We’ve seen zombie Laura in action- now get a glimpse behind the scenes!
“I think we both knew that the ladies [Laura Moon and Bilquis] needed more attention in the show than they have in the book,” began Bryan Fuller, showrunner for American Gods in our roundtables for the show. This desire to showcase more than just what was on the page. Neil Gaiman himself said he wondered what the characters were doing off “screen” in the novel, but novels can only go on for so long. Thus we get the fourth installment of American Gods, an episode dedicated to Laura Moon (Emily Browning) entirely. So what else did we learn at our roundtables? Check it out!
1. We don’t know why Laura was called to Anubis now, but we’ll find out later.
One thing Fuller was completely mum on- What drew Laura to Anubis (Chris Obi) in the first place. Fuller would only give us a secretive smile and say, “You’ll have to watch the whole season, and then you’ll learn what.” You’d better make good on that promise, Bryan! We are dying to know the answer to this question!
Ricky Whittle explained his love for the Laura backstory because he enjoyed the departure from the novel, “[S]o it can be fresh for everyone, not just those people who like Neil [Gaiman’s] work, myself included.”
2. Ricky Whittle thought the portrayal of Shadow’s relationship with Laura from her perspective had a lot to say about modern relationships.
“I feel like it’s the perfect example today of where we are in relationships that we believe are instead of actually paying attention to what they actually are. You know, you look at Shadow and Shadow kind of believes he’s the perfect guy. He gives up a life of crime, he gets a good job. He’s trying to be the good guy, he’s trying to make love to his wife instead of listening to his wife who says, ‘No I don’t want you to make love, I want you to fuck me. I don’t want you to have a nice job, I want a criminal, I want danger,’ but Shadow is doing what every guy thinks is right. He’s like, ‘I’m doing what I think you want instead of listening.’”
Thanks for the free relationship advice, Ricky. We’ll take it.
Whittle also though it was especially important to see Shadow from Laura’s point of view. “Shadow idolizes Laura. He doesn’t see her for who she was . . . She goes from loving Shadow and feeling comfortable, but she doesn’t really know what she wants she’s broken herself. To dying and all of a sudden realizing what she had, and what she lost and what he actually does for her: He literally brings her back to life. And so the seesaw kind of swings the other way. Shadow was absolutely infatuated, she calls him puppy. To now, ‘You’re not exactly what I thought you were. You cheated on me. You weren’t that good of a person,’ and so this going to be an interesting love story.”
3. Emily Browning couldn’t watch the lynching scene being shot
Emily Browning obviously had to be there when they filmed episode 1’s lynching scene, because she became a part of it in the episode for. Whittle told us, “[She] couldn’t watch because it upset her so much. So she just waited in her trailer until everything was done and then she said, ‘Can I come out now?’”
Later, Emily said, “That was the big night for me and I remember coming to set that day and it wasn’t Ricky it was his stunt double, but the first thing I saw was him hanging and I was like, ‘I don’t really want to be here.’ It was really very, very intense and heavy and Ricky was an angel for that whole night. He kept being like, ‘When you’re tired, when you’re done, I know you’re not going to complain, so you tell me and I’ll tell them that you’re done. He’s just an angel.”
4. Emily Browning had a lot of say on the expansion of Laura and insight into the character.
When we asked Emily Browning what she thought of the standalone episode 4 as a feature for her and Laura Moon, She said, “Thankfully Bryan and Michael just naturally wanted to expand their female characters and [didn’t] take a lot more convincing as an, ‘I can’t just write for white dudes.’ So I’m obviously very glad that they decided to do that. I think Laura’s a difficult character, she’s very abrasive and crass and does some very morally questionable things. So it was really helpful to have episode four where we got to learn a bit about her backstory. I think it doesn’t necessarily make her any more likeable, but I think it helps people to empathize with her, to see where she’s at in her life before she meets Shadow and when Shadow’s in prison. She’s depressed, I suppose, she’s having a rough time of it so I think it is hopefully going to be helpful for people to see why she does the things that she does and why she’s the person that she is.”
5. How Bryan Fuller and Michael Green hooked Emily Browning on playing Laura Moon
When Bryan and Michael were trying to sell Emily on playing Laura Moon, told her, “Death is the best thing that ever happened to Laura.” Emily’s take on that is this, along with a spoiler for the rest of the season: “[I]t frees Laura up to realize that the thing that she worships and the thing that she believes in ironically is love . . . Her whole journey for the rest of the season is trying to get that love back and I do think it’s ironic that sort of the least lovable character in the whole show me the one that’s that’s trying to get her love back.”
She talks about her conversations with Green and Fuller as well: “I had said to Bryan and Michael before I don’t really want to play a character that’s just trying to find her husband. If you tell me I’m the heart and soul of the show I’m walking away right now. I’m so sick of those meetings where they said, ‘Well you play the wife, and she’s a small role but she’s really the heart and soul,’ I can’t. And Bryan said, ‘No, she’s the spleen.’ And I said, ‘Great, that sounds fantastic.’ So I think it’s interesting that kind of dichotomy between this person with no emotional intelligence, no self-awareness, unintentionally cruel to everybody around her, and her journey is about finding her husband. It’s kind of amazing to me.”
6. Was Laura actually depressed?
Browning has some thoughts about Laura and whether or not she suffers from depression herself, but as for the show: “We never really go into depth about what it is that Laura really struggling with. I mean even the scene where she has the bug spray in the hot tub of a bunch of people have said, ‘Oh so she tries to kill herself,’ and I didn’t even see it that way I think it’s just that she I mean she’s getting high in my mind. But she’s also in a place in her life where, if it did kill her she wouldn’t really be bothered. But that I think she’s that she sort of smashing her head against the wall trying to feel something.”
7. Emily didn’t train for that fight scene at all
“[I] didn’t do any training. Because I didn’t have time, we were just there every day. But the cool thing about Laura- I’ve done action stuff before where I had to train because you’re meant to look like you’re really good at what you’re doing. Laura is not, she can kind of be flailing. The only reason that she wins that fight is because she somehow is imbued with this crazy strength. So the fact that she’s kind of scrambling around and knocks someone out and is it, ‘What?’ She doesn’t understand how it’s happening. We didn’t want to be perfectly choreographed or anything.”
In addition to watching her co-star and his stunt double get lynched, Emily was drenched in gallons of blood at 4 AM in Toronto going into winter in a light spring funeral dress in the rain. They needed to wrap her in emergency blankets. And aren’t elaborate fights usually choreographed? “It wasn’t really choreographed so there were a few times when I almost got punched in the face. It was great! It was messy and it was fun, but I think the way that scene turned out is cool.”
Pablo Schreiber and Emily also teased a Mad Sweeney/Laura Moon road trip that will parallel Wednesday and Shadow’s big road trip in future episodes, so make sure that you stick with American Gods to see what was described by Pablo as, “Bonnie and Clyde, but where Clyde is a zombie.”
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