2008年12月18日星期四

Jennifer Beals Thrown a Curve By 'L Word' Final Season Change

By Marilyn Beck and Stacy Jenel Smith
Dec 17, 2008


Jennifer Beals reveals she was "completely" surprised to find out that the final season of her "The L Word" series has been transformed into flashbacks. She admits to this column that she's been thrown "a little off-balance by it. It seemed very different from what we had done prior, but you kind of roll with the flow. We'll see what happens."

Jennifer Beals Thrown a Curve By 'L Word' Final Season Change (Image: Wenn)

Asked whether she likes the way her Bette Porter character's storyline has been handled, she says, "I don't know how the show has been edited. It's completely different from the way we shot it, in a way, since it's all being shown as flashbacks."

The Showtime series, returning Jan. 18, completed its production in October, and "they just recently put the trailers together," she notes. She did not learn of the change from the producers. "Somebody else told me -- Rachel," she says, referring to cast mate Rachel Shelley.

It might seem strange, to say the least, that the lead actress of the six-year-old lesbian drama series would be kept in the dark about such a wholesale change in the structure of the entire last season, but the Yale-educated Beals is circumspect about that.

"They didn't have to tell all of us, or any of us," she says. "The only thing is, it would help me with doing press. I really have no attachment. To me, after it's done, I rarely watch it. All those people in the studio that were there when we wrapped -- all the crew members, the production team, everybody -- they're all responsible for what we accomplished. Ilene Chaiken," she says of the show's creator-exec producer. "It's not me, it's a collective. That's the beauty of film and television."

As for what is next, Beals, who has a 3-year-old daughter with husband Ken Dixon, says she's "taking a little time to relax. I'll find another project, and I hope it will be as satisfying as 'The L Word,' and we'll see. I'm not in a huge hurry. I've been reading scripts with women characters who are not drawn very thoroughly. To be on a woman-centric show and then read scripts where a woman is an ancillary character is a rude awakening."