Two months ago, we chatted to Chasing Life star Italia Ricci on the eve of the show’s premiere. Ahead of the summer finale, which airs tonight at 9/8c, we caught up with her again to discuss her experience filming Chasing Life 1×10, “Finding Chemo”.
Check out our exclusive interview with Italia Ricci below:
There’s a lot obviously coming up in the next episode. I feel like throughout the season, April’s cancer has always been a big plot point but there’s always been a lot of other stuff going on with her family and all that, but the final episode is very very focused on the chemo. How was that to film and was it really hard?
Because I’m in a hospital bed, it’s taking away half of your tools to tell a story, so physically it was hard. Also, I lost probably like five or six pounds for the episode because I wanted April to look a little more sick and run down, and also I wanted to feel weaker, like physically I didn’t want to have my normal amount of energy and strength because she wouldn’t, so I wanted to sort of be able to pull from that, so physically it was hard.
Emotionally it was just like, draining, because you’re just in that mindset all day and then she’s slowly breaking down and hallucinating and being nauseous and all of these things. After pretending to feel that way for so long in a day, it’s hard to shake it when you come home at night, so I’m pretty sure every night I came home from shooting the finale, I just like, cried and curled up on the couch. I wasn’t a very fun person while we were shooting that, I’m sure.
Related to the hallucinations, April lost her dad, and he is one of the people she hallucinates. How do you think that affected her, being so reminded of him when she was in the hospital?
I think it scared her because she didn’t want to end up like that and she didn’t want her family to have to feel the pain that they felt after losing her dad because of her. She didn’t want to be responsible for breaking that many hearts and so that terrified her and then you see it get to her finally and she loses it and she becomes really weak for a minute, which I think is a moment that she’s earned because of how tough she’s been through the whole season. I was terrified of the scene but I was so grateful for it because she’s never given herself any time to feel sorry for herself or to take pity on her situation. She’s just been so tough, and so that scene is really… I think a lot of people are going to relate to it, and not just about having an illness, about any sort of hardship. We all go through those moments and I feel like it was really important to show that April had to go through one of those too.
We got a lot of questions that were basically along the lines of Leo vs. Dominic, so what are your thoughts on that?
I love both of them. I think that Dominic is April’s idea of the life that she’s always wanted, and the world that she started dating Dominic in was the world that she thought was her dream coming true with her job and everything that surrounded that, and so when she looks at him, she sees the life that she wants. But with Leo, he understands the life that she has, so she loves and hates that about him – and same with Dominic, she loves and hates the fact that he reminds her of what she wanted or still wants. They’re both so important but so different, and they’re both just so damn good-looking.
Speaking of the whole one-person-vs-another dynamic, April has been pretty supportive of Brenna’s Kieran vs. Greer situation. In the last episode, Brenna chose Greer. How are we going to see that develop? What’s coming up for them, and is April going to be involved in any of that?
No matter what road Brenna chooses and what mistakes Brenna makes, April’s always very real with her because she knows at the end of the day they’re sisters and they love each other and she can be honest about things with Brenna in a way that her mom can’t, so they sort of hang in this like, friend/sister teeter-totter, but April just wants to see Brenna happy and support her and try to prevent her from making mistakes, but ultimately Brenna needs to do that so she can appreciate her own decisions.
Brenna actually has quite an evolution over this whole first season. She becomes a very different person come, like, episode 20, and Haley has done such a brilliant job in playing her – it’s so real and honest, and it’s very reflective of what an actual teenager goes through. I remember I was crazy when I was a kid. I was a much more amplified version. One day I wanted to be a boxer and so I would get all ghetto and boxy, and one day I was practicing witchcraft. Actually I practiced witchcraft for like a year. You’re trying so hard to figure out where you fit in and Brenna’s doing that too, and I love how ABC Family isn’t afraid to show how raw and how scary and how upsetting or how exciting that can be – if that wasn’t the most vague answer ever.
The episode titles are very punny, like this week’s episode is “Finding Chemo.” Do you think that fits well with the show, how you’re kind of expecting it to be a downer but there are moments that make you smile and there are lighter parts?
Because it’s a dramedy, it’s a very lightly handled drama. We could’ve done the show in a way that just makes you want to just not get off the couch for three days after you watch it because it’s so easy when you’re dealing with such drama. I think the difficult part of the show is sprinkling the humor in because it’s so necessary.
From the feedback of the fans, they’re like, this is what it’s like – cancer isn’t always depressing. Sometimes you realize how much better your life is because cancer made the stakes so much higher and made you appreciate what really matters, which in turn makes you happier. So you’re not exactly grateful for the cancer, but you appreciate the perspective that it made you gain, and I feel like the show does that. It shows that it’s not all sad all the time, and when it is sad, you don’t have to be sad for a whole hour. It’s like real life when you’re crying over something and then your friend makes a stupid joke or does something dumb because that’s what you do in life to get through the hard times. It’s really easy on TV to just milk things because you can use music and you can use lighting and you can use camera moves to amplify it just to get a rise out of your audience, but then they end up not appreciating it because it’s dishonest, and that’s definitely my favorite thing about the show is how honest it is. And I think the titles are just fun. I’ve never really associated the titles with anything other than just, like, the quirky, brilliant writers.
How has April changed as a person since episode 1, and how has she stayed the same despite all the changes in her life?
Well, obviously her health has changed and her family dynamic has changed because of Natalie, but I think that April has forced herself to become even stronger than she thought she was in the beginning, but at the same time she’s still just as stubborn as she was in the beginning. She’s still got that tenacity to be the best at whatever she’s doing, but she’s also had to give up some of that control, which is very difficult for her – which I understand, because I’m a control freak.
Chasing Life 1×10 airs tonight at 9/8c on ABC Family, following Pretty Little Liars. Check out our interview with showrunner Patrick Sean Smith, view a sneak peek of the finale below, and keep up with Italia Ricci by following her on Twitter @italiaricci!
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