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The Gifted Season 2: Emma Dumont Talks Lorna's Pregnancy, Mental Illness and Playing a Very Different Character

One of the big surprises of the first season of The Gifted was finding out that Lorna Dane aka Polaris was pregnant. The first season ended with her very early in her pregnancy and we had a time skip to the beginning of the second season to Lorna giving birth. The concept of becoming a mother tends to change people and for Lorna it might be one of the reason she made some of her decisions. Emma Dumont spoke to Emmys.com about how becoming a Mom didn't change Lorna's view but it did change the way she looked at things.

Lorna has a time crunch, she has nine months. For her it's higher stakes, there's an hourglass running the time down. Who wants to birth a child that will not only be hated because of what they're born with, but will be treated differently because of this? So in a way, she's trying to get away from both her families. The pregnancy didn't change her views or what she believes in, but it changed the stakes.

One thing that fans were happy to see show up in season one is the fact that Lorna is bipolar. However, the show never used it as a reason for why she acts the way she did. They never tried to excuse her actions using her mental illness. For Dumont making sure that Lorna's mental illness was present but not a defining characteristic was important.

Lorna's mental illness is in a way so important to who she is, and yet is also not important at all. She has green hair, she's tall, she's pale, she has bipolar disorder. It's just another characteristic. Her core beliefs and her actions would be the same even if she did not have mental illness. But at the same time, for me as an actor, it was very important. A lot of research went into this, because I didn't know much about the topic beforehand, so I wanted to make sure that I really knew what that was about.

There were some criticisms from fans that Lorna was different this season. She didn't seem to be doing as much and seemed very different from the character to not viewers but Dumont as well. While she doesn't out right say that she didn't like the change she does say that she understands why the writers chose to go down that route.

She's a lot calmer, a lot more depressive. She's very low energy and she's not the Lorna we've come to know, the badass who would fight anyone.

I'm not going to lie, it was really difficult coming into Season 2 because I didn't understand why they wanted her to change so much. But to be fair, it is very rare when an actor gets to portray two opposite sides to one character and I am very lucky for that challenge.

And I realized that even though it didn't really serve Lorna Dane, it served the rest of the characters, and because we are such an ensemble cast, she needed to take a step down so that other people could have their journeys and story lines. I grew up in theater, and it's about making everyone look good.

The second season of The Gifted very much suffered from having things move along far too slowly. This is a show that could have gotten by on ten episodes pretty easily if they decided to trim some of the fat. It also would have helped with the pacing of the season which was, sometimes, on the slow side. It made the show lose a lot of viewers and now the possibility of a third season is very much up in the air. Maybe if Fox decides to cancel Hulu will set in and save the shows. Fans are currently crossing their fingers.

Action-adventure family drama THE GIFTED, from Marvel, tells the story of a suburban couple whose ordinary lives are rocked by the sudden discovery that their children possess mutant powers. Forced to go on the run from a hostile government, the family joins up with an underground network of mutants and must fight to survive.

Created by Matt Nix, FOX's The Gifted stars Stephen Moyer, Amy Acker, Natalie Alyn Lind, Percey Hynes White, Sean Teale, Emma Dumont, Jamie Chung, and Blair Redford. Seasons one and two are currently streaming on Hulu.

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