New York Times
Sunday, Sept. 29
AN ACTION HEROINE IS
GIVEN A WORTHY ADVERSARY: MOM
By STEVE VINEBERG
SANTA MONICA, Calif. _ Last year on ABC's "Alias," the heroine,
Sydney Bristow _ a double agent working with the CIA to bring down a
malevolent spy organization _ discovered at midseason that her mother
had been a Soviet spy whose domestic life as Laura Bristow had been a
carefully engineered facade.
Up to that point it was Sydney's father and fellow double agent,
Jack, whom she had suspected of hiding a shadowy past. In the mode
beloved of "Alias" fans, revelation followed revelation at a gripping
pace, and in the final hours of the show's maiden season, Sydney
learned that Laura Bristow, supposedly killed in a car crash when
Sydney was a little girl, was in fact alive and still in the spy
business. In the last scene, a captured Sydney was brought face to
face with her mother _ though we saw only Laura's back.
Another revelation was still to come. Early in the summer, ABC signed
the Swedish film and theater actress Lena Olin to join the series in
the role of Sydney's mother, whose real name is Irina Derevko. Olin,
familiar to American movie audiences from her performances in "The
Unbearable Lightness of Being," "Enemies, a Love Story"
and "Chocolat" (the last directed by her husband, Lasse Hallstroem),
joins perhaps the classiest cast ever assembled for an action series.
In addition to the Emmy-nominated Jennifer Garner as Sydney, "Alias"
features two gifted Broadway performers, Victor Garber (Jack) and Ron
Rifkin (who plays Arvin Sloane, chief of SD-6, the rogue
organization), as well as the television veteran Carl Lumbly as
Sydney's SD-6 partner, Marcus Dixon.
"It's a very complicated world," Olin said last month at her Santa
Monica hotel, during the first week of shooting. "And it's exciting,
because we don't really know where the character is going to go.
Every week we get this new bag of candy; there are new sensations all
the time." The air of secrecy that shrouds her character is in
keeping with the series' predilection for layered surprises and 11th-
hour plot reversals.
All we know, going into Sept. 29's premiere, is that Laura/Irina is
Russian-born, that she staged her own death and that she possesses
undefined powers that, as chronicled in a centuries-old prophecy,
make her a singular threat to the world's future.
"Laura has to be a powerful, mysterious, beautiful, sexy, dark,
athletic woman," said the series' creator, J.J. Abrams. "She has to
be strong; she has to be a leader. And you have to believe that
Victor Garber's character would have been devastated over her
betrayal of him, and that she could have manipulated him into
thinking she was in love with him. Visually and aesthetically, it's
perfect casting."
The daughter of the veteran Swedish actor Stig Olin, she trained at
the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm, where Ingmar Bergman (who
had directed her father in "Summer Interlude" and persuaded her to
enroll in drama school) featured her in his 1984 television
drama "After the Rehearsal," which was released theatrically in the
United States.
"I think I was blessed," she said. "Bergman gave me such confidence,
in a business where confidence is ripped apart. And I worked a lot
with Bo Widerberg, too, a director who created a universe for his
actors." (Beyond his native Sweden, Widerberg, who died in 1997, was
best known for the 1967 movie "Elvira Madigan.")
And then she had the good fortune to appear in two of the most
remarkable movies of the '80s. In Philip Kaufman's "Unbearable
Lightness of Being," she played Sabina, the artist who has an ongoing
affair with a Czech doctor (Daniel Day-Lewis) while remaining close
friends with his wife (Juliette Binoche). In Paul
Mazursky's "Enemies, a Love Story," set in the late 1940s among the
New York community of Polish Holocaust survivors, she was the
brilliant and neurotic Masha, who persuades Ron Silver's character to
marry her, even though he already has two other wives. The characters
Olin played in these films shared qualities that became her
trademarks as an actress: spirit, sensuality, intelligence and a
penchant for irony (sometimes playful, sometimes wounding).
"We were looking all around the world for someone who could play
Sabina," Kaufman recalled, "but I knew I'd found her when I saw Lena
Olin walking across a hotel lobby. There was beauty and confidence in
her walk; talking to her, you realized how smart she is, and how
funny. The Swedish actors are highly professional in the way the
British actors are, but she also had that emotional power that made
her exciting to work with."
The notion of casting a distinguished European actress on a weekly
action series is only startling if you make the mistake of thinking
of "Alias" as a conventional spy melodrama. "The action elements are
the icing on the cake," Olin said. "It's the characters who are most
interesting to watch." Indeed, "Alias" is to espionage thrillers
what "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" is to stories of the supernatural:
Abrams uses the conventions to tell a more searching story.
"Most spy shows are about the gimmicks and the gadgets," Abrams
said. "But our hope has always been to do an A version of a B genre _
to put together the kind of cast that you'd more likely find in a
traditional drama. And "Alias' is about more than just who Sydney's
playing in this wig and this outfit. It's truly about identity, and
about a child navigating the waters of a divorced family. That's what
makes the show so emotional."
Garner's Sydney spent most of last season struggling to work out her
relationship with a father from whom she'd been estranged most of her
life, and whose unspoken love for her she had to intuit from his
often clandestine acts of protectiveness and self-sacrifice. It was
her vanished mother whom she'd been accustomed to seeing,
nostalgically, as the rock of her childhood. Then she discovered that
her views of both parents needed to be overhauled. The second season
of "Alias" promises to be about Sydney's redefining of her
relationships with both Jack and Laura. And the thought of seeing
Garner play scenes with Olin all season is mouthwatering.
"It's incredible to see them together," Abrams confirmed. "It's like
watching a terrific athlete playing against an Olympian."
© New York Times News Service 2002
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