By Travis Johnson
When we catch up, de Gouw is holidaying at home, having recently finished work on Underground’s second season. “Yeah, we just wrapped on Season 2 in early December,” she tells us. “We’ve been in Savannah, Georgia. It was a good four months there, shooting the second season. It’s pretty full on!”
What’s like being on set for such an extended period of time?
“It’s wonderful for a lot of reasons. It’s lovely because it kind of feels like being on tour with a family, and by the second season we were definitely a family. Everybody is very familiar and very relaxed. It’s actually a really good environment to be creating in, because you are so familiar with everyone and you feel so supported – you know the creative team and a lot of the directors have come back for a second round as well, so it’s lovely. It’s a very safe space, and especially for a show like this where you’re dealing with such heavy material. It’s a really good place to explore.”
Let’s go back to the start – how did you first come on board Underground?
“I was over in LA, I think it was quite early on in the pilot season, and I was looking for another job. And a lot of the things that were coming my way were not of particular interest – I felt like I’ve seen a lot of them before and I felt that they weren’t particularly exciting scripts that I was reading. And then Underground was sent to me and it just felt like it was in a completely different game than the rest of the pilots that I’d seen. It was creatively very challenging and very ballsy, really. It surprised me, and it’s not often that I’m surprised by TV pilots – they seem very formulaic and they feel very easy to guess a lot of the time, and I like to be surprised. I read that and it blew me away. And so that was the reason why I went in and I met with Anthony Hemingway, who is an amazing director, and Joe [Pokaski] and Misha [Green], who created it and wrote it. I just really liked what they were doing and what they wanted to do – and then they offered it to me, which was very fortunate!”
How much did you know about the period it’s set in – the pre-Civil War American South?
“You know what? Not a lot. A knew a bit about American history, but that specific historical narrative I didn’t know much about. The Underground Railroad I don’t think is very well known on an international level. Even in America, a lot of the cast, all they really knew about the Underground Railroad was a paragraph in the history books. It wasn’t really explored or explained a lot of the time. So it was definitely a big learning curve and not only historically but culturally for me. It was a lot to learn about, but I had a lot support from the creatives around me and everybody’s very eager to learn, to delve deeper into that part of history. It’s been quite incredible. And especially now that we’re into the second season, a lot of the stories that we are exploring from first hand slave narratives so a lot of the things that you think might be fabricated because they’re too crazy to believe, a lot of that is truth – it comes from real historical stories.”
As a non-American, what was it like to be an outsider coming in to tackle this kind of subject matter?
“I never felt overwhelmed by it. Actually, I think it’s such a beautiful thing about being an actor – you have the opportunity to throw yourself into a different world, a different time and a different place. It was never really intimidating, more exciting because it was so much to learn. And as I said before I had so much support from the creatives around me that, every time I had a question, I would just go to Joe and Misha and they were such an endless vault of information. It was just a great learning curve for me.”
What is your research routine like? were than any specific books or films you went to?
“It’s so broad that you just have to take it piece by piece. One of the most incredible things that we did halfway through Season 2 was we went to the Smithsonian for the opening of the African American Museum [National Museum of African American History and Culture, opened by President Obama on September 24, 2016]. Some of the things I saw there were so incredible. In Season 2 Harriet Tubman, who is a major historical character, becomes a major character, so seeing some of her artifacts in the museum was incredible.
“But as I said before, a lot of what is in the show is from first hand accounts. And even though Elizabeth, my character, is not in herself a real person, she’s sort of an amalgamation of stories and people, there’s such a wealth of knowledge there. And then you’ve got the scripts, which are so beautifully written and so complex that it’s kind of endless, the amount of work you can do on it. Ultimately, to play a truth, you have all this information and you use to inform what you’re doing, but ultimately you look at the words on the page and you just have say them honestly.”
How do you find playing a character from such a different milieu, who may be coming at life from a very different set of assumptions as yourself?
“The thing about Elizabeth is, as Joe and Misha said to me, is that she and her husband, John [Marc Blucas], are kind of a way in for a contemporary audience. They’re quite contemporary in their relationship, they don’t really follow the way you might traditionally expect a couple to behave in 1850s America, but yes – the creators have always said they feel like the audience, like a modern look at this world. So it doesn’t feel like a stiff period drama in a lot of ways – it feels very easy to engage with, so I didn’t have to restrict myself in the way you sometimes have to do in period dramas, in the way that you behave and the way that you interact with other people.”
Having appeared in These Final Hours, Arrow and Dracula, you’re no stranger to on-screen violence, but this must be the most violent project you’ve ever worked on.
“Yeah, especially having just done the second season as well. The first season was brutal enough, but the second season takes it a whole other level. I guess that the way through that is trusting your creatives and trusting the script and trusting that it’s there for a reason and it’s not just violence for violence’s sake, because I think it can be overwhelming if you look at this as simply a brutal action drama/thriller. I don’t think it’s any of those things because there’s a reason for it, because the violence has a purpose – it creates conversation and it allows people to talk about it and think about it and relate it back to where we are and what we’re experiencing now. It kind of makes it easier to navigate, I guess.”
Season 1 of Underground is streaming on stan. from January 24.
