BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. _ Eleanor Tomlinson sports the talent and the looks to be an actress. But she possesses something else that has kept her performing since she was a child _ a fierce determination.
"I was 11 when I started acting, so you don't take the word 'no' on board. If you want to do something, you just do it. I was very much like that," she says in the hallway outside a hotel conference room here.
"I am quite a competitive person, not so much in sports. I'm useless in sports, but when it comes to amazing roles," she shrugs. "You're going up against the same people all the time often, and that becomes quite difficult. Then someone takes a chance on you, someone gambles."
Someone took a big gamble on the British Tomlinson when she insisted on trying out for the role of the fiery Demelza in PBS' "Poldark," returning for another season on Sunday.
The producers wanted her for the part of the cultured Elizabeth. "I just read the script and this one role really appealed to me and I thought, 'If I don't ask, I'm never going to get anywhere.'
"I said, 'May I please audition for the other role?' At first they said, 'We don't think you're right for it.' I said, 'I really want to try because I think I can do it, and I really want to challenge myself as an actress.' So they let me audition. And here we are," she grins, resting her hands on the lap of her black minidress.
It wasn't quite that easy. She had to tryout three times. "I did one audition by myself, the second audition was with all of the producers so they kind of see your performance. And the third audition was a screen test with Aidan (Turner, who plays Poldark); a chemistry test to see how we got on on camera. I was terrified. There's always another girl in the waiting room. And you can't help look each other up and down and go, 'OK, there's the competition.' It's hard."
Tomlinson should know better. She comes from a family of actors. Her mother, father, and brother are all actors. She was just a child when she intercepted her father's agent and insisted she represent her. Though the agent had no child clients, she agreed.
And Tomlinson, 24, has worked pretty steadily ever since. Though she's fiercely focused on her career (no time for sweetheart, she says) she's been through some trying times.
She was just 19 when she left home for London to blaze a trail. It was the same day that her pet dog died. He'd been with the family since Eleanor was 2. "When he passed away the bottom fell out of my world. He was like a brother," she says.
"It took a really long time to get over it ... He died and I moved out and I never went home again to live. I think I just told myself that's life. You've lost something you loved so much, but that's what life is. People come and they go and it's horrendous, but you can't have them forever. I'm sure he's running around in some amazing field now," she brightens.
While she's meticulous about her work, she denies she's so exacting in her life. "I'm quite a creative person. I surround myself with things I like. My flat is like a film set," she laughs. "I surround myself with creative people as well. All my friends are all in the industry and are all very creative, so that's really nice. I wouldn't say I'm a perfectionist," she muses.
"I know exactly what I want and just need to be given the opportunities to try it. I have a strong will. You take knocks, of course, you have to pick yourself up and dust yourself off. My God, the amount of times I have wept having not got a job, going 'I can't do this anymore. It's so ruthless.'
"A week or so later an audition comes in and you pick yourself up, and you go in, and you act like your heart hasn't been broken. It's a bizarre life."
Between assignments, Tomlinson says, "I'm awful for arguing with myself. If I have any time off, I always feel like I should be doing something else. I should be reading scripts, I should be reading a book. Instead I'll sit in my dressing gown and eat chocolate all morning and not leave the house. It's such a guilty pleasure, but I'm full of self-loathing after I've done it."
ABC COMEDY REFLECTS REAL-LIFE CHALLENGES
One of the better fall shows is ABC's "Speechless," which is a comedy about a family living with the challenges of a child with special needs. Minnie Driver stars as the in-your-face mom who is NEVER speechless about her son's well-being. The show, which premieres Wednesday, was created and is executive produced by Scott Silveri, whose own story is touching.
"For me, it's a question of writing what you know. I came from a family with a brother with special needs, and it's something that I've been wanting to write for a long, long time," he says.
"I have worked with different versions of it over the years. And, at the risk of sounding fawning, a lot of it was the encouragement of the studio, when I went in to pitch something, saying, 'What's really meaningful to you? What's REALLY meaningful to you?'
"It would be easier to do a show about a guy wins the lottery and buys a whoopee cushion factory, and sure, we can mine jokes from that. But this was an attempt to write what I know. And what I know is the challenges, the ups and downs of growing up with a family with a sibling with special needs. I know how it's the same as other people's experience, how it's different from other people's experience, what's funny about it. It was a very personal story, and I feel lucky to get the chance to tell it."
CEO REVEALS THE SECRETS TO TV SUCCESS
Most of the time the CEOs of TV networks just drone on about how wonderful they are and why their networks are your remotes' BFF. One exception is John Landgraf, chief of FX networks. FX has bolstered some terrific shows like "Fargo," "The Americans," "The Shield," "The Riches," "Rescue Me" and they continue. It's certainly not the public relations department, but Landgraf himself that affords the channel such gravitas.
"Despite the fact that Hollywood has always been _ and now Silicon Valley is even more _ a realm of very big businesses where titanic egos and competitors clash and huge sums of money are made and lost, I and we at the FX Networks have always believed that great storytelling is best fostered in a uniquely personal and human-scaled context," he says.
"The storyteller has to come before the story and the story has to come before the data or the money or the competitive ambitions of the organization. Television shows are not like cars or operating systems. And they are not best made by engineers or coders in the same assembly-line manner as consumer products which need to be of uniform size, shape, and quality," he says.
"Every single television show and every great episode of every great television show should _ on some level _ be sui generis, one of a kind. And every creator needs and deserves personal relationships and an attention to detail that takes its direction from inside their vision as a storyteller ... "
KEN BURNS CO-DIRECTS TALE OF NAZI FIGHTERS
It's a little known story and leave it to documentary filmmaker, Ken Burns, to tell it. During World War II a Unitarian minister, Waitstill Sharp, and his wife left their family at home in Massachusetts and traveled to Prague to help save lives of targets of the Nazi wave that was inundating Europe. On Tuesday PBS will air "Defying the Nazis: the Sharps' War," which was co-directed by Burns and Artemis Joukowsky, the grandson of the Sharps.
"There is opacity, as I've said, about the phrase '6 million,'" says Burns. "And while the Sharps saved only a few hundred, it's a few hundred, and you get to understand personally what these people did when they were children or young adults and were gotten out. So there's many, many layers about sacrifice, about the cost of that sacrifice, but also bumping up against the greatest cataclysm in human history, which is the Second World War. And it's not just the 6 million, but 60 million overall that perished in this human cataclysm, and that's, I think, one of the things that drew me immensely to this project."
