Freeform’s freshman series Dead of Summer made their big debut this summer at the San Diego Comic-Con. In addition to screening the entire next episode of the supernatural-thriller — How to Stay Alive in the Woods (airing Tuesday, July 26 at 9pm) — to a packed audience, the creators and several members of the cast spoke with members of the press to reflect on last week’s “Modern Love” and previewed what’s to come.
When the part of transgendered Drew was presented to cisgender actress Zelda Williams, she was honest to say she wasn’t sure why they were considering her for the role.
“I was like, ‘Why am I here? There’s an enormous community out there that’s been waiting for portrayals,” Williams tells OMFGTV. “I do still think that in the grand scheme of things, am I the portrayal the community necessarily wanted? No. But Drew also is not transitioned at all. He’s 18 in 1989 and I know the hardships that they face.”
“I’m one of the few cisgender actresses they read. They mainly read transgender actors and unlike my cast mates, I retested three times. Most of them, they auditioned and they got the part. I was on the hook for three months because they kept saying we’re going to go back and do another round of transgender casting and I went, ‘Absolutely.'”
Members of the trans community have expressed to the actress that they did wish that Drew was played by a transgender actor, however, they do love Williams and know she does care and have nothing but love for the community.
“I’m going to continue to be Drew as honestly as I can. Truthfully, a lot of people have reached out to me and said thank you and also a lot of the male-identifying members I’ve talked to — especially the ones who are young — they were so recently still having to live as a woman so it’s not as strange to see someone who is a woman having to live as a guy. They were just really grateful that someone was telling a story like that at all.”
After countless tests and several rounds of casting auditions for the role of Drew, Dead of Summer co-creator Edward Kitsis explains why Zelda was the perfect fit for the part.
“You write a character one way but what you hope is an actor comes in and surprises you with the way that they play it,” Kitsis says. “For Zelda, when you see episode 4, you understand the character between multiple times in their life. Zelda just brought this rawness to it and this emotion and this power that you just can’t write; it just is. When we saw her audition it was like she’s the only one that can play Drew.”
“Modern Love” and the flashback story of Drew’s past was both extremely beautiful and devastatingly heartbreaking at the same time. We posed the question to the creators on whether or not they knew going in that Drew’s journey was one they wanted to share.
“That was a story that we wanted to tell early on,” Kitsis says. “We wrote the first four episodes before we even shot the pilot. We wanted to build to that one. Very consciously we very rarely had Drew speak in the first three [episodes]. First you think it’s the mysterious loner in an 80s movie, but that story we’ve always wanted to tell.”
The heartbreak in the episode came when Drew returned to an empty home, discovering that his mom had abandoned him. There have been so many shows on television where the parents are accepting and they all live happily ever after. Spoiler Alert: In real life, not everyone gets this kind of happy ending, so we appreciated that the producers and writers were brave enough to give Drew that outcome.
“There’d be no conflict if nothing had happened,” Zelda tells us. “The gay community knows very well that that’s a big issue for them. It doesn’t really happen as often as they think that it just works out. Because for obvious reasons it’s still something people are still learning about let alone getting used to.”
“Getting used to it is many steps down the line. It’s going to take a lot more portrayals and a lot more stories and a lot more people actually understanding before they stop being afraid of it.”
Now that Drew’s secret is pretty much known among his fellow camp counselors that he was “Andrea” from years prior, he will no longer be keeping to himself much.
“From this point on, because you’ve seen Drew’s past and he got to leave a lot about what haunted him, moving forward it’s very much from a place of complete honesty for him at least in the way that is important for him not feeling haunted,” Williams says.
“It’s very present and it’s a lot of him getting to actually take part in friendships and in what’s going on and help people. From [episode] 5 on, it’s actually been a lot more intense.”
Dead of Summer airs Tuesdays at 9pm on Freeform.