Alexa Vega of Spy Kids, Ruby & The Rockits and Machete Kills fame makes her first appearance on The CW’s Tomorrow People tonight (January 22) as Hillary Cole, a hyper-competitive ULTRA agent that you just know will be a pain in Stephen Jameson’s neck.
To promote tonight’s episode, we spoke with Ms. Vega about Hillary and what the new character will bring to the world of The Tomorrow People. This interview will be presented in a Q&A format – our questions will be posted in bold; her answers will not be.
KSITETV’s CRAIG BYRNE: What can you tell me about Hillary Cole?
ALEXA VEGA: I can tell you she’s brutally competitive. [laughs] She’s pretty ruthless. She’s a character that will stop at nothing to become this top agent in training. Right now, ULTRA is weeding out all their weak agents in training and stripping them of their powers, and Hillary does not want to lose her powers at all. They even have Stephen as part of this competition, and he doesn’t want to be stripped of his powers.
So, we have to be with each other as a team when we’re finding breakouts and the things that ULTRA needs us to do, but at the same time, there’s such a competitiveness within ULTRA right now, that it definitely puts a strain on Stephen and I, and I just am vicious. I’m mean, and I’m striving to be the best no matter what that cost is, and if an obstacle gets in my way, I’m going to remove it, and Stephen tends to get in my way so I have to handle him. I kick his butt pretty well. [laughs]
So I take it that she and Stephen aren’t really friends?
Oh, no! And it’s funny, because we’re supposed to be a team. We’re supposed to be working together, even though we have this inner competition within ULTRA, and how do you work together with somebody, that you know that you’re going head to head against, to keep your powers? So she gets pretty ruthless and does some digging, and at the end of this episode, I can tell you that Hillary witnesses Stephen doing something with Astrid that he definitely shouldn’t be doing, and I may or may not use that against him in upcoming episodes.
You’ve worked with Robbie Amell before. Can you talk about that and how you became involved with The Tomorrow People?
I love, love, love Robbie. He is such a sweetheart. I’ve known him for a little bit, and it’s funny, because he had told me that he was on this show, and I remember reading the script and loving it, so when it started to air, I was like “Okay. Robbie. This show is incredible. Seriously, if there’s ever a really awesome role, I don’t care if she’s in it for only like a minute, you better call me up and tell them that I want to do it, because this show is really great!” And sure enough, this character came along, and he called me. He’s like “Okay. I’ve told them about you. This girl is vicious, she’s mean… I think you’re going to have a lot of fun with her. You’ve never really played a horrible character before, so this could be a really great experience with you.” And thankfully, they have kept me around. I’m still here filming, and Hillary is just as bad ass as promised, and I’ve been having a lot of fun creating this character, who [as] you guys will eventually kind of get to see, she’s pretty wicked.
Is Hillary able to see through the various BS stories that Stephen tries to put out there?
I think with Hillary, she doesn’t trust anyone, and at this point, she wants to eliminate her competition. And she does that, slowly, like one by one. She gets rid of the people, whether it’s fighting, or finding something out about them; she’s going to get rid of her competition. And when she sees Stephen doing things that he shouldn’t be doing, she starts to really look into him. For future episodes, this kind of puts everyone at risk. Everything that Stephen is fighting to protect and keep private and safe and secret, she is determined to find out. So, he has to really be on his A game for her not to find out what’s going on.
Is she aware that Stephen is Jedikiah’s nephew, and does that come into play at all?
Yes, and it makes her so frustrated, because she feels like he’s already kind of “teacher’s pet,” that he already has a leg up on her. It means that she has to try even harder, and because she’s already cut-throat, this gives her even more of an incentive to be very emotionally cut off and just stop at nothing, and be ruthless, and just kind of throw him under the bus, basically. She gladly does that over and over and over again.
What does she think of Jedikiah? Does she trust him?
I don’t think Hillary trusts anybody. I think she knows that he is the boss, and he has the power to take her powers away. So, she wants to please him, and show him that she’s smart, and she’s quick. She’s always the first one to answer a question, the first one to assess a situation, and Jedikiah notices that, and he picks up on it, but she’s also kind of annoying when she does it. [laughs] She’s not very likable, but she is incredibly smart and quick-witted.
Are we going to see her interacting with the Founder (Simon Merrells) at any point?
No. Not right now. You don’t see any of that. I do hope that you get to see something like that in the future, but as of now, nothing. She’s just mainly at ULTRA, dealing with Jedikiah and worrying about her being stripped of her powers.
More toward the future, is there ever a possibility that we will see Hillary among the good guys?
With every project, I always hope that the bad guy will see the light and be great, so I always say “never say never,” but right now, she’s so mean [laughs], and the things that she’s doing are pretty horrible, so I don’t know if that’s going to happen any time soon. But never say never!
Do we get to see her doing anything mean to anybody like Cara or John?
She’s still working on discovering all of these people, so she doesn’t really know enough about what Stephen is hiding, but she’s definitely digging, and as she gets closer and closer, it’s really scary for Stephen, because if Hillary finds out, ULTRA finds out, Stephen’s cover is blown, and everything’s just kind of gone to crap. So, this really keeps Stephen on edge. It keeps everybody on their toes, because he has to have everybody be on alert, because Hillary digs. That’s just kind of what she does. She’s a little snot.
But, absolutely, I think that if she were to find out about them? She absolutely would go in and do what she had to do to eliminate everybody. But for right now, she’s still digging.
Are we going to get to be able to see any of Hillary’s back story and how she broke out?
This is what I love about this show: You love these characters, and then slowly, with each episode, they reveal just a little bit more. They don’t give you the whole story, but they reveal a little bit more, just enough to keep you super interested and wanting to discover more about these characters’ lives and where they came from. I’m waiting to see what they do with Hillary, because I want to know why she is so cut-throat. Why is she so mean? She’s holding all this anger; this need to be the best, and I want to know why, so I’m really eager to see what they come up with, and how they play her, because right now she’s so horrible that I wonder what horrible things happened to her, or what kind of crazy parents did she have that brought her up to be this way. There are so many awesome things that we could do with her, I’m really eager to see what they do.
Alexa Vega’s Tomorrow People debut airs at 9PM tonight (January 22) on The CW.
