From showrunner Eric Heisserer (Arrival) and based on the worldwide best-selling Grishaverse novels from Leigh Bardugo, the Netflix original series Shadow and Bone is set in a war-torn world and follows orphan Alina Starkov (Jessie Mei Li), as she realizes just what extraordinary power she really possesses. As she struggles to understand and hone that power, General Kirigan (Ben Barnes) steps in, seemingly to protect her from the looming threat of the Shadow Fold, but clearly also with an agenda of his own.
During this 1-on-1 interview with Collider, actress Danielle Galligan, who plays Grisha heartrender Nina Zenik, talked about loving her character, her audition process, the journey that Nina goes on with Matthias Helvar (Calahan Skogman), how freeing it is to play someone who always speaks her mind, the challenges she went through, the fun of getting to do a fight scene, what she thought of the final episode, and where she hopes things might go next.
Collider: Does anything prepare you for doing a show that’s this epic? Do you just have to jump in and hope that you figure it out as you go?
DANIELLE GALLIGAN: My mom has always said, “Feel the fear and do it anyway.” That’s something that I’ve already started to keep in my brain because even stepping on stage sometimes can just feel like a car crash, in terms of the adrenaline. There is an element of just feeling the fear and doing it anyway, for sure. I felt prepared. I think there’s an element of staying in your lane. I remember getting quite bogged down in people reviewing a show that I’d made one time and I was like, “God, you can think something is so good and then someone can really not think that it’s good,” and that’s okay. There’s something about art and about performance and about why we keep seeing the same parts and the same show being done multiple times by different actors. It’s because every actor will bring something different. You can’t get bogged down in whether you’re the best or the worst, or good or bad. You just have to think about the message and what you’re trying to communicate to the audience. Once you’ve communicated what you hoped to communicate, then you’ve done a good job. So, I tried to just focus on Nina and focus on the story and the parts of Nina that I wanted to communicate to the audience, and try to do that to the best of my ability. If you try to think about the scale of something, you just go mad.
This is a huge epic story with all of these characters and all of these things going on, but at the same time, you’re telling a small story that’s mostly just between two people. Did it feel big and epic while you were shooting this, or did it feel like you were telling a smaller and more intimate story?
GALLIGAN: I actually think both, in a weird way. When you step onto sets that size and when you step onto lots that big, and when you see the image of people who are all working around you to make the scene the best that it can be, you do become aware of the epic and grand nature of it. But in terms of the show itself and in terms of our particular storyline, I think it is quite small. Well, it’s not small. The journey is huge, in terms of, for Nina and Matthias, going from, “I hate you, I want to kill you, you murdered my friends and family,” to understanding, to compassion, to empathy, and then to the other side of falling in love with this person. To go from thinking someone’s an absolute monster to seeing the human in them is massive.
What I think the show does so well is that it brings everything very much down to a human level. All of the stories and all of the relationships are very human and actually quite simple. They’re not easy, but they’re quite simple. That’s why, for me, the show and the story is so affecting. It has amazing visual effects and there is amazing scale and they really do create the world, but that can only get you so far. What really affects people and draws people in is the real heart and the struggle going on, between all of these characters. We can seem quite unrelated, in our little lane over here, and then there’s the main story and there’s the Crows in this lane. When something really works is when there’s an overarching theme and all of the storylines within that set and reflect that theme. In terms of Shadow and Bone, for me, the theme is this girl stroking against those that would try to control her, in order to step into her power. There’s an element of that with all of the characters. All of the characters have been told that they’ve come from nothing and that they wouldn’t really amount to anything. Leigh Bardugo coined it the best. It’s about them fighting and taking up space and taking their place in the world. That is true of all the characters. It’s a big, massive theme, but it’s also something that is quite small and quite true for a lot of people. Everyone has had a moment in their life when they’ve been like, “Oh, no, I have to step up to the plate.” It does seem massive, but it’s quite basic and quite accessible, really.
We see how the relationship between Nina and Matthias grows throughout the season. What do you think she learns about herself, from the journey that she goes on?
GALLIGAN: So much. The first time we meet Nina in the books is at the start of Six of Crows, so to try to track back two years, into the backstory, and try to find out who she was then, was quite an interesting journey. She’s been trained since she was eight years old, so she’s almost been brainwashed, in a way, to think of herself as a killer and to think of the Drüskelle, like Matthias, as monsters. There’s something there that Nina learns about her love for human connection, above all else. There’s a love of joy and a need for understanding. The main thing that she sees in Matthias is a lost little child. In the books, the first time she meets him, she talks about a boy with golden hair. There was something in that, that I feel spoke to Nina’s chapter, where she talks about feeling out of her depth and feeling like a lost little girl. She sees that little boy in Matthias and it connects her with her inner child or her little lost girl. She doesn’t feel so lost anymore because she finds that other half of her, essentially. There’s something in that.
Is there something empowering and freeing about playing a character that really speaks her mind and does things to constantly keep the other person in the room unbalanced and off his footing?
