreme gardening on a molecular level. But I’m trapped in this passionless marriage to the ship’s psychologist, so I use my virt module to fantasize about sex and intimacy. She’s introvert, oversexed, and I just think quite real. I mean, the fact that we’re geeks doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re particularly brilliant at handling our emotions. So I think we’re all prone to exploding emotionally, and I thought that our advanced kind of cerebral ability didn’t necessarily lend itself to us emotionally, and I think that that’s what’s nice about the story. There are huge big ideas, but we’re all very accessible people that are easily bruised.

Clea on how she approached the role:

On Virtuality, for me it was so much about getting to know the people that I was working with and getting comfortable with improv, which is something that I’ve never done before, but Peter Berg likes to work that way, just sort of letting scenes run and seeing what happens. I’ve never had so much freedom with the script. I mean, of course I said everything that was in the script, but being able to build on it and create more and find things that I didn’t even know were there until we were doing it was very exciting, and I think everyone was so good at that, and it really shows onscreen.

So it was a lot of kind of on-the-job training on this one. Any preparation I did had to be sort of thrown out the window and just putting the trust into my fellow actors and my director.

Sienna on working in an ensemble piece:

I was seduced by the idea of working in an ensemble, and the complete lack of limitation plot-wise, because anything can happen. Every single character has their own movie. And in virtual reality, your wildest dreams and fantasies can come true, so we all—it’s the fact that it’s limitless and entirely inspirational.

I haven’t ever worked with such a brilliant group of actors, and you know that if you do something stupid it’s just not going to be there, because someone else is doing something brilliant.

Clea on the environmental themes in Virtuality:

I think that the environment has been such a big issue, and I think people are taking more responsibility now, and hopefully the people that are going to see this and realize that, yes, this is a fictionalized show but dealing with a very real possibility – probability. And hopefully it will get more people to recycle or carpool or ride their bikes or whatever little steps we can do to reverse or at least slow down the damage that we have done and are doing.

Sienna on working with Ron Moore and Mike Taylor

I think that the creative imaginative genius that is Ron Moore and Mike Taylor, they’re so infectiously enthusiastic and …. They were so brave… they assumed that the audience was intelligent and demanding, which made us as an ensemble want to rise up and meet the challenge. So in those moments when we’re actually filming, we’re on set, they lent us that bravery, and they allowed us to inhabit the roles and just let rip with whatever stupid idea came into our minds, with the safety net of knowing that they’re more intelligent than we are and they’re going to take out the bad bits. So that was the freedom and that was the great thing about working on it.

Clea on the future of the characters:

There were little bits and pieces that we were given because I think we all had the hopes that it would continue. But they, Michael and Ron, didn’t really give away much. I think that we were all under such pressure to just do what we were doing, that thinking into the future was overwhelming at times. But there’s definitely a lot more to the story that, fingers crossed, we may be able to tell.

Virtuality airs tonight beginning at 8:00 on FOX.

Cast pictured L-R: Kerry Bishe, Ritchie Coster, Eric Jensen, Nelson Lee, Joy Bryant, Clea Duvall, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Sienna Guillory, James D’Arcy, Jose Pablo Cantillo, Gene Farber, Omar Metwally and Jimmi Simpson. ©2009 Fox Broadcasting Co. Cr: Kharen Hill/FOX