Episode Report Card Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Bride of Kiefer speaks
By Gustave | Season 1 | Episode 25 | Aired on 05.30.2002
Yeah. Not to be crude, but it didn't take long either.
A little longer than a commercial break.
Exactly. [laughs] So I really stand behind how we did it.
Not to get into my own personal details or anything, but I've had my share of sexual trauma myself, and I only reacted once I felt that I was in a safe enough place to break down and cry.
There were a lot of people on our boards who felt that what you did was heroic. You were using your body to survive.
I think that a lot of people aren't used to seeing women not cry. We are so used to seeing women characters cry, and that becomes our programmable expectation. When these kinds of things happen to this kind of a person, they do this. We're not used to seeing someone bravely endure something like that.
It's almost like a Kabuki drama or something. There are these traditional postures that are catalogued in the these ancient texts, and it's like there's a "rape posture" and you didn't assume it. So a lot of people thought it must be offensive because they couldn't categorize it at all.
Yeah. I'll admit that there are probably a few moments in the show where I watched it later and went, "Oh, I could have done that differently," but not with that. I have no regrets about the rape scene.
When you read the script, were you concerned about how big a deal the scene would be?
No. I mean, I get more concerned over things like amnesia.
So you're reading your script for this week's shooting and you discover that your character is going to have amnesia. What is that like for you?
Well. I went to Stephen Hopkins and said, "I'm really really concerned about this. I don't know if I can pull this off." And he said, "You should be concerned about this." [laughs] Hardly reassuring. But it was like everything else on that show. They pay me to act out what's in the script, and I took a swing at it. I think I may have gotten away with it because [laughs] the rape stuff was still going on in everyone's mind so no one was paying much attention to the amnesia.
I don't know how the story played on TV, but on our set it became the source of a lot of jokes. Jokes at my expense, usually. They'd call me to the set and I'd say, "I don't know where that is!"
Or, what is this, a Latin American soap opera?
Exactly. It took me a while to watch those shows, and when I finally did, I didn't think they were so bad. I think it worked within the storyline. Maybe in a few months I'll watch again and go, "Oh my God, what was I fucking thinking?" but I thought it looked okay.