Posted in: Preview, Starz, TV | Tagged: courteney cox, interview, mira sorvino, rosemary, shining vale, starz

Shining Vale Interview: Mira Sorvino on STARZ Series, Rosemary & More

Published Sat, 05 Mar 2022 09:08:12 -0600

Shining Vale, the upcoming family dramedy & horror series from STARZ, has big names in the cast but one, in particular, will likely catch a lot of attention and that's Rosemary, played by Mira Sorvino. Before the debut of the series, I got to ask Sorvino about portraying such a unique character and what she thinks about the personality she has to bring to life…or rather to the afterlife. Here's a look at what the series had to tell us about Sorvino's Rosemary:

Shining Vale: Mira Sorvino On Starz Series & Rosemary [Interview] — Shining Vale (Mira Sorvino as Rosemary. Source: Starz)

Rosemary is either Pat's alter ego, a split personality, her id, her muse, or a demon trying to possess her. Sometimes playful, sometimes evil, often tragic, Rosemary has been roaming the halls of Pat's new house for 70 years, searching for a vulnerable soul to live vicariously through. She sees in Pat a kindred spirit—like Pat she was unfulfilled in her role as a dutiful housewife—and as a result, may or may not have slaughtered her entire family, straightened up the house, then took her own life in the bathtub that Pat now uses to relax. In any case, Rosemary promises to help Pat get her groove back and finish her novel if Pat will simply agree to let Rosemary "come inside her," a bargain that may haunt Pat forever.

Bleeding Cool: I wanted to ask if there was a difficult part for you in portraying Rosemary or better yet, was there a difficult part of her personality you had to show?

Mira Sorvino: There's some scenes later in the show when we see what was sort of really going on with Rosemary, and those were hard for me to play. Like the parts where she truly is brokenhearted… brokenhearted and really feels rock bottom. My father used to use this story, the chef puts wheat germ in the Twinkies so it looks like a Twinkie tastes like a Twinkie, it's two of your favorite genres wrapped in one, horror and comedy. But inside there's this germ like the germ of wheat of truth that is kind of hard to deny that a lot of us are suffering on the inside, not living the lives that we wanted to. Certain things have been done unto us or we haven't been able to be strong enough to claw out and carve out the truthful, strong life that we wanted, and to play those parts was the hardest part emotionally. I'm not going to say it was hard to get to it because that's my job.

BC: The series contains a lot about books and what Pat writes, so thinking of Rosemary as a kind of a character in a book and if you think if she was in a novel, would she be more of a hero, a villain, or maybe an anti-hero in her story?

MS: You know, to a certain extent, she's not an anti-hero, I think she does good things and she's brave, but she's also a force of destruction. It's almost like she's just taking down the whole damn patriarchy. She's taking everything down, it's just all coming down now. I think you really have to watch the end of the season and not only then but until the end of however long we go because I think she's both she's both good and bad. She's a very human non-human. So, I don't think she's a clear villain. I don't think she's a clear hero. I think the anti-hero is a little bit of that stand-alone rebelliousness that you could admire.

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