The following interview for Backstage’s on-camera series The Slate was compiled in part by Backstage readers just like you! Follow us on Twitter (@Backstage) and Instagram (@backstagecast) to stay in the loop on upcoming interviews and to submit your questions.
Superhero series “Jupiter's Legacy” is one of Netflix’s newest and most show-stopping science-fiction dramas. The series, based on the 2013 comic by Mark Millar and Frank Quitely, follows the super-powered children of superheroes who struggle to live up to the legendary feats of their parents. Among these aging heroes passing the torch to their children is Grace Sampson, a.k.a Lady Liberty, played by none other than Leslie Bibb. She recently sat down with Backstage to talk about working on the show, her career and process at large, and advice for fellow actors.
The appeal of playing Grace Sampson was seeing her at two very different points of her life.
“You have to make a character real. You’re playing somebody who’s the strongest person in the world; where is her weakness? Where are her achilles heels? What are her broken fragments in her personality? And so I sorta hooked into who she was when she was 20, when she was a journalist, a truth-seeker, she was acerbic, I think she was sort of badass. She was a woman who was working in a man’s world, she was picking career over family and relationships which was not normal, in 1929. And I felt like that was the hook to her. She was sort of doing stuff that women weren’t doing at that time. And then when we catch her and she’s 110 years old and she’s seen everything and she’s had this very lived life, I wonder if she looked back and thought, ‘Where was the fearless girl I used to be?’ She had lost her voice.”
Bibb finds that the best way to be prepared as an actor is to have an arsenal of ideas.
“I will look at my script sometimes, it looks like a serial killer’s notebook. There’s writing everywhere and, you know, I just look at it, and I have contradictory notes. But I realized it’s an idea for a take. Like, ‘Maybe we try it like this or maybe we try it like that.’ I just come from the school of thought that the more ideas you have…. I think of it like a toolbox. And you’re putting all these things in your toolkit. And you don’t know what the scene will require. But our job as an actor is to come with ideas. You are required to do that.”
Finding ways to hone your acting skills is equally important.
“We always need to be talking to people about acting. I just think we never have it figured out. We can always be better. Get together with your friends and read a play. You know, watch lots of movies and when movies are back, go sit in theaters and watch a movie. I’m filming in Australia and the movie theaters are open. And Sam [Rockwell, Bibb’s partner] just got out of quarantine, and our first day out together, we went to a movie. I forgot the safety of a dark room, a big screen, some popcorn, and watching people work.”
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