I hate saying goodbye to a great web series, but one of my favorites is drawing to a close. I’ve followed Classic Alice and the great cast of characters since the beginning. I loved the concept of trying to live your life according to the books you read. As Alice (Kate Hackett) and her friends have shown us, reality and fiction often merge. Books have a lot to teach us about life and love. However, we have to actually live life to learn their lessons. Classic Alice has drawn a passionate and huge fan base that love and care about the story. It will be sad when the final episode airs in the near future. I was happy to have one last interview with two of the cast members. I say last, but only in terms of this series. I know the cast will move on to great things and I will interview them again in the future. My thanks to Kate Hackett and Chris O’Brien (Ewan) for the interview!
Mandi: Hi guys! Congrats on a great web series! I’m sad that it’s ending but glad you are interested in one last interview.
Kate: Thanks for having us!
What has been your favorite book out of the whole series to act out?
Kate: Probably Dracula — it was the most interesting, I felt, in terms of performance and depth. I got to say things that Alice wouldn’t necessarily say, and that shift from “goodie two shoes” to someone who is CLEARLY making mistakes is a really fine line to pull off. I hope I did it!
Chris: DEFINITELY SILAS MARNER. I got to do an evil villain speech.
What prompted the decision to use Jane Austen as the last series?
Kate: Pandering. TOTAL FAN PANDERING. FANDERING. No — it fit. It fit very, very well and the only reason we hadn’t done an Austen in S1 was out of respect for Pemberley, which was still putting out adaptations. At this point, however, we felt pretty ready to tackle one of our own!
Chris: I don’t know. I think we kind of had to. Alice as a character shares so many traits with so many Austen characters, it just made sense to me that eventually, she’d go there.
How do you feel like the series as has evolved since the beginning?
Chris: I think it consistently grew in sophistication, both thematically and stylistically. I think the series gets a little more mature with each episode and that’s really cool to watch.
Kate: I think it really grew in terms of sophistication, as Chris says. HOPEFULLY it grew with our audience and they appreciated how it moved with them as they, and Alice, grew up a little. It’s more mature, more difficult, and more of a challenge for everyone. Me, especially: it was more and more difficult to write and act, which I thrive on!
This past season has been really dramatic with the breakup and Alice heading to the dark side for a little while. What has been the best scene to film and the most difficult?
Chris: My favorite scene to film is and will probably always be when Ewan gives that awful speech and then steals Alice’s manuscript. The hardest to film was the debate last season. There were tons of lines, many of which overlapped, and it was complicated stuff. Layer in all the subtext and the way emotion and tension builds in that scene and it was a real challenge.
Kate: Scenes where Andrew and Alice are kind of “tearing” into each other I find really fulfilling. Tony and I connect very well with a lot of those scenes — so the one in Dracula where she tells him they DO have to hate each other… that was just so real, so perfect for me. I loved it. I also really loved the silent episode in the car; I knew when we were shooting that it would be a tough move to pull off, but I also was really confident that Tony and I had the chops for that!
Any plans you can share for after the series?
Chris: I plan to do more writing. May even develop a web series of my own. Who knows!
Kate: Yes! The app! Because you could just watch the videos or you could take part in a multi-platform story that brought its characters to Twitter, Tumblr, SoundCloud, and beyond, Classic Alice is a new kind of storytelling. Therefore, it requires a new kind of legacy — which is precisely what our app gives us. Telling a story via many platforms means that the narrative is spread out all over the web; the Classic Alice app pulls all of that story into one place and lets you experience it with one tap or scroll.
Otherwise, I’d love to get a feature at least started this year & Chris and I both have loads of shorts and sketches we’d like to shoot! :)
Best of Luck!
