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The Official Supernatural Magazine: When you auditioned for Supernatural, did you know that you were auditioning to play an angel?
Julie McNiven: Not when I did the first audition, but when I went back they had me read a couple of scenes from the next episode, episode 10. All of a sudden I was like, “Angel Anna? Oooh!”
Did that affect the way you played Anna in the first episode, do you think, knowing that she was an angel?
No, I don’t think so. I think in the first episode [I Know What You Did Last Summer] she really has no idea; she’s not lying or trying to be sneaky. She truly is innocent. They gave me this Girl, Interrupted critique, which was helpful. When you think, “Oh, I play an angel,” what does that mean? How do I play an angel? It’s almost as if you look at it as she’s a person with circumstances, just like everybody else, only her circumstances are supernatural!
You made a great transition from the vulnerable Anna to the angel Anna. That must have been quite meaty for you, essentially playing two characters…
Definitely. She finds out that her parents are dead and her world’s over, and then all of a sudden she realizes that… it’s not like she forgets that her parents are dead, it’s just that she realizes that there’s something more, that there’s really no time to sit around and be vulnerable about her parents and her life. Except, of course, there’s time to sit around and feel a little bit bummed that she’s not gonna feel any more! That, I think, is a big struggle. Knowing that she has to do the right thing, but she doesn’t really want to. Anna doesn’t want to leave the human world, the world where they feel things.
It’s a really bizarre concept, isn’t it? How do you play the part of a character who has no emotions?
I think it’s not that they don’t have emotions – this is my take on it – but I think that their world up in Heaven seems very militant; what I imagine being in the military would feel like. There’s not much time to sit around and feel; to think about feelings and have emotions. You have a job, you’re given an order, and you follow it. When these angels come to Earth and witness human emotions so closely, perhaps that creates emotions within themselves.
You’ve obviously put a lot of thought into this!
I have some books waiting for me at the library – one of them is the Encyclopedia of Angels – just the angel mythology, because I’m going to be returning in episode 16 [On The Head Of A Pin]. I actually got an email from Eric the other day, because I knew I was going to do some interviews coming up and I thought, “I don’t know if I’m supposed to say anything!” And he said, “Don’t worry about it, tell them you’re a full-blown angel who’s on the run from Heaven,” which I’m so fascinated by. So I asked my father and he said, “You should definitely read The Man Without a Country,” which is a short story written during the American Civil War [that deals with] patriotism. It involves a man who disowns America and spends the rest of his life living on ships, never seeing America again, and at the end he just wants to see his home because he realized how much he missed it. I thought, that’s a really interesting one to read, because I don’t know what it’s like to not want to be in the home that you’ve had forever. [In this case, the home] Anna’s rejecting is Heaven. There are different stories, I’m sure, within angel mythology, which I’ve never really looked into before. I’m sure there’s something that I’ll be able to use.
Read the full interview in issue 10 of The Official Supernatural Magazine on newsstands now.
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