Bitten returns to Syfy tonight for its second season, but it’s not all sexy werewolves this time around. Now Elena and the Pack have something a little more serious to deal with – a mysterious and potentially malefic coven of witches.
“She’s the daughter of a Winterbourne,” said Tommie-Amber Pirie of her new character Paige when speaking with The Mary Sue. “Paige intercepts with the pack, and they work together to fight this force bigger than them.”
Pirie said that joining the Bitten crew for their second season was a “gift,” and that she watched different YouTube videos and did a lot of reading about witches to really get into her character. “It was so fun because every day of shooting, I would find something new. By the end of the season, I found [Paige’s] arc fully.”
Writer and Executive Producer Daegan Fryklind said that they wanted to bring in the witches from Kelly Armstrong’s second series novel, Stolen, but maintain the overall feel from the show’s first season. “We wanted to keep with what they were capable of low-fi,” said Fryklind, “so we were trying to figure out how to have witches that you haven’t seen before. And then also the production side, incorporate those witches and give them viable powers that keep up in each episode and play off in the course of the season, but in ways that were not carving into our business budget.” According to Fryklind, this leads to a season filled with heavy twists.
Fryklind said the show is also taking on more of a horror tone this season, with the addition of a new DP, score, wardrobe, and more. “Not only are we working with a new tone, we’re working with a new pace this season,” she said. “We learned a lot from episode thirteen in season one of what this casting crew is capable of in terms of level of stunts, in terms of what kind of pace we can accomplish; and so in season two, it’s a very breathless season. It’s like four witches hit the gas and we don’t step off the pedal the whole way through.”
Pirie, a genre veteran, was excited to be taking on a role in another sci-fi/fantasy show. “There are a lot of women who are into the sci-fi genre,” said Pirie, “so to have that representation in shows like Bitten, and especially Paige -I think she’s relatable, and I think she’s strong and I love that, and I love that I can be that for our viewers.
“Yeah, it was a really cool dynamic,” agreed Fryklind, “having a more of a feminine presence in the show – and also cause season oone played with a sense of bad dads, and the implications of being a dad, be it Malcolm, be it Jeremy. In season two it’s a flip to, what does it mean to be a mom? And the spectrum that are mothers out there. You can see the mothering side from Elena as well in the show, and then the season.”
When we asked Pirie and Fryklind what they would do with witch powers, they both gave us perfectly respectable and totally realistic answers. “I would write in my sleep,” said Fryklind. “It would be nice to wak up and have a good forty pages done and on the laptop.”
“With a flick of my finger, the dishes would always be done, the laundry would always be done, my bed” agreed Pirie. “I would be fantastic to clean the house without any bother.”
Somehow, I don’t think the witches on Bitten will be getting up to quite the same levels of mundanity. The new season premieres tonight at 9pm on Syfy.
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