Cast and crew make sure 'Extant' is down
CULVER CITY, Calif. - Halle Berry felt a connection when the producers of the futuristic CBS drama Extant approached her last year about playing an astronaut who returns from a 13-month solo space mission with an unexplained pregnancy.
'I was eight months pregnant. I felt like, 'Wow! I think this might be meant to be,'' says Berry, whose now-9-month-old son, Maceo Martinez, was on set with her last month. 'When I need to go have mommy time, (as) I call it, I get to nurse my baby. Everybody's been patient. I couldn't think of a job where I would get to do it the way I do it.'
But the 13-episode Extant (Wednesday, 9 ET/PT), set in a not-too-distant future, is hardly a sepia-toned vision of motherhood. Besides the extra space passenger in her womb, Berry's Molly Woods must readjust to home life with her inventor husband, John (Goran Visnjic), and Ethan, 8, the android son he created after they were unable to conceive.
'Molly struggles with wanting to love Ethan, because it's so important to John and to her. She wants to be a mother, she wants a family, and she's trying very hard,' says Berry, chatting in the Woods' modern living room between takes of the drama, which is produced by Steven Spielberg.
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Molly 'was 13 months (in space) with nobody,' but at home, 'you need to talk and interact with other people and accept your child is a robot,' Visnjic says. Over time, however, 'you're going to forget that this kid is a robot. They really do talk about his upbringing like I'm talking to my wife about my son .'
The surprise pregnancy leads to more complicated emotions for Molly. 'Because that baby is part of her, there's a real struggle there,' says the latest Oscar winner ( Monster's Ball) to embrace a series that could extend for multiple seasons. However, feelings are 'tempered because they don't what (the baby) is.'
Extant juggles questions about artificial intelligence, extraterrestrial life and humanity. John 'didn't expect Ethan to start picking things up much faster than he was supposed to,' Visnjic says, which raises ethical questions amid fears of 'a robot uprising.'
The drama also wraps in elements of conspiracy and espionage through a mysterious mogul, Hideki Yasumoto (Hiroyuki Sanada), and the private companies that oversee Molly's and John's work.
'All of this is centered around this family, so it allows us to move between different genres but also keep it rooted in something that is emotionally compelling,' says creator Mickey Fisher, whose script finished second in a contest that led to work with Spielberg.
During filming for a late-season episode, Berry's Molly is on the receiving end of a memory-enhancer gun, a vaccination-style injector wielded by her friend and doctor, Sam Barton (Camryn Manheim), to help the astronaut recall events in space.
Most of the technology is not too hard to imagine, Manheim says. 'I remember watching (1980s series) Knight Rider, and he had that car, KITT,' a talking supercomputer, she says. 'I thought, 'That's incredible,' and now I have KITT. My Prius is KITT.'
Spielberg, whose 1982 smash E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was shot on the same stages as Extant, pushed to include flashback scenes of Berry, weightless in space, producers say, and has been involved in developing characters, reading scripts and editing.
'In the editing room, watching him craft Ethan's performance, he has such an intuitive understanding of getting inside the head of a character,' says executive producer Greg Walker. 'I've always been amazed and impressed with the way he has been able to crack a character, visually, so quickly.'
Berry, a fan of E.T., sees a larger Spielberg contribution. 'He's such a great storyteller. His input makes the stories more relatable,' she says. 'We have many cool elements to our show, and things seem futuristic, but it always comes back to the heart and soul of our story, characters and family.'
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