In the Prime Video series Gen V, a lot of characters have kick-ass powers that require special and visual effects to properly bring to life – but few compare to the awesomeness of what’s done for Lizze Broadway’s Emma. Also known by her internet handle Little Cricket, Emma has the ability to both shrink and grow, and it means filmmakers get inventive when building her special sets. But does Broadway have a preference when it comes to either being big or getting small?
I asked the actress that very question earlier this month when I had the wonderful opportunity to cover the Los Angeles press day for Gen V Season 2. While she was paired with Maddie Phillips and Asa Germann (who play Cate and Sam on the show), I asked about the process of bringing her powers to life, and she expressed that while she is wowed by what’s crafted to make her giant, she loves the pure imagination she gets to play with in sequences when she teeny-tiny. Said Broadway,
I love playing small, 'cause I'm in this little blue box with nothing – with no props, no nothing usually. So I just like get to be a child and just play and hope to wing it. And also, when I am big, the production this season, I get really big in episode two in an office and they took seven weeks to build this set piece, and it was like probably this big , and I had to like climb through it.
While I won’t spoil all of the times that Emma gets both big and small throughout Gen V Season 2, it can be teased that she ends up in some wild situations (and the aforementioned episode two growth spurt that occurs when she makes a huge discovery is just one of them).
Emma’s powers are not only a great opportunity for the production to utilize digital and practical effects, but she is one of the prime examples of how the show creates ties between supe abilities and common crises experienced by teens – metaphors that add surprising and wonderful depth to Gen V and makes it a special spinoff from The Boys. While she is still trying to fully understand how to control her gifts, she learns toward the end of Season 1 that her changing size is directly correlated to her self-esteem. She used to think that she could only get small by being bulimic (she would binge eat to get big again), but that was really just a reflection of her self-loathing. That’s an aspect of the character that is changing in some big ways in the new episodes.
For Lizze Broadway, she is delighted by what the filmmakers are able to come up with when they are designing sequences with Emma being small, and she was particularly tickled making the most recent run when she got to swim around in a giant, warmed beer cup. Broadway continued,
I think it's like really cool what they build for Emma – like a huge beer bong cup. That was heated by the way. They built a huge beer cup, and it was heated and I was like, 'Wow, this is privilege.' I was like, 'Wow: when your beer is heated, you know, you know you're doing something right.'
Available for all Amazon Prime subscribers, Gen V is now in the midst of Season 2, having debuted its first three episodes last week and the fourth on Wednesday. It’s an eight-installment run for the show that will play out through the finale’s airing on October 22. Be sure to stay tuned here on CinemaBlend in the coming weeks, as we’ll have plenty more stories for you from my interviews with the show’s cast.
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