[Warning: General spoilers ahead.]
After a bye week, Shoot the Messenger returns Monday with an all-new episode that finds Simon and Mary working background on the case when new clues put Daisy and Lutz back in each other’s orbit. Sam deals with one bombshell while another one looms and Daisy struggles with whether to tell her sister what she knows about her clandestine boyfriend.
Daisy also spends some time clearing the air with her sponsor, Tony (Rick Fox), and follows his advice when he tells her she needs to get right with herself about the people and things she’s still turning to for solace.
When I spoke with Elyse Levesque, we chatted about those sponsor scenes, and as we previously discussed, the block shooting came into play because she and Fox hit the ground running with rehearsal and filming as soon as he arrived in Toronto.
“He was such a champion. He got there Thursday night, and was given the scenes for the next day,” she recalls. “When he showed up, he said. ‘Let’s just run it and run it and run it.’ We sat in the trailer and went over and over and over our lines. It made all the difference in the world. It ended up being a really fun, freeing experience. We had to go on instinct and trust that Sudz [Sutherland] was there to guide us.”
One of the pieces of Daisy’s backstory that was mentioned early in the series is that she came over to the news desk from entertainment, but Levesque says we won’t see that onscreen. “We don’t ever actually find out what that was, other than that she was ambitious and wants to be on that side of things,” she says. “I think she has such a desire to prove herself and she feels like that kind of outlet gives her more of an opportunity to make a name for herself.”
Working in hard news also puts her in peril on a regular basis, and Levesque says that’s a combination of ambition and addiction. “I think [she] wants to get to the bottom of things. I do think there’s something that when you’re sober, you’re jonesing for a fix, some sort of excitement, looking for something else to curb the desire to drink or do drugs,” she explains. “I think the adrenaline she gets from putting herself in dangerous situations is [her fix].”
Levesque got to play the killer in an episode of Motive‘s final season, and says it was fun onscreen and behind the scenes “I loved doing Motive. It was a really nice cast and familiar set because a lot of the people on the cast and crew were people I had worked with on Stargate,” she points out. “And I got to play this great character, a very fashionable killer.”
This fall, Levesque also guested on Notorious, playing a young woman raped by a rock star who faces a backlash when she comes forward with her story. “[It was] very relevant to things going on in the media,” she says. “That was tough one to get into, but a really amazing experience. One of the nicest sets I’ve ever been on. The two leads on that show [Piper Perabo and Daniel Sunjata] are the nicest people.”
While Levesque couldn’t tease too much about the rest of Shoot the Messenger‘s first season, she does promise, “it tests [Daisy’s] sanity and sobriety.”
Levesque is now at work on the final season of Orphan Black, which returns next summer.
Shoot the Messenger airs Mondays at 9 pm/9:30 NT on CBC. Here’s a sneak peek of “Strange Bedfellows.”
#ShootTM returns November 14th with another provocative episode! Next Monday catch the @GillerPrize at 9PM on @CBC! pic.twitter.com/lCqzJf95B5
— Shoot The Messenger (@ShootTM) November 2, 2016
Photos Courtesy of CBC and CTV; Video Courtesy of CBC.
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