This wonderful interview by Legion of Leia (Dorina Arellano) is a must read.
Legion of Leia
I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Mr. Daniel Gillies while he flexed his culinary muscles on his TV brother’s recipe for stuffed red peppers. We talked about underrepresented vampires, gender equality, racial diversity, the UFC, our mutual crush on Mads Mikkelsen, and even managed to squeeze in some stuff about his awesome show The Originals and its upcoming third season.
Our website’s mission is to promote women’s contributions to sci-fi and fantasy, and I have to say that The Originals has done a pretty great job of showcasing a lot of powerful yet very different women from many racial backgrounds. Do you know if this has been a conscious goal of the series?
Well, that’s Julie Plec. I think the same could be said of any of her shows. There are always frequent and complex female characters. And what’s lovely about The Originals is that we’re most triumphantly racially diverse. It should be. It’s set in New Orleans where it’s absolutely as diverse as it gets, and we should be seeing many cultures represented. What’s cool, in terms of your question on whether it’s a conscious choice, is that, absolutely, I think it’s a choice. Ostensibly, we’re a show aimed at women in a lot of ways, even though, as the show has grown and diversified, I’ve noticed a growing male audience that is really enjoying the show. However, particularly in our origin when we split from the mothership of The Vampire Diaries, a show with an enormous demographic of women followers, it’s been in our best interest to have strong, intelligent, sassy, cool, intellectually dexterous women at the center of these dramas. It has not only behooved us to have women wielding great intellects, but we’re also sensitive to a multiplicity of female wisdom, strength, humor and contemporary fun set amid this world of magic realism. And I think they’ve done it masterfully. Look at the number of writers we have, too. I just finished working with the writer of the last episode who’s a woman, Diane Ademu-John. Michelle Paradise wrote the episode before that. Julie wrote the one before that. It’s written by women. Are we designing this show with lots of women in mind deliberately? The short answer is absolutely.
