Pam Grier Is So Committed to Them: The Scare “That My Nose Is Going to Bleed”
The post Pam Grier Is So Committed to Them: The Scare “That My Nose Is Going to Bleed” appeared first on Consequence.
When Pam Grier found out that Them: The Scare creator Little Marvin was interested in speaking with her for a role, she was nervous. “I didn’t want to put all my emotions on the table, to be squashed and slammed and frayed,” she tells Consequence. “I have anxiety attacks.”
However, she says, Marvin drew her in with “his conversation of craft and ability and passion drew me in. I like horror as he likes horror, and there’s not enough of it.”
Grier’s career has been a fascinating one, from her early days working on Roger Corman B-movies before becoming a screen icon as the blaxploitation hero of Foxy Brown and Coffy. And since that time she’s worked steadily across film and TV, with a late-career renaissance courtesy of Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown giving her a major boost, and high-profile roles in The L Word and This Is Us keeping that going.
Having worked widely across both mediums, Grier feels that there’s no difference between film and TV “when it comes to the acting craft of emotion. The television screen’s just smaller and the film screen is larger, and you take a little bit more time.”
Grier notes that “when I do the work, we’re going to come in under budget because I’m gonna do it right. That’s how I consider my work — like in theater, there is no take two. I’m living it as take one. That’s it. If you wanna do take two with a different color hair or lipstick, whatever, that’s fine, because it’s still going to be take one.”
In the second season of his Prime Video anthology series Them, Grier plays Athena, the mother of an LAPD detective trying to solve a gruesome murder. Grier says Marvin pitched her “this incredible story about not only political discourse and psychological medical issues and paranormal [stuff]. It’s like, wow, that’s a lot.” For, not only does Athena have her own secrets, but the season is set against the backdrop of 1991 Los Angeles — a truly chaotic time following the Rodney King assault and subsequent court case.
“I find it all refreshing. It’s not derivative. It’s not copied. It’s all original,” she says. “I expect Little Marvin to explore even more dangerous edges to take us to — he is that confident and we believe in him. And after seeing this, he took chances that many would not, whether it was budget or money, or script or time, or just confidence. He took us there, and I’m very proud to have worked with him on this piece.”
In the early 1990s, Grier wasn’t living in Los Angeles, as she was taking care of aging family members during that time, but she came to the city frequently for work, and remembers what the city was like very well. “When you’re outside of the forest, you can see the trees a lot better. I was commuting back and forth and running home. And I’d be in a fancy rental car and get stopped by the police force and interrogated — I was doing a series and was stopped at 4:00 AM in the morning for just being in the neighborhood, and I was afraid to make the wrong move, sneeze, you know? That was that type of martial law that I had to live through.”
Adds Grier, “There were times where I was absolutely afraid of the city burning down again” — “again” being a reference to the civil unrest that occurred in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1965, which Grier witnessed personally while on a gospel group tour. “Talk about vulnerability, talk about flames, and seeing the response and the reaction of a community that could not understand one another, didn’t communicate with anyone. That’s fear, to see the loss of life and love being torn down in a beautiful city.”
The time period is only one aspect of what makes the series so terrifying — which Grier says made it that much more compelling to her. Marvin, she says, “convinced me to go on this incredible journey because I love horror. I love Bones [the 2001 film, in which Grier starred with Snoop Dogg]. I love John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars. I love Stephen King. I was hoping [Marvin] would have it, and he brought it.”
Them: The Scare (Prime Video)
That said, Grier brought it too. When it comes to her commitment to whatever part she plays, she says, “I’m so there that my nose is going to bleed. My pulse is going to race. It’s gonna take me a bit to recover because of my intense adhesion to life, so that I can bring the substance to what they need. We may not have to use special effects or artificial blood. There is something that I can bring that is sufficient in emotion, and I have been rewarded with that.”
As she continues, “There were times where I’m saying, ‘Okay, just get me through the day. Just get me through the day. Because I have to believe and live and breathe and bleed this scene.’ My anxiety, my safety filters, my nets were down. And that’s a good feeling as an actor, to be able to do that around your director and cast and crew. It was just wonderful. A wonderful experience.”
Her major issue was about what might happen afterwards, in terms of her mental health. “Can I recover? Will I be needing therapy? I’m like, these are serious issues. You never know what an actor has lived through and can revisit safely, mentally. I was hoping that I’d be okay when I left this project — I was immersed in it, scarred for life probably, but I wanted to do it. I sacrificed my mental security and enjoyed the experience. And I am so grateful that [Marvin] had the confidence in me bringing what he needed.”
Marvin, she continues, “didn’t push me off [the edge]. But I did turn around and grip his ankles — ‘don’t let me go alone.'”
It helps, she adds, that Marvin said “he would pay my therapy bill afterwards.”
Them Season 2 premieres Friday, April 26th on Prime Video.
Pam Grier Is So Committed to Them: The Scare “That My Nose Is Going to Bleed”
Liz Shannon Miller
Popular Posts
