SciFi Stream promotional video: Forbes March, Victoria Pratt, and John Shea
Mutant X Promotional Video
Forbes March: Mutant X is a superhero show with a sci-fi edge. There's a lot of stunts. There's a lot of action. It centers around 5 new mutants who've been genetically engineered from birth.
Victoria Pratt: Mutant X, it's gonna be fantastic! It's about a group of mutants led by a charismatic fellow named Adam. The mutants on our show and the mutants that we deal with every episode are products of this experiment. And we've been bred with different kinds of DNA. Mine was animal DNA.
Forbes: And they've dedicated themselves to trying to save the other, we think, thousand other mutants that are running around out there. Some of them aware, some of them not aware that they are mutants who are being hunted by the bad guys, the GSA.
Victoria: We are fighting to help other mutants that are children of a company called Genomex to sort of live right and don't be evil. Genomex is a secret part of the government and they were created to do genetic research. And now Genomex is run by a fellow named Eckhart who took his experiments in a bad direction. And now he's trying to collect all of these mutants to sort of work for him and to use their powers for his benefit instead of sort of the benefit of human kind.
Forbes: How was Mutant X founded? Well, our leader, Adam--last name unknown, of course--he was one of the original scientists who was doing the genetic research. He found out that the mutants were going to be used for not so positive means and separated himself from the organization. And went about trying to pull together a team of mutants to combat the bad guys he had previously been working for. So it's a sort of redemption for his character.
John Shea: The character of Adam is a complicated character. One of the reasons I liked him was that he wasn't just a pure straight all-American hero. I mean, he was much more of a complicated modern anti-hero, in the sense that he's a scientist on the run from the law. He's an outlaw scientist. And I like that about him. There's also something of the wounded idealist about him that I relate to. His back story is that he was a scientist, sort of a prodigy, a scientific prodigy coming out of Stanford with a PhD at the age of 19. Was hired by a private corporation called Genomex to start doing genetic research and thought he was doing it in agriculture, and he was coming up with all kinds of interesting hybridization ideas. And then found his ideas being coopted and being used in human genetic experiments that were going on within this corporation that he didn't know about. And so then when he found out that he was party to the creation of a whole series of human genetic experiments, he was aghast and downloaded as much of the information as he could to wipe out the programs that he had created and take the list of all of the embryos which had been experimented on and sort of went into hiding. And as the series is picked up, we see him on the run and underground from the government, who has created the GSA, the Genetic Security Agency, to try hunt him down. And all of the mutant embryos that are now maturing and developing and manifesting these extraordinary powers. In the first couple of episodes, even before the series begins, he's gotten two people. One is the character of Shalimar, who has her human abilities have been cross bred with those of a cat. So she's a feral. And she has cat-like abilities. So she can jump, move, do astounding physical things.
Victoria: My character is Shalimar Fox and she has animal DNA. She's faster and more agile than a human, and just like a cat can drop X times its height, so can I. And I can leap the same distance. And she has heightened senses of smell and vision and fun things like that. It's just such a fun character to play.
John: The other one is a character called Jesse Kilmartin, who is somebody who has the ability to materialize and dematerialize, or to mass and mass out. To create a solid impermeable structure and then to equally create something that energy can pass through. So it's an astonishing ability and it comes in, obviously, really useful through the course of the episodes.
Forbes: Jesse's new mutant ability? He can control his molecular density. So he can get hard as a rock and very strong one moment, and then he can phase out or become very light and float around or pass through walls the next. So in a fight situation, he can mass out his arm and hit a guy, which sends him flying 18 flips through the air and bouncing off a wall. Or he can run through the wall and then mass out or drop through the floor. Jesse is an upper-middle class kid. His father was a corrupt multimillionaire politician type. And Jesse's a fun guy. He's probably the only character in the Mutant X team who is a volunteer. Which gives him a certain joie-de-vivre. He's akin to these middle-class kids who go and join the Peace Corps. They don't have to do it. And that gives him a certain edge. And it gives it a lightness while at the same time, a greater sense, perhaps, of dedication. Because they're doing it voluntairily; they weren't drafted into the situation. They want to be there. And Jesse's really enjoying it because he's found a family for the first time.
Victoria: The other girl on the show, Lauren, her character is Emma. And she is telempathic. So she can move things, create feelings in others and sense people's feelings. Brennan, he can throw off sparks. He has electric energy. And that's kind of a fun power for him.
John: One of the things that drew me to the series was that these were not being treated as one-dimensional kind of cardboard comic book characters. One of the brilliant things about "Lois & Clark" was that we tried to make those characters as real as possible. They had both strengths and weaknesses. They had flaws. They were very human. And certainly, Clark was human. Lois was human. Lex Luthor was human. You know, we all had our vulnerabilities. And that's what we're trying to create here as well. One of the things when I read this that drew me to it, was that I saw that possibility. That the characters make mistakes. That they're human. But they're humans with extraordinary abilities. And with those abilities come all kinds of problems.
