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A couple pictures of Emily at a Halloween party that she attending last weekend have been added to the gallery. If you’ve been reading her tweets lately, then you probably know that she was shopping for a costume with Revenge co-star Ashley Madekwe. Looks like she went with a 1920’s flapper costume. Cute!
Also, check out a short sneak peek of tomorrow night’s ‘Revenge’:
And lastly, a couple new articles about Revenge featuring some quotes from Emily:
‘Revenge’ sweet for Canadian actress VanCamp
By: Nick PatchWith its sudsy romantic storylines, backstabbing beauties and absurdly opulent surroundings, the insidiously infectious “Revenge” has been hailed by many TV critics as the fall season’s top guilty pleasure.
And Canadian star Emily VanCamp has no qualms with that description, even if the “guilty” part sometimes implies a rather back-handed compliment.
“I think we’ve really embraced the fact that yeah, we are sort of a juicy throwback to the old night-time soaps and I think if you try to fight that, then you’re taking yourself too seriously and that comes out in the product,” the affable VanCamp said in a recent telephone interview.
“I mean, the stakes are so high with these characters, and there’s so much drama and intensity, that if we didn’t allow it to be a bit campy, it wouldn’t work — it’s gotta have that sort of surreal, kind of heightened Hitchcockian feel to it or else it does not work.“So I love it. It’s all been so positive. I don’t care what (the media) wants to call it, as long as they’re telling people to watch it.”
So far, attracting viewers hasn’t been a problem.
“Revenge” is among the fall TV season’s brighter stars, earning a full-season pickup from ABC weeks into its run after drawing viewers in droves on Wednesday nights (in Canada, the show is broadcast on Citytv).
Perhaps the primary reason for the widespread appeal is the show’s pulpy premise. VanCamp plays Emily, a cold-blooded social assassin who aims to avenge the death of her father by moving to an abundantly affluent neighbourhood in the Hamptons and systematically destroying the lives of the duplicitous, well-heeled locals who allowed her dad to take the fall for crimes he didn’t commit.
Viewers have revelled in VanCamp’s morally dubious takedowns. In one early episode, she manipulates a state senator — who helped put her father behind bars — into retiring from public life so his extra-marital affair (and the ensuing abortion he sponsored) will remain under wraps. Then she releases the videos of the senator with his mistress anyway.
Madeleine Stowe portrays VanCamp’s most formidable rival, the ruthless matriarch of a powerful local family that shared culpability in Emily’s father’s downfall. Some of the most buzz-worthy scenes in the show’s early run have revolved around subtly poisonous exchanges between Stowe’s stoic ice queen and VanCamp’s inscrutable Emily, her pristine golden locks and graceful demeanour concealing her true intentions.
VanCamp argues that the murky economic climate makes it even easier to enjoy seeing rich people get their comeuppance.
“Absolutely, who does not want to watch really mean, awful rich people get taken down? I mean, I would watch that,” she says with a laugh.
And for VanCamp herself, the show’s early success validates a gutsy career move.
The 25-year-old from Port Perry, Ont., is best-known for starring on the placid Emmy-nominated family drama “Everwood.” Less than a year after that show ended its four-season run in 2006, VanCamp landed another plum role on the similarly themed ABC ensemble drama “Brothers & Sisters.”
But after three years on the show, VanCamp was asked to renegotiate her contract and instead decided to move on from the show, chalking the move up to a creative decision.
She says now that she had no clue what she would do next following her departure. She paused to re-evaluate her life, and even considered leaving acting behind.
“I thought about going to cooking school abroad somewhere — I’ve always had university in the back of my mind, but the perfect timing has never presented itself,” she said, summing up just one option she considered.
“The world was sort of my oyster at that point, and yet I’m always sort of drawn back to (acting).”
Notice how she said “university” and not “college,” the way a real American might have?
While VanCamp has been living in the U.S. for years, she says she still hasn’t been entirely assimilated yet — to the occasional chagrin of her “Revenge” producers.
“I’m still a Canadian girl at heart — I still say my ‘oots’ and ‘aboots,’ and get in trouble for it on set between scenes … especially when I’ve been talking to my mom,” she said, laughing.
“It never really leaves you.”
The other thing VanCamp had trouble shaking? A reputation for portraying intelligent but blandly benign characters.
“Revenge,” clearly, offered a departure from that. But VanCamp struggled to prove to producers that she was capable of portraying the show’s lead character in all her devious glory.
“They really weren’t sold on the fact that I could play a dark character,” she said. “And I had to go out and prove it to them. It was great, obviously — they saw something, they saw some kind of dark side because here I am.
“But you know, I think it’s important to go out and fight for those parts, especially as a young woman. You get pigeonholed so easily, and I kind of felt that for myself creatively, I felt that from the industry.
“It was just sort of being put in a box and I didn’t really like that.”
VanCamp happily teases that her character will navigate even darker territory in the episodes ahead, and the show will shed more light on the personal struggles that followed her father’s death.
She also shrugs off concerns among fans and critics that the show’s early momentum will wane once Emily runs out of wealthy conspirators to terrorize.
“It doesn’t always need to be my quest for revenge, I think there are so many intensely wonderful characters that have their own agendas as well that we’re going to see a lot more of,” she said.
For now, though, VanCamp is still soaking up the positive response to the show’s first season.
“I was just on a hike and someone screamed out to me that they thought that ‘Revenge’ was the best new show on TV,” she recalled. “I just can’t quite believe it. Everyone is responding to it so wonderfully, and they’re really into it — and you never know going into something like this, with episodic television, how people are going to respond.”
“We’re just so grateful and happy and excited about it. Because we’re all really proud of it.”
