Prime performers
Stars including Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Octavia Spencer and Felicity Ward previewed their new series at a Prime Video event outlining its mission to create a television destination for women. DQ has all the details.
While Prime Video has successfully cornered the ‘Dad TV’ market with series such as Reacher, Jack Ryan and Bosch – shows that are targeted to appeal, not exclusively, to men – the streamer has a new audience in its sights.
Prime Video’s Trailblazers event in London yesterday celebrated women on and off screen as actors including Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Octavia Spencer gave an insight into their work and previewed upcoming series heading to the streamer.
They were introduced by Jennifer Salke, head of Amazon MGM Studios, and Kelly Day, VP of Prime Video International, who revealed their “personal and professional mission to create and make a destination for women all over the world to come to Prime Video,” before previewing shows such as the Sophie Turner-led Haven and The Girlfriend, starring and directed by Robin Wright.
“You can see that this is not ‘Dad TV.’ Maybe dads are going to like it,” Salke said. “It’s made to be addictive for women and date night and everything in between.”
“We are so passionate about our female-led slate. This has really been years in the works,” said Day. “A lot of it has been led by this The Summer I Turned Pretty and Maxon Hall. We really believe that women of all ages love and enjoy the stories, and some dads too.
But we’ve expanded the storytelling for women so much and ignited a lot of passion from our female viewers, which is really exciting to see.”
Here, some of the stars who attended the event discuss their latest shows, their work behind the scenes and breaking boundaries in the film and television business.
Octavia Spencer (Hidden Figures) will star opposite Hannah Waddingham (Ted Lasso) in an action-adventure series created by producer Tessa Coates (Feelgood). But she wasn’t always destined to become an actor.
Spencer: I came to acting by way of relieving myself of the dreams that my mum had for me. She wanted me to be a lawyer or doctor, and I’m a hypochondriac and I knew I couldn’t be a doctor. She passed away when I was 17 and I knew I needed to do what was in my heart. It was not easy, but it was a journey I was excited to take.
The best advice my mum ever gave me was, “You have to train.” If someone was going to hire you as a fry cooker, you have to learn how to do that job. For me, it was about studying as hard as I could, reading every play, all of that, but also taking practical jobs on set. I learned so much about how very necessary crews are and how invaluable it is as a family. You can’t make a film or television with just an actor. You need an entire group of professionals. It is a job that I cherish.
Getting into character, Spencer starts with research and learning everything she can about the role.
Spencer: Then it is a lot of collaboration with the filmmakers. I choose the overall project because I want to know that I am going to be working with a collaborator who will guide me in the areas I can definitely fall prey to, but I rely a lot on my scene partners as well. So there is all of the research one must do and then there is the discovery process when we’re in rehearsal and then just breathing life into the words that the brilliant writers write. So my work begins with the script and ends with the actual production.
Her upcoming Prime Video project alongside Waddingham has a relationship between two women at the centre of the story, with “action, humour and heart.”
Spencer: Tessa has a way of telling a story – you’re on the edge of your seat. [Hearing it] I felt like I was a little girl getting a bedtime story. Both are women of a certain age who have known each other for 20 years, and you think you know a person when you’ve known them for 20 years. It turns out my best friend is kind of an assassin. That’s all I’m going to tell you about that because I want you guys to tune in, but the process when they were pitching it to us, I was on the edge of my seat.
Felicity Ward stars in the Australian remake of British comedy The Office, playing Hannah Howard. It debuts on Prime Video on October 18 outside the US.
Ward: Ricky Gervais approved a female lead – just in case anyone is angry! I did zero preparation. I read the script and I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is every annoying part of my personality.’ It was just all in the script. I don’t know how much the head writer had seen of me before; it was like she got the tapes and edited out the charm and the bits that people liked and then just wrote a character. So it was just there, and Hannah was born.
Maria Sten was revealed to be leading an untitled spin-off focusing on her character from Prime Video’s Reacher, private investigator Frances Neagley, as she seeks justice after a friend’s suspicious death…
Sten: I love the character; she’s so fun to play and quirky and has so much complexity, so I’m excited for the world to be able to dive further into her world and see who she is, separate from Reacher.
I love doing character work. That’s how I was trained, so when I first booked the job, I read the books she was in [the Reacher novels by Lee Child on which the original show is based] and did all that work and background and got into her psyche. I had it all there, and I’m just thrilled to be able to expand upon it further. The scripts are amazing from what I’ve read so far. They stand on their own. It’s still Reacher – splashy action and quirky dialogue – but it has something that is very much not Reacher, and it’s incredible to be able to achieve the same fun tone and make it its own and expand on who she is in her vulnerability.
