Interview: Magda Apanowicz Issue #44

She’s making a name for herself as the voice of reason on the intergalactic soap meets Greek tragedy, Caprica

By Catherine Disabato
Published: September 1st, 2010 | 3:00am

Lacy Rand, Magda Apanowicz’s character on SyFy’s Caprica, is having a rough year. First, her best friend Zoe (Alessandra Torresani) dies in a terrorist bombing. Then, Zoe’s consciousness gets uploaded into a robot body, and that robot starts ordering Lacy around. Finally, she’s forced into playing cat-and-mouse games with an unstable religious fanatic named Barnabus (portrayed by sci-fi TV veteran James Marsters).

While Lacy often buckles under the weight of the forceful personalities around her, Apanowicz, who possesses an appropriately offbeat beauty, plays her boldly, threading subtle intelligence into every scene. In upcoming episodes of Caprica, a spinoff of and prequel to Battlestar Galactica, we’ll finally get to see Lacy come into her own. “It’s her journey. She’s trying to find her voice and who she is, and discover how she fits into this big scary world,” Apanowicz says.

The viewer catches early glimpses of the bolder, braver Lacy during scenes that take place in Caprica’s most interesting landscape, the virtual world or “V-world.” In it, characters upload avatars of their physical selves and have the ability to act out fantasy scenarios and visit fantastic settings. Apanowicz takes the special circumstances of the virtual world into consideration: “I’ve always played it so that she’s a little more comfortable in her skin when you see her in the V-world. It’s her place and she feels like she belongs there. When you see her in the real world, she’s just kind of scared and alone.”

When Lacy and Zoe appear in scenes together, and Zoe is portrayed both as a giant robot and as the girl trapped inside. As such, Apanowicz has to film each scene twice. “Alessandra and I do the scenes, and then, instead of a robot, they have this slender tall pole with blue lights all down it—where the face and neck would go,” she explains. The 24-year-old actress enjoys these particular challenges of an effects-heavy show, but she really enjoys working on the intense one-on-one exchanges between Lacy and Barnabus. “That was a fun story,” Apanowicz gushes. She starts to explain more, than holds herself back so as not to spoil the yet-unaired secrets for the fans. “There’s more that I can’t really talk about, but I want to.”

Next up, Apanowicz is filming a Lifetime movie called Bonds of Silence, the real-life story of a man’s murder at the hands of a group of drunk teenagers, in which she plays against type as the bitchy, popular girl. “That [character] was kind of weird for me,” she admits, “because I’m not even close to that.” When that project wraps, the Canadian-born actress wants to explore. She’s planning to spend three weeks backpacking through Germany, Italy, and the Greek Islands. “I used to travel a lot before I got into acting and then I got so focused. It’s time to go live a little bit,” Apanowicz says.