By now it’s no surprise that A-list movie actors are coming to television where they can find some primo material. Still, it’s exciting when an actor like Oscar winning X-Man Halle Berry decides to enter our homes every week. She’s still making big movies, but we’ll get a piece of her for free.
On “Extant,” Berry plays an astronaut who returns home from a 13-month solo mission pregnant. So that’s weird. Meanwhile her husband (Goran Visnjic) has created a robot child, Ethan (Pierce Gagnon), so she’s got that to deal with too. Berry spoke with reporters on a panel for “Extant” this summer, and we were there to report as the show premieres on Wednesday, July 9 on CBS.
CraveOnline: For the scenes where you’re actually on the spaceship, how close to Gravity could you get on a TV budget?
Halle Berry: I think as you can see from our trailer, we got pretty doggone close to doing something that is on par with any film you’ll ever see. I like to say Gravity was our benchmark and I think we tried very hard to sort of hit that mark the best that we could. I think our space looks as good. I think our spaceship looks as good. There was no expense spared. CBS was very invested in making this show look really good and they have put a lot of money into making that a reality for us. So we have a lot of support from the network to hopefully keep turning out show after show that will be of feature film quality.
What was the process for you in performing those scenes?
Well, luckily, because I had been Storm, I was used to flying. So I’ve had a lot of wire work and a lot of experience that way. So putting on that harness and those wires just seemed like something that I was used to doing. And I did actually take a real zero G flight so I have really experienced being weightless and understanding what that is. So that sense memory certainly helps me be able to when I have those wires on, to assimilate being in a weightless environment.
Tell us about your real zero gravity experience.
Yes, that was pretty amazing, actually. And the first time I felt the sense of weightlessness I was surprised that it took very little energy for me to move. You just kind of lift off the ground. And what also surprised me was that when you go upside down, because there’s no gravity you have no sense of being upside down. You feel exactly the same when you are upside down as when you are right side up and you start to lose sense of what is upside down and right side up.
And it was a very freeing experience. I can really understand why astronauts love to go up there and love to live in that medium and experience. It’s as close to being a bird and having that kind of freedom I think one can ever get. But I also have to say by 15 times going up and down and going through that I did, you know, vomit.
My body was done dealing. But it wasn’t as bad as this one guy who started to vomit after the first up and down so he had to go on this plane for an hour and a half as we kept plummeting up and down and going in and out of the zero G. He was like five shades of purple when we landed and he was strapped to his seat in the back of the plane and just hurled the entire time.
What other research did you do to prepare for “Extant?”
We have some consultants on our show. I spent time talking to one of the consultants. She was a female astronaut who sort of gave me some information about the psychology of going on a space mission, what that entails, the training that they have to go through. We took a trip to NASA with Allen Coulter, the director of the pilot. We sort of picked their brains there. Doing the zero gravity flight helped me an awful lot just to put that experience in my body.
I’ve watched tons of videos of space travel and space flight and it’s been about putting some of that scientific information in our heads, but at the core, at the end of the day this is really a human story about people. The fact that she’s a scientist becomes a little bit irrelevant pretty fast. That’s what she does as a job. John is a scientist. But it becomes very human. It’s about a husband and wife trying to live together. It’s about a woman trying to be a mother and raise a child. It’s about trying to answer some tough questions for herself and for her family.
So all that stuff is important but I also broke this down like I do any other character that I break down. It’s finding the heart of what’s making this woman tick and why is she doing what she’s doing. What’s driving her, what does she care about, all of the things that go into creating any character, really.
What was it that drew you to the character of Molly?
There were so many elements that drew me to it but probably the first one was being a mother. This was a character when I first read it that was so relatable to me. I felt like it was just in my DNA. I had a knowingness about this character. I had a fundamental understanding. While I’m not an astronaut or scientist, far, far from it, I still had an understanding about the human quality of this woman and her struggle to not only find time for herself, which is what she loves to do.
Our Molly goes into space for a year, but also to be a good mother. That’s the struggle I have struggled with since my kids were born. So that drew me to her. She’s also strong. She’s complicated. I’m complicated. But she has a will to survive, to win. She’s good at her heart. And I love playing strong, complicated characters who refuse to be victimized and that’s what our Molly is. And then when Steven Spielberg came along, a name like that you don’t really sneeze at and I know the quality of his work and I know that he loves this sort of genre.
These supernatural kind of stories are right in his wheelhouse. And for me I feel like the best writing now is on television. That’s been a real reality that I think all actors have been talking about for years now. But there was always a stigma with going to television. If you do movies, you can’t do television and I think that line is becoming very gray.
As a mother, could you ever imagine loving a robot child?
I think I struggle with that and my character, Molly, struggles with that which is why I so related to Molly when I first read the story. Having two children who are so very human and help me get in touch with my humanity on a daily basis, I struggle with if a robot would evoke the same kinds of feelings from me. Would I really be able to love a machine? Those are the questions I ask myself and Molly is asking herself in this show.
I don’t think there’s one thing that makes us human and I think that’s what this series all about. We are discovering that, as we are portraying these characters and telling this story, what does make us human? That’s a good question. And one of the questions that the series poses is can this robot become human, can we teach it to become human? Can we teach it to love? Can we give it free will? Will it act as human beings act over time? And we, as humans, can we love that that is not real, that is sort of fabricated?
These are all the questions that we are asking. What intrigued me about this series is to try to discover the answer to that. Can we teach someone to be human? Hopefully by the time we finish this series, we might have a better answer. We might be able to intelligently talk about it. But I think that’s what is exciting all of us right now. We are discovering. We are asking ourselves those questions. What is that, exactly, and can it be taught.
And if you believe that love is what makes you human, then that beckons the question, will Ethan, will the robot, ever be able to really love? Will he be able to love Molly and John, his parents? That’s the question that our show is also asking.
Since she has this unknown thing inside her, is there a bit of a Rosemary’s Baby aspect to “Extant?”
It’s funny you should say that. That is an element to our show. It won’t be the entire element of our show but there is a period that we’re going to go through where it will have elements of Rosemary’s Baby because she’s having it with something that is unknown. It is for us to decide throughout the series what this entity is, what it wants, will it stay here, is it really her baby, is it just an offspring, what is it really. These are questions that we are asking.
