This past weekend, OMFGTV sat down with the two leading stars of Freeform’s upcoming mermaid drama Siren at WonderCon 2018. In our chat, the two introduce their characters as well as their fascination with mermaids.
Eline Powell (“Game of Thrones“) plays Ryn, the titular siren in the series. She’s never been on land prior to setting foot on Bristol Cove, and to its denizens, she’s very odd.
“She’s a top-level predator but at a complete disadvantage in the sense that her body is new, her surroundings are new, and on top of that her sister just got kidnapped,” Powell says. “She doesn’t know anything about this world and she has a mission and so she has to trust some people, but so far they haven’t shown much trustworthiness. So that’s where Ben is quite a major shift in her experience of land, and the story unfolds.”
The Ben Powell speaks of is a marine biologist and conservationist with an altruistic view on the world. Alex Roe (“Rings,” “The 5th Wave”) shares that his family are the business people of the town and fishing is the way they make money and that he’s a rebel against them in some ways.
“He discovers this young girl and he assumes that maybe she’s on drugs or something like that because she’s pretty strange,” Roe says of Ben meeting Ryn. “She turns out to be a mermaid and she kind of gets in his head a little bit. My character is kind of like the exploration of what the siren song does, how it makes people act and drives people a little crazy. That’s kind of fun for me to play.”
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When finding out that the series would take a much darker approach to the mermaids we are used to, Powell says that concept is “awesome.” “Don’t get me wrong, I love mermaids the way we have them, it’s fantastic,” she says. “We’ve explored vampires in such a different way, and evil and Twilight-beautiful ways, and zombies even, so why not mermaids?
“It’s such an interesting mythological creature,” she continues. “They’re our connection to water. Especially the women aspect of it, this dual nature of danger but allure and in many cultures the mermaids have good powers and they actually come from fertility goddesses down through history. I just think it was just so cool to show this different take on it.”
For her co-star Roe, mermaids was the big reason why he signed up for the project. He points out 2011’s Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and references a section in the film where mermaids lured sailors to their deaths.
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“That juxtaposition of being really attractive and beautiful and alluring and then being very dangerous, I think that’s a really cool and quite sexy and fun idea,” Roe says. “The way that it’s explored in this [series] is really cool, basing itself in some kind of scientific truth, which I think for me to try to imagine that mermaids could actually exist, this is how it would happen.”
The duo say that their new series shows how having mermaids in reality would happen, but do they believe it could happen? Could the existence of mermaids be real?
“I’m not claiming that there is, but why not?” Powell says. “We don’t know. There’s so much we don’t know. I’m open minded to it.” Adds Roe: “Realizing that we kind of almost know know less about our oceans on our own planet than we know about space, and a lot of people are pretty sure that alien life exists. I think there’s something really intriguing about this unexplored depths of the ocean. Why not mermaids, you know? Why not?”
Siren Premieres Thursday at 9pm on Freeform.
