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think that that mixed tone was part of what I
liked about the book as well.”
Helping O’Brien and the writers in that
task is director Kari Skogland, a veteran of
shows like The Handmaid’s Tale and Penny
Dreadful (and recently announced as the
director of Marvel’s Falcon & Winter Soldier
series) who was tasked with setting the tone
in the first two episodes. “I came to her and
I said: ‘I think that the answer is that Vic is
kind of the anchor or the pivot point between
these two different worlds, the real world
and the supernatural world, and her bridge
is kind of a bridge between them’,” explains
O’Brien. “So I felt like she was the key; we
stay focused on her and then we kind of
ground the supernatural in the real world.
And so Kari brought in ideas about how to
do that, one that comes to mind immediately
is that she said she never wanted to see the
bridge appear or disappear. It’s either there
or it’s not there and that way when we see it,
it feels like a real bridge and when we don’t
see it, we don’t see it. But there’s never a
kind of science fiction-y vibe to it!”
Of course, the other key element is casting.
In the book, we meet Vic at age eight before
following her into adulthood, but O’Brien
tells us that the only way to make the show
work was to bring the character into her
teens. “You say to yourself ‘do we cast a
child actor, do we play this part of the story
in flashback, do we throw out this part of
the story?’. And the truth is I didn’t really
want to do any of those things because I
was so interested in that part of the story.
Vic grappling with her parents and who
they are and where she sits in the world, Vic
encountering her bridge for the first time and
Vic encountering Charlie Manx for the first
time, which all happens in the book when
she’s very young, I thought that they were so
fundamental to who she is as a character. I
wanted to make sure that our Vic, meaning
the actor who is going to take us through the
series, was the actor who took us through
that portion of the book. So I made the
decision to just age Vic up a little bit.”
O’Brien settled on up-and-coming
Australian actor Ashleigh Cummings, who
impressed in 2016’s gruelling Hounds Of
Love and who immediately convinces in this
crucial role. “I got very lucky with Ashleigh
Cummings,” smiles O’Brien. “Vic McQueen
in the novel, she’s one of my favourite
fictional characters of all time. She’s a
regular kid, but what she has going for her
is courage in spades and over the course of
the first season she learns to harness it. The
thing that was tricky was that eventually
this kid needs to have the grit to go toe-to-
toe with Charlie Manx, in our case played
by Zachary Quinto who is obviously a very
powerful actor. At the same time, whenVic McQueen is a
fascinating heroine.