GALLIGAN: Yes. The joy of being an actor is that you get to explore so many different personality types and facets of your personality that might never see the light of day, if you weren’t able to explore them via a character. So, to have that lack of filter and that self-assuredness to be able to speak your mind is amazing and very powerful. It’s very important for women because so often when we go to speak our mind, we’re told that we’re bossy or emotional, whereas when a man does it and he’s told that he’s ambitious and a go-getter, so there is definitely something very empowering in that. Sometimes it’s less about keeping other people off balance and more just a need for self-expression that Nina needs to express and experience. With Matthias there was that picking on him or playing with him, but I don’t think it was for no reason. I think it was because she could see that there was more in him. She could see the human in him, and I think she was trying to show him the human in him, as well. I don’t think that it was gratuitous, in any way. She was really trying to open him up for himself, but she was having a bit of a crack, as well.
What was your audition process like for this? How do you go through something like that and not get attached to a character this awesome, before you actually know whether you’ll get to play her?
GALLIGAN: I definitely still do, with many things. When I read the character description for Nina for the first time, I hadn’t read the books beforehand, but I’ll never forgot reading the description. I didn’t feel like, “This is me. This is my role.” It wasn’t that at all. If anything, it was a Netflix series, so I thought, “Okay, I’ll just have a bit of fun.” But there was something in the character description where I felt seen and represented, in terms of the type of woman that I am and that I hadn’t encountered before. Whether I got the part or not, I was just so happy that this character was going to exist. I was like, “I can’t wait to see it on screen because I’ll feel represented.” That’s so important. It’s the reason we do what we do, to make people feel less alone.
But in terms of the actual audition process, I was in Dublin and so I couldn’t travel. I did a self-tape, and then I couldn’t travel for the callback, so I just had a Skype interview and I had to do another self-tape. This was before the pandemic, so it was before the time that we were all very Zoom literate and had our AirPods and knew what was going on. I had (director) Lee Toland Krieger and (showrunner) Eric Heisserer on my laptop, sitting on an ironing board, in the corner of my sitting room, and I was nervous wreck. There was something about the two of them and the dynamic of the two of them, where they’d laugh at my jokes. Whether it was out of pity, I don’t know, but there was something about the quality of the conversation in the chat that made me feel very safe and very at home and very much like I could just relax into myself and talk about the character freely. That was something that I held onto. That was very apparent on set, as well. They create a very free environment for people to really be themselves and feel safe, which is really amazing and really special because they’ve got a million things to be doing.
These characters are in a world that’s very different from ours, so what was your way in, when you started trying to figure out how you wanted to play her and tried to understand her? Is it about focusing more on the human aspects and not thinking about the supernatural aspects of it?
GALLIGAN: Yeah, you’ve hit the nail on the head there. You just have to focus on the human aspects because there’s so much in our life that we take for granted with technology, like a phone or an email, where someone not from earth, for example, would say, “Wow, that’s magic. You sent that from that computer? That’s amazing magic.” And I’d go, “It’s just an email.” There’s something like that about having the power to harness the wind, where you’re like, “It’s just a small science. It’s not magic. I’m just manipulating matter that exists and that’s already there.” You have to just play it like that’s normal and every day. I tried to not worry about that because the show itself will do that. They are working so hard to create this incredible world, so the less I worry about that, the better. My job is the heart. My job is conflict in Nina. My job is bringing her to life. She’s so loved. Nina means so much to so many people, and that became very apparent to me.
But in terms of an in to Nina, the one thing that always stayed with me, like an engine for a lot of her stuff, there’s a scene from the books where she’s trying to heal Inej and she just says that she feels really out of her depth and she tracks back, in her mind, to when she was younger and feeling like her training was too short and she’s not able for this and that she’s just a failure. That was something that really stuck with me. Inside this fiery, gregarious, hedonistic, sensual woman is this tiny child who can sometimes feel completely out of her depth. That was something that definitely chimed with me. I feel like every time you walk into a rehearsal room, you’re like, “Oh, God, am I able to do this? Am I going to be good enough?” Nina is not just fire and brimstone. There’s a very compassionate and very innocent almost child in there, as well, at the end of the day. That was my in to her. That was the place that I tried to keep constant, through the romance and the no filter and flirtations and everything like that.
You spend a decent portion of this drenched in water, and with your hands chained up and your arms above your head. And then, you’re trudging through the snow in the freezing cold. What were the biggest challenges that you went through and really had to push through for this?
GALLIGAN: The thing is, I love that. When in my life am I gonna be able to go through all of that. In terms of a physical experience, it’s a gift. I’s amazing. In terms of challenges, being wet for that long, obviously you get cold. But to be honest, it didn’t really bother me too much. Nina, from where we meet her to where she ends up, goes on such a journey. I had a million different costumes made, all torn up to different degrees of catastrophe. It was like, “Where on the spectrum of catastrophe is she?” One of my skirts was so destroyed that it just stood up on its own. I didn’t even need to be in it. It was so covered in muck and it was ripped. There was something about having that material there that was a constant reminder of what she was actually enduring. It is a journey towards love. It is a story of romance, in one way. What I wanted to constantly be reminded of was how absolutely horrific the conditions are and everything that she was going through and the torment inside her. She’s being forced to learn to love something that she’s been taught her whole life to hate, and that’s a very serious journey. The costume and the clothes being drenched and miserable reminded me of that. It’s not just a love story. There’s actually a lot of fight and a lot of struggle and a lot of hardships that they’re enduring, as well. I like the challenges. You should always try to make it as hard as possible for your characters, to be honest. I feel bad for them sometimes.
