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THE SOAP

Elisabeth quickly found herself in a short run on the daytime soap opera, ‘One Life to Live’. Certainly an opportunistic place to start but also what one would consider the ultimate crash course in Acting 101. "Definitely," Liz agrees. Most actors will attest that it’s a great training ground due to the demands that are placed upon you with learning directing techniques in hitting your mark and script memorization, etc. "Oh my God, yeah, it just made me a pro. If you’re screwing around you’re gonna fall so fast. And it kind of just gave me P’s and Q’s more than anything. It taught me how to be prepared and professional."

Seeing what the exposure, although short, has led to, it was probably to Liz’s benefit that she got in and out of the soap world so fast. "Yeah definitely," she agrees and admits, "It’s funny because a friend of mine, who I’ve been friends with for two years used to love to watch One Life to Live. Before we met she had seen me on the show and thought I did good work. Then I left really quickly, she was like, ‘I wonder what that girl’s gonna go do. I hope she goes and does something bigger.’ And then we became friends because we met on a meeting for some other project. It’s funny, she was like, ‘I thought in the moment when I watched you on the soap’, she goes, ‘it’s a good thing that girl got in and out’, because you can get really trapped there. It’s a nice life, doing a soap. You get money and constant work. You still get a lot of the accolade too because soap fans are so dedicated," she concludes.

 

THE ‘ANGEL’

"Sorry, it’s just, someone who’s not even a person lecturing me on most people — it’s kind of funny." ~ Kate Lockley

Scenario: You’re sitting at home and your agent calls you and says she has this great new part for you! ‘It’s a great female roll about a strong, independent police detective with a vulnerable side. You’ll be involved with mystery, suspense, a chance for humor but the catch is that your ally and foe, well, is a vampire!’ And you say . . . "No, I’m not going." That’s right! Liz turned it down and not just once. "I said no, that’s teenage stuff, I’m not going. I want to do serious drama. She said, ‘you’re being a snob,’ she’s like, ‘you’re going.’ So I went to the audition. They offered me the job and I said no, and then they offered it again and I said no." Now don’t start to think that she was totally crazy, there was a valid defense as to why Liz didn’t think the part was exactly right for her. "Then they offered it again and I said, ‘can I speak to Joss Whedon,’ because there was no script on Angel. I mean, I said no for a reason, because I didn’t know what it was about. I had two, three scenes, something like that."

Making an impression so strong that she was still offered the part is quite a compliment for Liz. "Yeah, I don’t know. I guess I created somebody, they’re like, ‘Oh that’s her!’ So I had this incredible talk with Joss who I never see (now) and never talk to because he’s always at Buffy, but who I really respect and really admire. I just think he’s a genius. I think he’s so smart and so ahead of everybody. I just trusted him in the conversation and I said, ‘you know what, I want to jump on your bandwagon.’ " If you think that’s an odd turn around you can imagine what it was like for her never having watched a single episode of Buffy either. "Never!" she exclaims rather humorously. So you didn’t even know who Angel was? "No, I thought Angel was some guy, that he was going to be cast like me, like somebody currently that they’d found for the part. Even when I drove up in the van by the stage and Glenn and David were standing outside, I didn’t know which one was Angel.

"I didn’t know which one was Angel. I was like, ‘oh is it the cute Irish one there?’"

I was like, ‘oh is it the cute Irish one there?’ " she remembers saying as she laughs telling the tale. "It was good for our relationship because I really had no idea and I could really approach him just as a person."

Walking in cold, not having a script or an outline as to what the show is about, or who your character is would have been daunting for some actors but Liz took the approach like everything she does. It’s happening for a reason so let’s just go for it and see where the ride will take me. Angel writer and producer, Tim Minear had said that Kate’s original character was much darker than what we finally saw when the series started. She was to play a cop with an addiction to drugs who actually crosses the line in her undercover work as a prostitute. I wondered if that deep destructive profile was something that intrigued her by the roll. "Well actually, now that you’re saying it, I remember that," she recalls. "I guess there was a little bit that you would have learned in those three scenes that one of them was that she was addicted.

"I cried so hard that I strained the muscles in my neck. I don’t think I’ve ever cried that hard in my life."

So she was definitely much more of a loose cannon and then Joss and I started developing her on the phone more when we talked because it was going to be changing. It was more about her loneliness and her little girl lost then anything else."

And also her relationship with her father which ended rather dramatically towards the climax of last season. I wondered if Liz would have liked to have seen that dynamic of Kate’s relationship with her father develop further. "Either way it was fine because it was a great, great story for me. They gave me a really dramatic, really painful experience," she confesses with a laugh. "That was great for me as an actor, I mean, my God. I literally, after we shot that scene where he died and I run in. The next day, I woke up and my neck hurt. I didn’t know why and then I thought, ‘oh my God, I cried so hard that I strained the muscles in my neck.’ I was sobbing so hard. I don’t think I’ve ever cried that hard in my life." Liz felt that scene so much that when John Mahon, who portrayed Trevor Lockley on Angel recently came onto Bull to do a guest spot they had an emotional reunion. "I ran up to him and hugged him," she recalls. "He was like, ‘It’s just acting Liz.’ He didn’t say that but, I mean it was such a really powerful story line for me." Powerful indeed and really convincing, very tough scene to watch. "Thank you."

An emotionally gripping scene as Kate discovers her dead father in ‘The Prodigal’

But not everything was of the high emotional draw last season, Kate got to kick butt and show a few slayer moves of her own! Liz laughs, "That’s fun, I liked them. You really hurt the next day but, you know what I mean." So you have a lot of fun with that? "Oh yeah," laughing again, "I told David Greenwalt a couple of weeks ago, ‘Come on, I wanna go kick some ass!’ He was like, ‘I don’t know, we’ll see.’ It’s funny."

There’s a lot to Kate’s character that a lot of fans still don’t understand. She has an entirely different perspective on Angel at the moment but their agendas are still the same and this year they are going to have to come to terms. "Well, that’s why I think she’s falling more now. Because when you’ve set yourself up to think that the world is one way and you learn that it’s not . . . Kate really believed that the world was essentially worth saving. She still feels that way but she just had the biggest betrayal of all. A man that she trusted lied to her and he was the catalyst for her dad dying. She’s really not pleased with existence right now, in general. She just feels like nobody gets what’s happening here. That there is this other worldly stuff and nobody gets it. She’s convinced of the fact that she’s surrounded with people who don’t see the real picture, but that’s only because, I think personally, that she’s having to adjust to realizing that she can’t control everything she sees. That’s growing up, you know, like letting go. She’s freaking out right now," states Liz laughing at the fact that this about a girl dealing with the reality of demons. "I’m actually referring to the last episode. In that moment, when she confronts (Angel) she feels she’s trying to control the situation and she can’t and it’s terrifying."

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