The Point Radio: Alicia Witt’s Real Christmas Story

Since the age of nine, actress Alicia Witt has dazzled us with her work in JUSTIFIED, MR HOLLAND’S OPUS and CYBILL. Again this year, she has a holiday project with The Hallmark Channel but also a new Christmas(!) song that might be the most honest one yet. She explains how she really isn’t a Grinch all the time. Plus both Andrea Roth and Tricia Helfer reveal why you should be locked onto ASCENSION on SyFy all this week.

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Transcript

The Point Radio Hey it's Mike Rodd, this week of sentient debuts on the Sci-Fi network and actresses Trisha Helfer and Andrea Roth are both here to talk about what you should be watching Plus, Alicia Witt literally has grown up in front of us in TV and films Now she's back with a couple of new projects and a holiday song that well, is just a little bit different

Let's get to The Point This is The Point The Point Radio Get The Point Radio In a move not unlike the way we were introduced to Battlestar Galactica a few years ago

Sci-Fi this week is rolling out Ascension with a new series debuting with three episodes in the hope of a longer run sometime in 2015 Ascension actually has a strong base in history as explained by actress Andrea Roth In 1963, President Kennedy and a team of, especially one particular doctor, Enzman but they decided to secretly launch a spaceship into space which is where spaceships go

and at the time, the fact of the matter is during this time, they actually found a way that they could completely conceivably and even to this day they say it would still work they had the capability then and they would use the same capability to at the time that they could only do it for 100 people so it isn't entirely out of the realm of possibility

The social trappings of that decade also play a big part in the show Trisha Helfer explains that My character is Beyondra Denninger, the wife of the captain of the ship, played by Brian and obviously since the show, the ship launched in 63, there is an ode to the 60s and sort of women behind the man at that point

we haven't gone through the sexual revolution, the cultural revolution there is a level of racism, there is a level of certainly sexism so Beyondra is a very strong character and in our times maybe she is still a formidable horse but she has to kind of go through back channels so she is quite a manipulative character, she is fun to play

but she wants to stay in power there is also class struggles, there is kind of an upper deck, lower deck situation and both of us were born on the lower decks and we made our way up into the position of power on the ship and Beyondra will do anything in her power to stay in power So we will see lots of fashions from the 60s?

Yes, and yet, in many ways we have the clothes that we had in 1960 some people may have repurposed or recycled but my character wears like nice 1960s dresses, very feminine and shoes and what not the style of the ship is, the style of the ship is very, we have kept it very very clean and brand new looking considering it is 50 years old

so all of that is that we are only, we have no contact with Earth so we know like Gilligan's Island and Gidget and in terms of the books at one point when someone is going to be investigating a murder that happens it starts to search things out that we have never had such violence on our ship what he has to do is he has to go back and look at films or novels

One of Andrea's joys is working with the ensemble cast It is wonderful in all ways, one because I am a mother, I am a four year old girl I love an ensemble thing, I also love an ensemble thing because you don't have the pressure I am carrying the whole thing and then I think it is really great because the show can just go different places pick up on this story similar to sort of how it lost

you could sort of go in and out of the different characters, they are all quite interesting and coming off of Rescue Me where was a grittier, rougher show my character is very feminine and she is a very smart scientist but feminine and gentle and that is actually really awesome and exciting for me because for a while though I am Canadian people would say Andrea is only to New York or she is to this or to that

so I kind of feel like I get to shake that up for myself and for my career Tricia agrees and she compares it to what it was like on Battlestar It feels great, there is a lot of parallels in terms of when I got Battlestar Galactica just in terms of the filming, not even storyline wise but there is a huge ensemble cast bigger on this show than there was on Battlestar and the sets are bigger

but everybody has come together and we are already close knit and that is one thing, again not storyline wise but just the people that you are working with the dynamic has been really nice because on Battlestar we became incredibly close we are all still really close 10 years later, we are also really close and some of my closest friends If you missed any of Ascension this week or want to rewatch a couple of episodes

you can do that all this month on Sci-Fi Now It's a gift that just keeps on giving, here is the latest in pop culture Mark Wade and Fiona Staples are charged with putting together a brand new Archie series that will start with a new first issue early in 2015 All this is in addition to some other big plans Archie has in 2015

that include a revival of their superhero characters under the Dark Circle label and a new live action Archie TV show Wizard World is getting into the TV business early in the new year with a new Comic Con and pop culture theme channel called ConTV it will show up on smart TVs from Samsung, Roku, Apple TV, Xbox, PlayStation and more

and it will feature TV series like Being Human and Yu-Gi-Oh! plus some original YouTube programming like Fight of the Living Dead and Return to Horror High as well The channel will be basically free but there will be a $6.99 charge if you would like some extra exclusive content Two and a half man ends up its run on CBS in February now there are some strong rumors out of Hollywood that Charlie Sheen might make an appearance on that finale

no official word on that yet although more than likely it would be announced probably either right before or come as a complete surprise to people who watch the finale meanwhile the reboot of The Odd Couple will replace Two and a Half Man on the CBS schedule Following the success of CSI and NCIS there is a new criminal mind spin-off slated for the new year It will involve FBI agents helping citizens who get into hot water overseas

