To promote tonight’s episode of The Secret Circle, The CW yesterday hosted a screening of the episode, “Balcoin,” followed by a Q&A with executive producer Andrew Miller and actor Gale Harold, who plays Charles Meade, Diana’s father and one of the older generation that is desperately trying to get power for themselves.
Considering the guest list, it’s no surprise that a lot of what they talked about involved Gale’s character of Charles, but there are some other great bits that were revealed, including a future for Cassie and Adam, and what else might be coming in the show’s future. Beware of some minor spoilers!
You’ll probably read about this event at many different outlets, as there were many of us in the room. Here are some highlights.
– What’s next for Charles Meade and Dawn Chamberlain after all of the antics they have pulled? “Charles and Dawn’s behavior has not been the greatest, and there are consequences to that,” Andrew Miller says. Gale Harold had a bit more to say, revealing that Charles’ mother will be coming to the show, as played by Hunter’s Stepfanie Kramer. “Dear old Mom. She’s on her way. Charles’s mother has got some issues to resolve. Or to start, so she can resolve them later. She’s coming. She’s pissed. And she’s very good at covering that. As far as that relates to the other Elders, I’m not sure, but I know that it makes Charles very nervous, because in a sort of existential way he wants to be, I think, in possession of that kind of power that he imagines the elders have and he doesn’t know how to access, and I think in a weird way, it’s kind of Oedipal because there’s Dawn, and then there’s Mom who comes around. Charles doesn’t have a woman in his life except for his daughter, which is a totally other kind of relationship, but it puts him at a weird position.”
– “We like the idea that Charles has complicated relationships with women,” Miller adds. “The women he seeks and goes after, like Dawn, and a lot of this comes from his relationship with his mother, as it often does. We’ll explore that a little bit, very shortly.”
– “It feels to me like it’s such a classical thing, where – forgive me for even saying these two names, but it’s that sort of sexual attraction to stay alive, but also to take power, like Bonnie and Clyde had,” Gale Harold continues. “It’s like the feeding off of that. It could be a screw-up. It could be something that works. There’s a whole post-human side to it, which is the supernatural side. Being able to spell people and control what they may say, or do, or think. So I think that, to me, is very interesting. Now it’s becoming like a card game. ‘How much do I like you? I don’t know. How much do I want you? I don’t know. I know I want most of what you’ve got, and probably more of it, and I’ll take all of it if I can get it, but I have to keep making you think that I just want to give you what I have.’ It’s always like ‘you can have this’ while you’re stabbing in the back.”
– The relationship between Charles and Dawn will continue to evolve. “Their relationship has been changing in the last few episodes because of what happened to Nick, mostly from what happened to Nick, on, I think it’s created a wedge in between them. Their relationship now, in the last couple episodes, Charles has really stepped up, and I think he’s grabbing the power back in the form of this crystal, and stepping up to Dawn. What we’ll find in the next few episodes, [is] that as that divide increases between them, they’ll have to seek out support, and a guy who might come in to the middle of that power struggle is a friend of ours, Ethan Conant. He’ll become a player in this power struggle between these two,” Miller says.
– “I think that what Dawn motivated Charles to do in killing Nick, I think that is – just from a human nature point of view – I think he holds that as a real betrayal,” Gale says. “It’s a mind eff (you, see, kay). The worst you can get, because he has a child who’s the same age, and he stood there in the water and strangled the kid to death, and watched him die. He’s always going to see Nick’s face when he sees Dawn’s face. That’s a whole other trip that’s coming out.”
– Is John Blackwell really dead? “What kind of a question is that? They say he’s dead all the time! Why wouldn’t he be dead?” Andrew Miller laughs. “He’s a complicated figure, so I’m told from the books, but we’ll find out more about him. We’ll get into more of his background and exactly what happened to him, as we continue.”
– Most of the parents on The Secret Circle seem to be single and have never remarried. Why didn’t they? Miller reveals that Melissa’s father has remarried, “to a lovely woman that we haven’t met yet.” “You know, a lot of these characters are just heartbroken,” he says. “Like poor Ethan. And Charles’ relationship with women is obviously complicated. I think Charles may have wanted to remarry to a certain special blonde at a certain point, but it’s kind of a case by case thing. Amelia obviously has her own troubles, and won’t be remarried now.”
