LIVE AND LET DIE
How Jack Bauer changed the rules of TV drama,
SPOILER ALERT: A major plot point from the most recent episode of Vikings is revealed.
TV’s mortality rate is going up, up, up. Game of Thrones could be called Game of Throwns, so many characters get hurled to their death. You could make a drinking game out of characters getting offed on Sons of Anarchy.
The Fox thriller 24 started the body count a dozen years ago by killing the wife of Jack Bauer (played by Canadian actress Leslie Hope) at the very end of its first season. That shocker sent a message to viewers that, from this point on, no one was safe — not even on The Good Wife.
Actors now joke about how they hold their breath while reading through scripts or have to curb diva behaviour on sets. Nobody wants to get killed off a hit show.
Nobody, that is, except Jessalyn Gilsig. The Montreal-born actress, until this week, played Siggy, the ambitious wife of slain King Haraldson (Gabriel Byrne), on Vikings (Thursdays at 10 p.m. on History).
Vikings is a Canada-Ireland co-production entirely shot on fields and sound stages near Dublin. To complete each10-episode season, the cast spend up to six months of the year in Ireland.
Gilsig is one of several Canadians in the cast, others being Toronto native Katheryn Winnick (Lagertha) and Vancouver’s Alexander Ludwig (Ragnar’s son Bjorn). Another Canadian, Ottawa-born Donal Logue (King Horik), was bumped off last year. Before moving on to Gotham, Logue’s character was also killed on Sons of Anarchy.
Gilsig has been killed off on a TV series before: Nip/Tuck. Her unhinged, sex-addicted diva plummeted to her death off the roof of her lover’s apartment while the two were in the heat of passion. “This was the only way for her to go,” thought Gilsig at the time.
The former Glee star gets that the acting life is a gypsy life. What she didn’t anticipate was the impact it would have on her child, coping with schools on two continents. At the end of Season 2, Gilsig went to Vikings’ showrunner, Michael Hirst, and asked to be written out of the show.
“I knew, as we get older, family sometimes needs us,” Gilsig said on the phone from her home in Los Angeles, “and there’s no substitute for being there.” Gilsig says she “loved that role, I loved that world, and as an actor, it’s probably one of the highlights of my entire career, but it had to be done.”
Hirst, who writes every word of ev- ery script, was sympathetic. “He’s a father, he understands.” He told Gilsig she’d need to return to Ireland for the first few episodes of Season 3 while he set up her character’s exit.
What he came up with, says Gilsig, was “beautiful and poetic and emotional.”
Here’s what happens: two mischievous tykes under Siggy’s care wander off onto a frozen lake. They fall through the thin ice. Siggy dives in and rescues them but an apparition, a mysterious character (Kevin Durand), prevents her from saving herself. Siggy descends into the murky waters.
Basically, Siggy sacrifices herself to rescue her children.
“It’s your child who’s taking you away from us,” explained Hirst, “so it will be Siggy’s child who will take her away.”
Mixing one’s own emotions or circumstance into a character is “exactly what you work not to do,” she says. There’s always a piece of the actor in each character, however, and Gilsig was so moved that “Michael, in a very private way, was acknowledging that.”
She also appreciates that the death was accidental.
“I would have made it a Viking death, I would have made it bloody,” says Gilsig.
“But of course there was a whole dimension to the show that we hadn’t explored yet, which was that accidents happen.”
Shooting the scene was another matter. Gilsig had to perform in an outdoor swimming pool rigged with a fake ice barrier. Scuba divers were in the water as a precaution.
“It was pretty intense,” says Gilsig. Very little acting was involved. Child actors were used as little as possible with Gilsig mainly diving for dummies. The 43-year-old had to find the opening each time and “the more tired you get, the heavier that dress gets, the heavier the hair gets.”
Vikings is a rough and tumble show, not one where you ask, “Can I get a little more lip gloss?” jokes Gilsig. “I mean, you just say, ‘Do with me what you’re going to do with me.’ ”
Was the water cold? “Yes,” says Gilsig, who has swum in the Irish Sea. “Everything in Ireland is cold.”
But you’re from Montreal, she’s reminded.
“As a Canadian, I should know not to go out onto a frozen lake!” Fans who missed the first four episodes of the third season of Vikings can catch up on History.ca. The first two seasons of Vikings are available on shomi.