Emily VanCamp’s sweet Revenge
By: Alex StrachanEvery so often, and almost always by accident, a role intersects with the zeitgeist at exactly the right moment.
Call it alchemy, call it strange coincidence, call it what you will, but when Port Perry, Ont. actress Emily VanCamp landed the role of Emily Thorne, an upwardly mobile, hard-luck young woman bent on revenge in an updated retelling of the Alexandre Dumas classic, The Count of Monte Cristo, she had no idea that the series — and her character — would take on a life of its own.
The new TV series, ‘Revenge,’ shares The Count of Monte Cristo’s themes of wrongful accusation, justice delayed, and revenge for a stolen childhood and innocence lost. It’s a story where a hardscrabble, blue-collar work confronts corruption and affluence, where the rich behave badly — and get their comeuppance, in ways both lawful and beyond the law.
‘Revenge’ has tapped into the audience’s disaffection with affluence and power at a time when public protest against the financial centres of power is growing. Six weeks into the fall season, Revenge has surpassed expectations, and is now among the fall’s most-watched new network dramas. ‘Revenge’ has defied early doubters by edging time-period competitor CSI among younger viewers in the U.S., and is now seen by an average 11 million viewers on ABC in the U.S., a number that, remarkably, puts ‘Revenge’ on an even footing with ‘The X Factor.’ (‘Revenge’ airs on Rogers-owned Citytv in Canada.)
As with Edmond Dantes, the hero of Dumas’ timeless classic, Thorne is consumed by the need for revenge, and blind to its moral consequences.
The story is about a young woman who, when she was just nine years old, saw her father framed by affluent neighbours, whom he trusted, for a crime he didn’t commit. He died in prison; his daughter grew up in foster care, alone and resentful, consumed by guilt and driven by a need for eventual revenge. The series opens 17 years later, with the troubled teen now a young woman, socially adept, upwardly mobile — and utterly focused on the task at hand. She rents a beach house in the Hamptons, next door to Victoria Grayson, the wealthy matriarch and socialite she blames for her father’s death, and she puts her plan in motion. Victoria Grayson is played in the series by Madeleine Stowe; her tycoon husband, Conrad Grayson, is played by veteran Toronto stage and screen actor, Henry Czerny.
For VanCamp, who’s used to playing demure heroines in family dramas like ‘Brothers & Sisters,’ ‘Everwood,’ and the Hallmark Hall of Fame movie, ‘Beyond the Blackboard,’ ‘Revenge’ posed a unique challenge: Play the friendly, sophisticated “girl next door” whose charm and outward appearance of generosity mask a cold heart and a scheming, calculating mind.
“Focused,” VanCamp said, summing her character up in a single word.
Emily Thorne has educated herself in the discipline of revenge. She has learned how to subsume herself in other personalities, and has learned how to move, chameleon-like, through different social settings, without drawing attention to herself.
VanCamp has come to terms with her character’s moral choices, though they are not necessarily the choices she would make herself. She’s quick to defend her character’s emotional compass, though. Emily Thorne is no sociopath, VanCamp insists, despite the way her calculated actions trigger murder and mayhem.
“What happened to her was so traumatic — having this happy childhood and then being torn away from her father, growing up in the foster-care system with this really rough teenage-hood — that I think who she is now is completely understandable,” VanCamp said. “Beyond her father, she didn’t really have anybody who truly cared about her, who loved her. She had that, and it was all taken away.”
The teenage Thorne grew up believing her father was guilty of the crime he was imprisoned for. She had to wrestle with that guilt, while growing up. Learning her father was innocent made her that much colder and more determined to get even, VanCamp says.
“This is not somebody who has family or friends. She’s protected herself, and she’s deliberately chosen not to make any real human connections. Her only true understanding of love is this relationship she had with her father, and her desire for revenge. That’s what keeps her on track. She believes, at this moment in her life, that it’s going to be quite easy and fulfilling.”
It’s anything but, of course. In its darker moments, Revenge recalls the ancient Greek myth of Medea, where Thorne deliberately hurts someone she knows is innocent, in order to further her plan.
“That’s where, for me, it’s about to get really interesting,” VanCamp said. “That’s what makes her such an interesting person to play. I see it as her spending eight years building up this wall — eight years, just so she can do this. It’s as if she has nothing to lose.
“I see this revenge as a way for her to stay connected with her father. The moment she forgives is the moment that she has to let him go. And I don’t think she’s ready to do that yet. It’s too much for her.”
‘Revenge’ is set in the Hamptons, but the series itself is based at Manhattan Beach Studios, south of Los Angeles. (The pilot episode was filmed in North Carolina.) The production design and set details are uncanny in the way they recreate the look and feel of Atlantic affluence, though, and VanCamp, for one, is grateful to be in the sun, away from the snowstorms of the Northeast.
She has another reason to be grateful not to be in the Hamptons.
“They may not really like us there, now that the show is out,” she said, with a gentle smile. “I don’t know, if we actually shot there, that I’d feel very welcome.”
Kidding, of course. Though, as with her character, for a moment there, it’s hard to tell.
“We talk all the time about finding the right balance,” says VanCamp. “At the end of the day, it’s a moral discussion about how people feel about revenge. I think she’s quite justified in what she’s doing. These people stole everything from her. They’re not pleasant people. They do terrible things. And, on some level, I think everybody can connect in some way to the idea of revenge. Whether they act on it or not — that’s where the balance comes in.”
Source: Canada.com
Thanks for that update. Beautiful pics, Emily looks great in that whateverthisis-costume. Liked the interview, Emily acts very intelligent about her roles and her acting career, I’m sure not every woman her age does that. Can’t wait to watch episode 7 soon.