Pic from Karen Cliche.com
Femme Fatales 5/03: Karen Cliche interview, on Karen Cliche.com
Deep Blue She
The syndicated Adventure, Inc. was inspired by the real-life exploits of explorer-author Barry Clifford who, among other things, discovered the sunken remains of a treasure-laden pirate ship off the coast of Cape Cod in 1984. But Clifford's adventures didn't have the supernatural ingredients encountered by the series' explorer Judson Cross, played by Michael Biehn, who runs into avenging spirits, reincarnated lovers and other inexplicable obstacles. Cross skippers his high-tech converted Coast Gueard icebreaker, The Vast Explorer (a nod to Jacques Cousteau's vessel the Calypso), in search of lost relics. The other two components of Cross' crew are Gabriel Patterson (Jesse Nilsson), the son of a wealthy family who is intent on setting out on his own, and MacKenzie Previn, a beautiful, dark-haired woman with a secret past.
Cast as Previn, Canadian actress Karen Cliche, has always been interested in acting, having studied drama both in high school and college, but a chance encounter took her in another direction. "I used to work at McDonald's when I was a teenager," she remembers. "I wore a little fuchsia-pink visor. A modeling agent, who later became my acting agent, spotted me and saw something while I was flipping burgers. She asked why I didn't become a model." Why indeed?
At first Cliche didn't want anything to do with modeling, but she later reconsidered. She had put her dreams of acting behind her and studying to be a psychologist when this opportunity appeared. "New York was the first place they shipped me off to, and I was sacred [sic]," she says. "I had no idea what I was doing." But before long, she did, and she was doing it well and began touring Europe for jobs in Milan, Germany, and Barcelona.
Upon returning from one European jaunt, Cliche received a call from her modeling agency, which had just opened an acting division. "They asked if I could act, and I said, 'I think I can,' and I started working at that," she says. "When I got into it I thought, Holy crap, this is what I love. I made the decision to leave school and do this. My first job was in 1998, playing a receptionist in a picture called The Collectors, starring Casper Van Dien. I had about seven lines."
The next year found the young actress appearing in such Canadian TV shows as Big Wolf on Campus and Misguided Angels. She was then cast as Marissa in the fifth season of MTV's lascivious teen series Undressed. "It was a funny, quirky, kitschy comedy about these three stories that run at once," Cliche describes. "There are three teenagers in high school and college. It's basically like a soap opera; it goes back and forth between the three stories every episode. It's complete wacky fun and called Undressed because it was all about sexual issues and stuff like that, all the while being wild and ridiculous. Marissa and this other girl, Cleo, are best friends, and they're always plotting and planning and getting into everyone's business. Marissa was very neurotic and a premed student and a complete nutball. That was really fun--I had to talk really fast and move my hands around a lot."
That same year, Francis Ford Coppola had the bright idea to produce a TV series based on the classic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Unfortunately, only the pilot was filmed. It starred Adam Baldwin as a young surgeon whose Hong Kong honeymoon turns into a disaster. "That was my third job ever," Cliche says. "I spent five weeks in Australia and a week in Hong Kong. I played Muriel Jekyll, who gets killed about a half hour into the movie. I was an innocent victim in a kidnapping and blackmail scandal."
Meanwhile, Cliche was still learning the ropes of working in front of the camera: "I didn't know what a pickup shot was. I was completely overwhelmed and baffled when the director and crew were talking. The challenge was just to get a grasp on things. I was just trying to put everything together. But it was a lovely experience.
She also starred in a British-Canadian TV series with the intriguing title Vampire High. "It ran for only one season, which was too bad, because it really was a wonderful show," says Cliche, who starred as the undead Essie Rachimova. "We were five vampires, two girls and three guys. Essie was blonde--I've done most of my career being blonde and now I'm dark-haired. She was royalty 100 years ago--very snotty and a bit bitchy. She was like the princess of the gang. It was a fun part to play. It's too bad that it didn't run longer."
Undaunted, the actress found a berth on another genre program, Galidor: Defenders of the Outer Dimension, which appeared on Fox Kids Channel. "I did that earlier this year before I got onto Adventure, Inc.," Cliche says. "It was a kid's show, and I came on for the last six episodes as Linda, a Galidorian girl who basically meets up with two humans who are fighting to protect Galidor with all this super sci-fi stuff, like robots and giant frogs. It was really fun. My character was based on a Japanese anime-type girl. My hair was all in braids, and I wore this crazy kimono type thing with a sword. I did a lot of martial arts stuff. Lego has a lot to do with that show, and they basically created my character. They had little action figurines that were sold at McDonald's."
The circle was now complete.
Snagging the role of MacKenzie on Adventure, Inc. was a breeze for Cliche, who sent in an audition tape, received a
all three countries to fulfill the investment criteria. For the first season, the show spent five months shooting in Toronto, moved to England to film four episodes and then finally relocated to Marseilles on the French Riviera for six more.
But there is more to MacKenzie Previn than good looks. This chick can take care of herself in a fight. "She's a girl whose past is kind of questionable," says Cliche. "No one knows where she really comes from. She doesn't reveal too much. She's had military training and was in the Special Forces. She'll stand up to defend herself and anybody else who she cares about. She's not afraid to do it. She's part of a team, along with Judson and Gabe. We travel around, and we explore and we search for things out of pure pleasure. Our company, of course, is called Adventure, Inc., and we're hired to find certain things and every episode deals with a bad guy who's trying to get away from us in different places around the world. She loves life like that, she's an adventuress, she's a tough cookie."
Cliche admits that the role isn't too far from Karen. "So much of Karen is in MacKenzie," she says. "I'm an army brat--my father was a sergeant--and I grew up with that whole tomboyish childhood. I'm also tough and sarcastic. I identify with her a lot, and I bring a lot of myself into her onscreen. It's fun to sort of play yourself. I don't really kick people around in my real life, but I get paid to do it onscreen."
Perhaps the best-kept secret about Adventure, Inc. is the show's Indiana Jones-esque supernatural content, as the writers quietly introduce the paranormal into each script. For instance, in "Bride of the Sun," a Mayan legend comes to life and reunites two lovers. A ghostly army unit returns for vengeance in "Memento Mori." And while searching for the lost icon of St. Nicholas, Judson and Gabe find themselves in a remote Russian village shrouded by a mystical fog.
"What's interesting about the way that we deal with the whole supernatural thing is that we have a relic that has some supernatural power or other strange events," Cliche says. "We just finished an episode with vampires, but the show always ends in a way so you can ask yourself, Was it or wasn't it real? That's what happens in real life all the time. We're still questioning, Are there UFOs? Are there aliens? So the show leaves you questioning things, which is what we deal with in real life all the time."
As luck would have it, bikinis, tight-fitting jeans or shorts are often the outfit du jour for MacKenzie. There is no doubt that Cliche is the show's sex symbol. "Whether I'm in the desert or on Fifth Avenue, I've always got a change of clothes," she laughs. "She's really fashion conscious. She's tough, but she has a wardrobe and look that supports that. She couldn't be a tart in a short skirt and high heels because that's not who she is anyway. She'll dress up like that when it's appropriate, but also because she's always
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