Jessica Raine returns to Prime Video on October 18 for the second season of time-loop psychological thriller The Devil’s Hour. She plays Lucy Chambers, a social worker dealing with insomnia who is drawn into the hunt for a serial killer.
Raine: We left season one with Lucy in a fire in a house. It did not look good for her. We see another Lucy, which is Detective Inspector Lucy, looking on at that fire. Season two opens up with Detective Inspector Lucy’s back story. So you see young Lucy. She has witnessed her mother’s death; she is going off the rails. She gets pulled back by a detective who brings her back into the fold and she realises she’d make a great detective.
You feel like you’re on safe ground in episode one. You feel like, ‘OK, we’re in a detective drama. This feels OK.’ About two-thirds in, it whips the rug away and you’re back to feeling very queasy. There are questions which get answered from season one in season two. [Lucy’s son] Isaac disappeared in season one and, suddenly, you get the answers of where he went. I found it thrilling. There were loads of Easter eggs planted all over the shop, and the audience kind of becomes the detective.
There is a huge jigsaw puzzle that you have to keep watching. You can’t be floating off, looking at your phone. We need to not look at our phones so much. You really concentrate and you’re really rewarded. It is like the satisfaction of putting a 2,000-piece jigsaw puzzle together.
Matilda De Angelis takes the lead in Citadel: Diana, the Italian entry in Prime Video’s spy franchise, which debuts on October 10.
De Angelis: It’s a very different Italy we are portraying, far from clichés and common standards. I guess in that sense, Milan as a character is not a very typical city when you think about Italy. You think about Venice or Naples or Rome. Milan, because of its architecture and history, is a very international city. We are in 2030, so a near future, and despite all of the action, it is a character-driven drama. We take a deep dive into the world, so we are telling the point of view of the bad guys, which is kind of cool and interesting.
The actor underwent “months” of training for the action-packed role, in a series that features approximately 850 stunts.
De Angelis: I have a background as a gymnast so I remember being so happy with doing that. When I had the chance to do something that felt natural to me, I did it. We don’t get the chance that much in Italy, I would say, as an Italian actress, to perform action and be a part of something this big and challenging. I really saw it as an opportunity for growth.
Priyanka Chopra Jonas is at the centre of the Citadel universe, with her and Richard Madden starring in the US flagship drama as two elite agents from the titular global spy agency trying to rebuild their lives.
Chopra Jonas: I was at that time [when I landed the Citadel job] making my journey from Indian movies to Hollywood and finding partners and figuring out what I wanted to think. I knew I wanted to think outside the box. I wanted to meet people who thought outside the box. [Citadel] is not something that’s ever been achieved and it takes somebody to have immense courage to greenlight something like that, to be able to stand behind something like that.
Right now we have one in India, Honey Bunny, and Citadel: Diana, which is the Italian version, and both stories are connected to ours. The characters are interconnected, but they’re made by local filmmakers without interference from each other. We had a writers room and 30 to 50 writers discussing how each show is connected.
Citadel marked the first time Chopra Jonas received pay parity with her co-stars.
Chopra Jonas: You would have expected Tom Cruise or Bruce Willis or a guy who saves the world over and over again. Was [the fact that it wasn’t a male lead] because we had a female executive? We need women behind the camera. We need women in roles of power. We need women who make decisions, and I have to say it was the first time in my career that I received pay parity. It was not something I even thought was possible. Did that happen because the head of the studio was a female? Maybe. But you know that’s how the landscape changes – when women support women. There is so much that makes an example out Citadel, and a lot of that is to do with it being top-down [with female leadership].
It was “really scary” for the Indian actor to “dare to say” she wanted to play the leads in English-language shows.
Chopra Jonas: When I started doing this 10 or 12 years ago, there were very few who had done it, and there are still very few people who are continuing to do so, and that is something I’m really grateful to see. Today, the diversity we see, the kind of stories we’re telling, the amount of cultures being represented, the hyper-specific stories we’re able to access as a viewer, it is incredible to have the platform of giants like Prime Video. Those were huge challenges and I feel really wonderful to have partnerships where I can take a movie of mine, which might be super obscure and really specific, and know there will be a place for it, which was a huge challenge many years ago.
tagged in: Citadel: Diana, Felicity Ward, Jessica Raine, Maria Sten, Matilda De Angelis, Octavia Spencer, Prime Video, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Reacher, The Devil’s Hour, The Office