Forbes: I think that's part of the subtext to the whole super hero thing. That in life, we all feel like mutants, that's the idea. We all feel subtly ostracized. We all feel outside. We all feel peculiar in some way. And we all want to be normal. What makes these people heroes, and what makes them inspirational is that they take these weaknesses...in everybody else's eye, what we perceive to be everybody else's eye; who knows if we were actually open about our weaknesses whether they'd be accepted or not? But they're not afraid of their weaknesses, interpreted weaknesses. They take those weaknesses, they tend to turn them into strengths, and they become heroes with them. That is, I think, from what I understand, is the attraction to comic book heroes. Superman. That is the story of Superman. That's why they run around in disguises. That's why Batman wears a mask. That's why Superman couldn't play football. And that's what makes him a hero. It's nice to work on a show that I feel is positive. That I think a lot of people are gonna feel good about. That it's going to make a lot of people feel good. That it's going to make people feel inspired. That's great. That's great. I mean, I like acting just for acting. I'll act by myself. I've been acting in the shower since I was, you know, in a shower. But to have the chance to do that and do something that is positive, is great. It's great, yeah.
Victoria: I get letters from mothers saying, "Oh, you know, my little girl thinks you're so cool because you're so strong." And I really think that's important to me, for girls to feel empowered. But I mean, whoever can draw strength from, you know, whatever source. If they draw strength from me being an outcast in the show, then that's great too. You know, I think people have to find the strength within themselves.
Forbes: Oh, the stunts, the fun stuff! Yeah, yeah!
Victoria: I do a lot of my own stunts. Some of the things I'm not insured for!
Forbes: We do about 90-95 percent of the stunts ourselves. We do everything that we are, for insurance reasons, allowed to do. So falls, if it's within a certain height, we do them ourselves. I think it's a five story limit that we're allowed to do. Which is pretty freakin' high! But a 10 story stunt, that's my well-paid stunt man. Any of the wirework that you see, any of the flips, any of the martial arts stuff, we do all our own fight scenes. Which I have the well-covered bruise on my left knee to cover for, having done ten hours of fight scenes on Sunday. But we do as much as we possibly can ourselves. I had to do a drop. They just dropped me into the middle of an action scene once from above. It's actually a crane, we don't show in the scene where they drop me from. I just... There's a fight going on, and I WHAP! drop into the middle of it. So what they do is they have a very high crane and I'm on a very thin wire. Dangling there while they're setting up the scene, looking down at the concrete pavement below me. And I hate heights. I hate heights. But it's not that dramatic, really, but it scared the poop out of me.
Victoria: In the pilot, there's this great...the entrance of my character. I'm jumping from a building down onto the roof a truck. And I don't know, I think they just assume that I'm game because I've done my own stunts in my other show. And I am, for the most part, pretty game. But they took me up four stories on a decelerator. And I'd never done a decelerator fall before and I hadn't rehearsed it. So I was up there in this harness, just looking down, down, down at this tiny little truck and thinking, "What am I doing? I mean, my stunt double is over there, and she's willing!" But boy, when I saw the finished product. And I saw just like the...I mean, you can tell. You can tell when there's height, and when there's air beneath you. And when you see the fall, it just stopped my heart. It stopped my heart on the day, and it stopped my heart then too. And it was just... Oh, it was incredible.
Forbes: It really adds to the quality and the impression. I mean, if you can see that it's the actual actor doing it. It's a lot more fun, you buy into it. You really pull for the character a lot more than if you see that it's a stunt man.
John: I think it's set like 5 minutes in the future. I don't see it as happening, you know. This is a very stylized world. It's a very different kind of world, I don't know if you saw the film Gattaca. There's a kind of simplicity to it. There's a stylization to the set designs, the designs that you're looking around here. The wardrobe, the makeup, and the writing, and the acting, it's all supernaturalistic. But at the same time it's set slightly in the future. And I'd say like 5 minutes in the future. So in a way, it's a cautionary tale as well.
Victoria: I think we're talking about the very, very near future on our show. When you think about what they're doing with genetic research right now. I mean, who's to say there aren't mutants next door, you know what I mean? So I think that it's close, if it's not here already.
Forbes: It's very much a Conspiracy Theory kind of thing. That in fact genetics is not a new field of science. The code has not just been broken. The code in fact broken back in --I don't know what they're saying-- the, I mean, 30's, 40's, 50's, 60's, but a while ago anyway. That the government is much more advanced than we think they are. Which many of us think they are, in fact. And that it is, in fact, contemporary.
John: I believe that there's genetic research going on right now. I believe that here in Toronto, or in New York City, or in Los Angeles, or in any major city. We know that it's going on in Paris. We know that it's going on around the world right now, that people are trying to genetically engineer embryos. And who knows what's going to happen as people start to take animal genes and transplant them with human genes, and take some human things and try to augment them. And 100 years from now, even ten years from now, we may be finding that this show that we're doing is not so far-fetched.
Forbes: Visually, this show is amazing. The sets rock. The director of photography is amazing. It's a really beautiful show. The stunts are great. I think you're going to see some stunt work that hasn't really been attempted too much before in TV. And that's very exciting. I mean, obviously, set designs, and beautiful photography, and good looking clothes and fun action sequences aren't going to carry us through 5, 6 years of the show. But it's a great start anyway. And then as the show develops, the relationships develop, I think you're starting to see a really visually cool show. They're doing a lot of really neat stuff up here which is cutting edge. Very cool.
John: I believe that the show is going to be enormously entertaining for those who want to enter into this world. I think people are gonna find that it's gonna be satisfying on a lot of different levels. There's great action; there's great adventure. The dramas are interesting, the characters are interesting. There's some humor involved. You know...
Victoria: There's lots of fun coming up.
Forbes: Yeah.
Victoria: Lots of fun.
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