HER ‘DEATH’ WISH
‘Prodigal’ actress nears dream of playing serial killer
Halston Sage really wanted to play a serial killer.
“Every time a writer would come to set, I would basically bribe them to make me a serial killer,” the 27-year-old actress told the Daily News.
“Prodigal Son” made her the next best thing: the daughter of a murderer who appears to be taking after Daddy.
The first season of Fox’s hit show, starring Michael Sheen as doctor-turned-assassin Martin Whitly, ended with his daughter Ainsley (Sage) covered in blood after slitting Nicholas Endicott’s (Dermot Mulroney) throat and then stabbing him seven times.
When the new season picks up Tuesday at 9 p.m., everything seems as normal as the family of a cold-blooded killer can be.
“I think that she’s been trying to hold everything together for her family,” Sage told The News.
“Now that she’s had this event, it’s opened her eyes to a different side of herself that she may have always secretly feared but she wasn’t allowed to feel.”
Where last season took time to delve into the father-son relationship between Martin and his NYPD profiler son Malcolm (Tom Payne), “Prodigal Son” is now looking at the rest of the Whitlys.
Jessica, the Whitly matriarch who accidentally brought Nicholas into their lives in a desperate search for love, finds herself watching her family once again fall apart at the seams.
“For so many years, she’s been such a mother lioness. She’s trying to keep them safe, keep them on the right track,” Bellamy Young, who plays Jessica, told The News. “Now she’s seeing them as adults, which is already so hard for parents and children, but now she’s really looking at them and it’s hyperreal, all the possibilities they have for greatness and horror.
“She’s feeling like one of those surfers who get really excited out in the water... and then the wave comes and it’s high as a skyscraper and there’s this moment of paralysis. The enormity of what might be the truth of their nature-nurture tension is staring her in her face.”
Young, who was at her most charming on “Scandal” drunk on hooch and fried chicken, relishes getting to play another flawed female.
“She’s self-aware. At least when she blows it, she knows it,” the 50-year-old actress said of Jessica.
“She’s the first to laugh at herself, she’s the first to clean up her mess. There may be a pill on her tongue and a martini in her hand, but there’s also an apology in her mouth. As women, we so rarely get to be the messy ones; we’re usually the functional devices.”
Martin’s children, who watched their father dragged away in handcuffs, endured the press coverage and bore his last name, were destined to grow up traumatized. Ainsley, much younger than Malcolm when Martin was arrested, seemed to have built a life beyond her father’s treachery.
“There’s something that’s very relatable, even though it’s about a serial killer and his family, it’s universal that you grow up to turn into your parents,” Sage told The News.
“She’s motivated to prove society wrong and prove herself wrong, that becoming a criminal was going to become a part of her past. She wants to prove that she was going to end up OK.”