Stephanie Jacobsen Interview

American audiences were first introduced to Australian actress Stephanie Jacobsen via her strong performance in Battlestar Galactica: Razor, the TV-Movie in which she played the lead character, Kendra Shaw. Now, Jacobsen is back on TV with a new role on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Jacobsen plays Jesse,a resistance fighter from the future with close ties to Derek Reese (Brian Austin Green).After the jump there are excerpts from a recent IGN interview.


By Eric Goldman,IGN
October 31,2008
IGN: How would you describe Jesse?

Jacobsen: Jesse, Jesse, Jesse… [Laughs] I would describe her I guess, first and foremost, as independent. She's strong willed. She is very devoted. She is a person with a great deal of conviction and a great deal of passion.

IGN: The show has a pretty dense mythology. Did you have to do a lot of catching up on who everyone was when you came onboard?

Jacobsen: I had seen some of the first season, so I just watched a few of the episodes that I felt would be pertinent to my character and a little bit more detailed; I.e., the ones that contained heavy portions of flash forwards.

IGN: You are part of two big sci-fi franchises now, with Battlestar Galactica and Terminator.

Jacobsen: I grew up with sci-fi always sort of in the background – like the background noise was always sci-fi, because my father was a big sci-fi fan. So I always kind of felt at home with it, if that makes any sense. And now, as an actor, I love the scope of sci-fi. I love playing with the sets and the guns and the aliens and the robots and all of that stuff. I love that. And it makes it feel like a play! I mean really, who goes to work and runs up and down a hallway with an M-14, dressed as a futuristic freedom fighter. It's great fun! Who wouldn't want to do that? It beats the heck out of running along a beach in a sundress.



GN: Razor seems like it must have been a bit unusual, because you were a guest star on one hand, yet still the lead in this TV-Movie.

Jacobsen: Right, right. Yes, that was interesting. I booked that from Australia and I flew out on literally 48 hours notice. I was reading the script on the plane and then kind of rolled off on set jet lagged. It was an awesome experience though. Talk about making your stripes! That was a lot of fun. But I didn't feel like a stranger there, much in the way I didn't really feel like a stranger or too much of a newcomer once I started on Sarah Connor, thanks to the people I've been working with.

IGN: Talking to you, it occurs to me that both Kendra and Jesse basically both had their society wiped out by killer robots.

Jacobsen: Yeah, I seem to have been typecast like that, don't I? [Laughs] "World as she knows it is wiped out by killer robots and she then goes forth to fight them." Yeah, if you're going to be pigeonholed, might as well be that! A couple of people have commented on that to me, but to me they're such different characters. They're two completely different people, so I guess that doesn't creep into my consciousness too much when I'm working. But yeah, there are definitely similarities there and I guess it's just, for me, about exploring different dimensions of a military woman. Different kinds of military minds; that kind of thing.

IGN: On both Battlestar and Terminator, you've been allowed to use your natural Australian accent. Was that a surprise?

Jacobsen: Both times, yes. And I think that my natural accent has served the same purpose on both productions and I believe that has been to just kind of highlight the universal scope of the disasters that have happened to bring about the basis of the stories. For example, with The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the idea is that okay, now we can see that once the robots take over, it's the whole world rallying against them. It's a global effort. It's a global fight.