– How could Charles kill Amelia so easily (in the series pilot), but the killing of Jake caused so many issues? “It’s a really interesting question,” Gale says. “I think about it too. We haven’t really talked about this… perhaps that will be elucidated in the future, but at the moment, I think the most direct that I know about it is that it has something to do with his relationship with Dawn. That’s one aspect of what he did to Nick, right, and that line… doing that to Amelia, flames, more exciting visually… as brutal as drowning a child in the water right in front of you… but that’s what it seems to me. Somehow, he did that, not just because he wanted to go burn somebody to death. There was some sort of pact between Dawn and Charles that led to that, and I think she was the driving force. It seems to be that she was the one in the driver’s seat, propelling him to do that. That’s not to say he didn’t enjoy it in some weird subconscious way, but I don’t know. I think that was that, and it was the beginning of forcing Cassie into the place they needed her to be. That’s all that was about. The fact that he did it, I think, goes to Dawn’s power over him, as it was at that point. By the time they got to what we saw with Nick, then that’s when it starts cracking for Charles, because it’s like ‘I can’t go on being a homicidal maniac.’ Or maybe I can, but I’ve got to be in charge if I’m going to do that. I’ve got to pick the time, and the place, and the way that people are killed. I can’t just say, ‘oh, I’m going to kill that person because you told me to’.”
– “We have a great gift on our show, which are these actors, who have the capacity to play these different things at the same time. At least for me, but as a fan of this show, I love watching scenes with particularly the adults, where I feel as though you can believe that the same amount of passion that goes into the torment that Charles experiences over Nick, can be shifted just slightly, and can become terror, and anger, and rage, when it goes against Amelia. I think these guys are so talented that it allows us to write these layered, complicated characters, where you can convince yourself that anything is right if you try hard enough. I think these characters, particularly Charles and Dawn, are at this place where they’ve convinced themselves about a lot of things, and over the course of the next few episodes and then beyond, they’ll start to question the ‘mind eff (you cee kay)’ that they’ve done on themselves, even. People make themselves do things all the time. Sometimes good and sometimes bad. That’s a fun thing for us to explore – both sides of that,” Andrew says.
– Since Jake showed up, the “Adam and Cassie” pairing seems to be on the backburner. What’s up with that? “That hasn’t been on the backburner for long, or it won’t be on the backburner for long,” Miller says. “Cassie’s becoming a slightly different person, with this whole ‘dark magic’ thing, and also, I think Diana at this point has become pretty clear on not wanting to pursue anything with Adam. Guys are dumb for the most part, and I think when Adam really lets that sink in, he’ll kind of have no choice but to say ‘there’s a girl that people keep talking about me being destined to be with, and what does that mean? And if nothing’s going to happen with the tall, pretty girl over there, then maybe I should look at the short blonde girl’.”
– With all of the talk about the night the kids’ parents were killed, will we ever see a flashback? “Many of you may have seen Vampire Diaries. They can do flashbacks whenever the hell they want and use the same actors, and it’s really fun. We just can’t do that in the same way. But we do need to delve into this back story, and we are exploring ways to experience that past, in what I think are really, really exciting, interesting ways, in the very near future. Pretty soon on the heels of the new year, we’ll start to see more of the past than we’ve seen thus far,” Miller reveals.
– One journalist pointed out that after Nick’s death, there still seems to be an overabundance of girls in the girls-vs.-guys ratio. Will this be changing? “Boo hoo hoo, not enough hot guys! What is this? Supernatural?” Miller jokes. “There are more hot guys coming. They’re on a bus right now, they’re coming in from Friday Night Lights. We’ve got this kid, Grey Damon, who is going to be on the show for a little bit. He’s pretty hot. If by ‘hot’ you mean ‘really sexy eyes and six feet tall and handsome’.” “His character is a very dangerous guy, for a lot of reasons. He’s confident and cocky, and has a different kind of power than we’ve seen. One of our characters will be drawn to him in a way that could prove dire for some of our other characters.”
The Secret Circle is new tonight at 9PM – check it out! Our thanks go out to Andrew Miller and Gale Harold for taking the time, and to The CW for the pizza and for arranging the Q&A in the first place!
