The future is now
In Continuum, Rachel Nichols plays a cop from 2077 chasing bad guys in present- day Vancouver
“I like these strong female role models,” Rachel Nichols says, catching her breath between takes. “Carlos — Victor Webster — had a shower scene the other day. Without his top on. He gets to do all the fun eye- candy stuff, and I get to kill people. It’s gritty.”
Nichols has played tough- gal roles before — the lead role in Tim Minear’s short- lived, 2005 crime procedural The Inside; a recurring role in J. J. Abrams’ spy thriller Alias, in 2006; 13 episodes of Criminal Minds, last year — but nothing like this.
In the time- travel thriller Continuum, Nichols plays a driven cop from 2077 trapped in presentday Vancouver. A terrorist cell has dropped back in time with her, and now they’re hellbent on destruction and making sure their future never happens. Nichols’ time cop is all that stands between them and a future where technology, and society as we know it, may cease to exist.
The scenario requires a lot of foot chases down dead- end alleys in Vancouver’s downtown core, which as often as not end in fisticuffs, bruised faces and the occasional broken bone.
Nichols wouldn’t have it any other way. She’s keen on doing her own stunts — when the insurance bond and common sense allow it, that is. It was one of the reasons she signed on.
“This was the first opportunity I had in a while to do some real action stuff,” Nichols says, grabbing a director’s chair and kicking her feet up. “I love the physicality side of roles, I really do. And when I get to do my own stunts, it’s that much cooler. I’ll do anything the production safety people will let me.”
Nichols is overly familiar with the milieu of haunted, withdrawn TV detectives. She was drawn, though, by Continuum’s
Vancouver’s the perfect city to be futuristic ... You can imagine that, with a couple of extra, taller buildings, with some highly digital advertising ... it has the right look.
RACHEL NICHOLS
CONTINUUM ACTRESS
trippy combination of time paradoxes, high- tech gadgetry and high- concept science- fiction themes.
“I’m similar to [ my character] in a lot of ways: her work ethic, her stubbornness. Being a student — I was a student — loving to learn. Being relatively quick.
“And then there were parts of her that I had never had the opportunity to play before. I’d never played a wife, or a mother. Especially not a wife and mother who has been separated from her family. Acting- wise, I knew this wasn’t just going to be a show where, every week, we go in and solve a crime. There are elements of that, certainly, but that’s not all it is. This is a beautiful character, and I want to do her justice. Hopefully I’m making the right choices.”
Nichols had never been to Vancouver, she admits, until January, when she began work on Continuum. In a strange way, seeing the city with fresh eyes made it easier to play the part of someone from the future who’s experiencing everything for the first time.
“I had worked all over Canada, but never in Vancouver,” she says. “Vancouver’s the perfect city to be futuristic, especially the way it looks at night, coming over the Cambie Bridge. You can imagine that, with a couple of extra, taller buildings, with some highly digital advertising — whatever there may be in the future — it has the right look. Tokyo is a lot like that — very futuristic.
“There’s a Blade Runner element to this show, too, sort of gritty and dark. They’ve done a very good job, I think, differentiating between the two looks, now and the future.”
Nichols admits it was tricky at times to separate her own experience from what it must feel like for her character to experience things for the first time.
“We do have to ask those questions constantly. Is this foreign to me? If it is foreign to me, how do I know it? How do I cover over this?”
Nichols admits there have been moments when, working on Continuum, she has wondered herself about what the future holds.
“It does get you thinking, especially when you sit down with someone like ( Continuum writer) Simon Barry or Jon Cassar, who directed the first two episodes,” she says. “History is fickle. We know that. The good and bad come around and go around, and go around again. There are recessions and depressions, and economic boom and bust.
“I’m concerned about the future. I think many people acknowledge we’re on a path that can’t be sustained. But we’re not making a lot of headway with how we go about dealing with that, whether it’s big oil or bureaucracy or terrorism or Afghanistan or Iraq.
“There are a lot of conversations to be had about the future. As much as I would hate to see a future made entirely on technology, I see elements of that happening already. I have eight Apple products, and I don’t know what I would do without my two iphones and my ipad and my Macbook Pro. I wouldn’t say I’m scared about where we go from here as much as I’m interested to see how it turns out.”
Continuum premieres Sunday on Showcase.