One of my favorite parts of our chat was when we discussed perfection, the need to be perfect at all costs, to live up imaginary standards superimposed by our society which make us weak in our inability to be “unapologetically ourselves”. Like her character in the latest project she’s starred in, the TV series “Wilderness” where she plays a control-freak, vindictive wife living in a constantly heightened reality, where she needs to be the perfect female counterpart to her dominating male partner. Or at least she thought she needed to. When Jenna wondered out loud, “What even is perfection?”, and I found I couldn’t answer to that question and, at the same time, I didn’t care to know, I realized that maybe things are really changing, like she said, especially for women and women in cinema. Starting from me, starting from her and the new generation of actors and young people in general whom we both look up to.

Because the thing is we only are truly brave and bold when we show ourselves in all our complexities, and that’s a fact now.

What’s your first cinema memory?

My first cinema memory is “My Girl” with Macaulay Culkin: that was the very first film that made me feel overwhelmed by emotions while watching, it had that kind of power. Some other memories are related to what we would watch in my house, like “West Side Story”, “Oliver”, “Black Beauty”; I remember we would watch lots of musicals, actually. Also, “Back to the Future” and “Never Ending Story”, I think I watched that film 50 times or something like that! [laughs]

“Doctor Who”, “Victoria”, “The Sandman”, “The Serpent”, and now “Wilderness”, just to name a few of the projects you’ve starred in so far. Needless to say, you’ve been playing quite a wide range of characters, both in cinema and TV, all very different from one another: what was the most challenging role you’ve taken on so far and in which terms has it been so for you?

What I found is that each role brings its own challenges. In “Wilderness”, for example, my character is in such a held, heightened state of immense anxiety and pressure, so to hold that over the course of the three/four months of shooting, to keep that heightened energy was a challenge. I found that on “Wilderness” there was such an intensity because the whole show is based on a mechanism for which you have something bad that happens and the next one gets worse and worse. To keep Liv, my character, in that suspended state for so long was incredibly challenging.

So, different roles bring different challenges for different reasons, but in a fun way. “The Serpent” was incredibly challenging because I hadn’t spoken any French three weeks before I started shooting, and for me it was all supposed to be a process of working with a French actor in a language I don’t speak, and this was incredibly challenging: trying to get to the level where you weren’t just speaking a language, it was trying to have an accent in another language, that kind of detail was immensely challenging. “Victoria” because you were trying to dig in history, but the thing is that history puts forward a version and you get different opinions, for example people think Queen Victoria is a certain way because she looks grumpy on her portrait; so, the challenge of that was trying to find the truth in the essence of the human behind her public persona, diving within the biased history, so to speak. “Doctor Who” because of the green screen acting, probably; “The Cry” because it wasn’t easy to find something instinctive, representing the loss a child while not having children, I felt that kind of pressure. Anyhow, the French was probably the hardest thing.

Indeed, “Wilderness”, like you said, is about bad things happening one after another, and trying to survive in extreme situations. Furthermore, at some point, a series of events leads your character, Olivia, to free herself from the doom of being like her mother and take revenge against her “wrong” and toxic relationship with her husband. How did you manage to connect with her? Could you somehow develop empathy for her?

Yeah, I did have empathy for her and I understood her and I thought that what was so interesting was that it feels like a very “coming-of-woman story”. She’s someone who doesn’t really know herself or isn’t listening to herself, and is co-dependent, unsure, she will bend herself to what society expects of her, the life she thinks that she should be living.

For me, along the line of the six episodes, it became a very primal story of her reclaiming her voice, and herself, and her boundaries, and I think that, especially for my generation, these themes have become very common, formative and primal. It is a kind of “Woman hear me roar” story, the journey that she goes on, but she needs to go to the darkest depths to be able to get out the other side. All of that was really well done in the script, but obviously the challenge, which is absolutely mental about the series, is how you’re asking the audience to empathize and side with a character who does things that are very morally wrong. It’s interesting to try and get the audience on that journey, and that was one of the biggest challenges for me and the only way to do that is to try and get the audience to understand that: that’s one of the hardest things about the show.