Detective Alex Cross is back in action in Prime Video’s latest series, Cross.
Based on the character created by James Patterson and the protagonist of many of Patterson’s novels, this television adaptation from Ben Watkins is a thrilling experience you’ll have to see to believe.
Ahead of the show’s premiere on Prime Video, Geeks of Color was able to sit down with some of the cast and creators of the series to discuss their experience working on Cross.
Cross has a fantastic cast of actors on their roster including Eloise Mumford. In the show, Mumford portrays Shannon Witmer, a woman who is swooned by the powerful and wealthy Ed Ramsey (Ryan Eggold).
Check out the full interview with Eloise Mumford below:
Prior to joining the cast, Mumford was no stranger to James Patterson’s works and the character of Alex Cross, including other on-screen adaptations of the character. However, she hadn’t read the books until she was cast in the project.
“I had heard of the Alex Cross series. It’s legendary, right? Between the books by James Patterson, and then also the movies in previous iterations. And so, I had never read any of the books until I was cast in this project. Then I honestly got hooked. I started sort of pounding through them. We were filming in Toronto, and, you know, part of the life of an actor is quite lonely, because you spend a lot of time on location by yourself. So I had the books to keep me company, which was really fun, and just delving into the world and also the twists, and realizing the twists and the turns of the plot, and then also just being so excited that our story is a brand new one that fits perfectly into the puzzle of all of the Alex Cross stories, but is a brand new mystery.”
Playing a character can be transformative in many ways, and for Mumford, she shared that she learned a lot during her time playing Shannon.
“I learned so much while portraying Shannon, because at the beginning of filming, I honestly didn’t know what it would be like to go on this journey. She’s going through something unimaginable, and so, actually living it as an actor and experiencing it was was really brand new on so many levels. And so, right off the bat, I thought a lot about the seven stages of grief and layering that over the arc of her season, so that it wasn’t one note. I really wanted to, you know, honor her as a whole person, and also honor the real life people who have found themselves in unimaginable situations and had to survive, so that every time you saw her, she was going through a different stage of grief throughout this journey.”
In playing the different stages of grief as Shannon, Mumford found ways to find the places where the character she is playing and her real-life intersect.
“I mean, I think my job as an actor is always to find the way the places in which my real life experience intersects with the characters that I’m playing. So whether that’s figuring out the things that Shannon loves and would be imagining in her mind’s eye to keep her sane in those moments – that in particular. She loves art, and so I tried to find some art pieces that I could imagine in my mind’s eye when I was laying in the cabinet or, you know, alone, bound in the chair, that I could imagine like she would. And maybe it’s not the same art that she would imagine, but it’s something that spoke to me so always trying to find the shared humanity.”