The CW’s Frequency listens in on a young woman from 2016 who, through her ham radio, is able to speak with her father in 1996. Peyton List (The Tomorrow People) plays the young woman and Riley Smith (Nashville) plays the dad in 1996.
On a recent visit to the Frequency sets in Vancouver, we spoke with Mr. Smith about his role of Frank Sullivan and what it’s like to wear all that flannel.
“I love that I get to wear so much flannel on the job,” he admitted, pointing to the shirt that he was wearing at the time of the interview. “In fact, this exact shirt right here is — was, or is my shirt. They just went and bought me one for the character. I showed up on set, and they were like ‘we love that! Where did you get it?’ I was like ‘I don’t know!’ So they took a picture, and the next thing you know, now Frank’s wearing it,” he said.
“The joke about it is during the pilot, I had just gotten this, and I wore it every day because it’s just cozy and warm, and so I told Devin [Kelley] who plays Julia, she was just so tired of seeing it, and I was like ‘don’t be mad, but you’re still gonna see it on set’,” he recalled. “I love it. I grew up in the 90’s. I was wearing flannel when it was cool. I was wearing flannel again when it wasn’t cool. Now it’s coming back around!”
Doing Frequency as a TV series has been a venture that Riley Smith has enjoyed. “I didn’t know what we were gonna do with the series,” he admitted about his impressions of doing the show after the pilot. “I guess we all kinda had assumptions on where it could go, and to be honest, the way that it’s going right now, I love. I love the pacing of it,” he said. I love the energy that the scripts have, and I love the dynamics that they’ve created. There’s a lot about my [character’s] backstory that I had no idea when I was undercover that has now come to flesh itself out. It blew me away. I was like. ‘Oh, God!’ Did I wish I knew that, or am I glad that I’m now finding it out later down the line? I found it out when I needed to, for my backstory, when I played in my scenes, but a lot of it I did not know about until we got that script. Would I have liked to have known that 5 episodes ago? Maybe. But I think it played out for the right reasons.”
“I love everything they built like that,” he admitted. “Even when I read the scripts, and we have a lot of those intercuts, for instance in the golf scenes, I think, in Episode 2 and 3, where I’m running out to the shed to find golf, she’s running to the shed to find golf, and we’re intercutting between ’96 and 2016, until all of a sudden what I do makes ’em disappear in the future. Those little montages that are now implemented in every episode? To me, that’s so stylized and slick, and I did not even read it that way, let alone visualize that. And the way that they’re weaving the two timelines together – like when I draw the picture and I leave it for her, and then she opens it, she’s there… those are just… that’s what makes this show really cool to me. Those are the things that we’ve now – the writers have made their own. They’ve made it their — that’s what’s made the show what it is. I didn’t see that stuff coming.”
A new episode of Frequency airs tonight (November 16) at 9PM on The CW. Photos from tonight’s episode “Break, Break, Break” can be found here.