Changing stations:
Keke Palmer (right) puts her career on a different track with a starring role in the SoHo spy drama Berlin Station. Julie Eley reports.
Scream Queens star puts her career on a different track in Berlin Station.
Scream Queens star Keke Palmer is taking a quieter approach to her latest project. She has been cast as April Lewis, a young CIA agent on her first field assignment, in season two of SoHo’s spy drama Berlin Station.
It’s a long way from her role as Zayday Williams in the camp horror series and one that has called for a change in her acting technique.
“The first day of filming they were like, ‘OK, not so bouncy’,” she recalls, although she seems to feel she has good reasons to jump for joy.
“As an African American it’s amazing to have the opportunity to be doing things that I don’t often see people that look like me doing,” she says during a chat in Los Angeles.
“And the fact that they thought of me and wanted me to be part of it, it was just awesome – especially with the kind of topics that we’re straddling with, you know, racism and politics and sexism all of the ‘isms’ there could possibly be.”
The latest season, which also stars Richard Armitage, Ashley Judd, Richard Jenkins and Rhys Ifans, features a shift in tone for the show from the whistleblowing of season one to this year’s general election in Germany and the rise of the far right.
April Lewis is one of two major female characters who have been brought in by showrunner and executive producer Bradford Winters to “balance out the cast and mix things up”.
Also joining the show in the role of maverick station chief BB Yates is The Missing star Ashley Judd.
But while Judd is known for her
love of action roles, it’s Palmer as Lewis who is in the thick of things as the bullets fly.
To prepare for the role she had to learn how to handle a gun and took part in a CIA-style induction course.
“In the CIA they actually have these real kind of fake versions of what they’ll be doing on a mission,” says 24-year-old Palmer.
“So they set it up for us. I had to do a lot of that during the filming of the show. I can tell you April is pretty quick on her feet but (I) definitely felt a little bit of soreness.”
But while the training presented difficulties, Palmer says the biggest challenge of shooting in Berlin was being away from her family.
She grew up in Harvey, Illinois but when she was just nine, her parents moved to Los Angeles so that she could pursue her acting ambitions.
“My parents were dreamers. They were always the ones talking about the movies, but we never thought in a million years that one of us would seriously pursue something like that,” she recalls.
However, when a casting director praised her talent after an audition for The Lion King, the family uprooted and moved to California.
“I loved that my parents took that chance on me. I really don’t know how to repay them, thank them,” says Palmer.
But if her dreams of Hollywood success have been realised, Lewis is having to remove her rose-tinted glasses as she progresses in the CIA.
“What happens is she is very idealistic and some of her ideals do not match with the history of her colleagues and how they experience their work in the CIA,” says Palmer.
“She realises that the CIA isn’t the idea she was trained to believe it was and prepared for.
“And that aspect I think is very familiar to a young person growing up. You reach, you know, 18, 19, 20, 21, you start to realise everything is a lie, everything that you believed is somewhat a lie. There is a truth that underlines it and there are stories and things you can cling to that help you survive but, ultimately, it’s brand-new territory.”
Also facing unfamiliar ground this year have been the writers of
Berlin Station who were suddenly confronted with the election if Donald Trump as President.
“The writers’ room started the week of the election, and we know how that went, so given that outcome suddenly there was a question of ‘OK, how directly do we take on this issue, this fact, this real seachange of Donald Trump and all that would bring with it in terms of this new administration?’,” says Winters. “Had the election gone the other way I think it certainly would have made for some differences.”
As to what season two holds, Winters says, “The last thing we want to do is to come off as a show with a political agenda. Certainly not a left-wing agenda and at the same time we didn’t want to simply villainise our characters in the far right. If anything, the effort was to humanise them and, given a subject matter that is so prone to black and white rhetoric, our intent from the get-go was to really just grey that up.”