In its 10th season this year, Criminal Minds by the way is doing pretty well averaging a 3.9 rating among the coveted 18-49 year old viewers Just about a year from now when we started looking at what the biggest selling comic of 2015 was well we might already have the answer to that that would be Star Wars number one from Marvel with a large amount of variants and a lot of exclusive covers that are headed to some outlets that usually don't carry comic books

Sales on Star Wars number one are topping out a little over 1 million copies which certainly makes it number one for now and more than likely for maybe a couple of years into the future Compare that to the last big selling titles one of which was a Pokemon title that sold about a million copies back in 1999 but mainly was sold in places that don't normally carry comics

and beyond that Batman number 500 in 1993 was really the last book to sell over a million copies in the comic store market Alicia Wood is a talented and familiar face as you've seen in things like Justified, Mr. Holland's Obus and of course Sybil Now she actually started young, her first role was at age 9 in the movie Dune but how'd she avoid all the usual trappings of being a child actress? You know I sort of, I didn't really move to, I mean I didn't move to LA and be a child actor at that point

so my experience with all that was a little bit different I certainly wanted to move to LA but my parents wouldn't let me which maybe was a good idea for the reasons you just mentioned but I was living in Worcester, Massachusetts and it was a total random series of events that led to me being in Dune but once I did it I certainly knew that I wanted to do that for the rest of my life

so by the time I was 14 my mom had been convinced by me to move to LA and we started out there and that's when I really got an agent and started with all the auditions and the life of an actor but before that I was a classical pianist as a kid and so that was really my whole focus studying and competing and all that stuff As she's literally grown up in TV and films, have the roles matured and have it become more challenging?

I wouldn't say more challenging, one thing I've always tried to do as an actor is to not play the same role more than once if I can help it, so, or maybe more than twice, I mean sometimes roles are very similar to each other but I never wanted to be typed out so I try to avoid if I get offered the same thing too much and what happens a lot in this business is that if you play one role you then immediately get offered 10 more exactly like it because people think of you for the part because they've just seen that

so the real trick is to be constantly reminding people all the other stuff you've done and the first time I played a single mom was on Friday Night Lights which was quite a few years ago and she was just a young single mom that had a kid when she was 15 and so that was fun and there's just roles all over the place that are different and also similar to that but I don't think the actual age makes things more challenging, it's just as light goes on you try and play more different types of parts

One of Alicia's current projects is a holiday movie on the Hallmark Channel called Christmas at the Card Rites I love this script, after doing Merry Mix-Up last year which was honestly one of my best experiences, I had so much fun on it We had been talking about finding another one for me to do this year and when I read this script I immediately knew that this was the one I wanted to do because I get to play Santa Claus in it, and not Mrs. Claus but the actual Santa and I've never seen a story told before where a girl gets to be Santa and has to be convincing enough to convince the kids

and talking about challenges and things I hadn't done before, that certainly fit the bill so that part of it was extremely fun for me because there are local kids who lived in the town in Ontario where we were shooting I really did think that I was Santa and I had to be convincing enough for them so they were the ones I was most concerned about I didn't want to ruin the surprise and take off everything in front of them and all that kind of thing You might not know it but Alicia is an accomplished musician and a classical pianist as well, has been since childhood

This year she released a new Christmas song that's not necessarily your usual type of holiday tune Well that song I actually wrote last year and last year I went from having never done a Christmas movie to doing three of them in one year Which was very odd, and I do love Christmas but on the other hand it can be very exhausting and it can feel sometimes like it's just more trouble than anything because you can't go to the store without hearing Christmas music Being told what to buy and how special that December 25th date has to be

and isn't it just feel like you want to take the day off and hang out with friends and maybe family and take it easy I feel like a lot of times even all the family stresses come up at Christmas especially So it was inspired by a couple of ethically stressful Christmases, let's just put that one and my goal was to try and make it a merry song at the same time as I'm pretty much saying I think the Grinch and I would have had a thing or two in common

Along with TV films and even some voice over work, Alicia has written and produced some pretty interesting short films as well I ask if there was more of that on the way I have some ideas for series and that sort of stuff So I'm talking to a few people about that That's nice of you to think though

I also write scripts so I have a feature script that I'm trying to get set up at the moment and just trying to keep busy in all ways I think when you get to a certain point in your career you know that there's going to be work I should knock on word as I say that But I mean the question is what kind of work is it going to be work that really excites and inspires you

The best way to try and give it the best shot of happening that way is to diversify and do as many different things as possible So that's what I try to do And especially with the music it's so different than the acting world in that I wrote or co-wrote everything that I record and that's really me And these roles I play if somebody else directs or edits or writes it a way that I would not have it's completely out of my control

Sure That's a whole different thing In the new year catch Alicia as part of the cast of Elementary and the new run of House of Lies on Netflix And if you want to get a copy of her song you can do that at AliciaWitt.bandcamp.com That does it for the podcast

We're going to go gargle and be back in a couple of days here with a lot more Follow us in the meantime of course on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram under The Point Radio And grab the podcast every time we do it on websites like comedyriggs.com, michaeldavisworld.com And getthepointradio.com and of course in the iTunes podcast directory See you back here in a few days

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