Not long after we meet Nina, we see her get into a fight with a number of men. What was it like to shoot that? What preparation did you have to do and what did you enjoy about what you got to do?
GALLIGAN: All of it. I loved every minute of it. I got to do some fight training, which I loved. It’s almost like dance choreography, at the same time, which is really nice. The guys were incredible. They were so good at breaking it down and explaining it all. There is something so satisfying about kicking the crap out of six foot men, when I’m a tiny little stump of a girl. That was my first day on set, as well. There were no preconceived ideas of who I was or what I was going to do, and I didn’t have any preconceptions of what was about to happen or who I was going to meet. There was something about just having to come on and do it. I didn’t have lines. I got to grunt and scream, and I really enjoyed that, as a first day. It was really nice and very important for me to see, and for the audience to see, Nina’s training. She is so full of joy and she’s such a beautiful human and she loves humans, but you need to see that training that she’s had since she was eight. You need to see that side of her – that deadly killer and that spy. I don’t think that should be taken for granted, especially in a female lead. It’s always important to see bad-ass women, and I mean bad-ass in every sense of the word. Yes, she can kick-butt, but then she can also be incredibly vulnerable and very free with her emotions. There’s a dichotomy there in her that was really important for me because so many women can do that, as well.
What was your reaction, when you got to read the final episode and learn how things would be left at the end of the season? Did you immediately start thinking about what could be next for her?
GALLIGAN: Yes, completely. I really love where she’s at, at the very end of the [season]. This is a terrible analogy and I probably shouldn’t say this, but when you’ve had a really amazing night out and you get really drunk and you’re just so full of joy, and then you wake up with a hangover and you’re like, “Oh, reality.” There’s something of that to Nina’s journey. I don’t know why I’m saying this, but she’s gone through so much, and her and Matthias seem to be in this little bubble where it’s just the two of them and they’re learning to love each other and that’s so special. And then, at the end of the series, reality hits and it hits really hard, and she’s forced to make a really serious choice. There’s a breaking there, in her. She chooses a path and she has a lot to come to terms with, in terms of that choice. She’s made her choice. She’s chosen a path. It’s less about where she’s going to go physically now, but how she’s going to deal with all of that, mentally and emotionally. That’s going to be a really hard journey because, for the first time in her life, she’s completely alone. For someone who chose love and that kind of human connection, and for someone who’s worked so hard to learn to love this person, but also has worked so hard to be the best she can be for Ravka, her country, to now be completely isolated is really tragic and very sad. I’m really excited for that tragedy. That’s so weird.
She makes a decision that she feels she has to make, but at the same time, how did she really think Matthias was going to react to that decision? Did she think he would embrace the fact that she made a decision for him?
GALLIGAN: As Danielle, I know it was an absolute disaster. In the moment when she’s making it, it is the absolute right decision and it does make perfect sense. She doesn’t have all of the information. She thinks she’s making a very informed decision, but she finds out that there’s that piece of information that leads Matthias to doom. I don’t think she realized that. She did her best. That’s all she can do.
Do you hold out personal hope that he forgives her before too long?
GALLIGAN: We’re very good at hating each other. No, I don’t. I don’t want to short change the journey, in any way. Personally, me and just my taste, I don’t want things to work out too easy because I don’t think that’s what happens in life. When there’s that intense love that’s come from a place of intense hate, there’s a lot at stake for them. They’ve made themselves incredibly vulnerable, and when people get vulnerable, they get very defensive. They had to work so hard at forming trust and now that trust has been severed, so they’re gonna have to work even harder to try to reform it. That journey is very engaging because the reader, from the outside, knows that they couldn’t be so angry, if they didn’t love each other, so just kiss already and get over it. That creates a really good tension throughout the book because the reader has an idea of what the inevitable end will be, but the characters just won’t do it and it’s so frustrating.
What was it like, on a personal level for you, as an actor, to have Calahan Skogman there by your side, through the scenes that you have together?
GALLIGAN: That’s the most important thing for me, as a performer. I always say that I need to feel safe and I need to trust, so that I can take loads of risks. As a performer, if you don’t feel safe or you don’t feel that you know what you’re doing or where you’re at, it’s very hard to take risks. I always found that with Cal. We just trusted each other, very much instantaneously. That’s the chemistry that just happens. That’s biology. There’s something about our work ethic and how we are together, that we really meet each other. We really challenge each other on the day and we really expect a lot from each other. I expect him to be there and to be present with me, every take, and I know that he expects the same from me, so we are really in it together. You’re only as good as the other actor in the scene with you, and my favorite bit of acting and when it’s really magic is when you’re surprised by the other person, and then you’re affected because that’s real relating. I trust Cal to be there for me so that we can do that, and I know that I’ll always endeavor to do that for him. You just have to have the trust. It’s important.
Shadow and Bone is available to stream at Netflix.