Interviewing Azita Ghanizada About Alphas at Comic Con 2012

Azita Gharizada in media roundtable
(cr. C.A. Taylor)

(This interview was supposed to be published on Suite101.com but they are undergoing a re-launch and I feel that it isn't fair to anyone to keep the article/interview under wraps any longer. So I'm going to publish it here and then transfer it later if I can to Suite101.com. This way the work doesn't just languish on the computer unread and unloved.)


On Syfy’s hit series Alphas, Azita Ghanizada plays the lovely Rachel Pirzad who has the Alpha Skill that allows her to enhance one of her senses at the expense of the others in order to help her partners in various situations. For example, her enhanced sense of smell leads to hilarious moments with one of her coworkers as he struggles to find a soap/shampoo that she’d find pleasing.

Azita Ghanizada at media roundtable
(cr. Evans Vestal Ward/Syfy with permission)

In Syfy’s media room at Comic Con 2012 last July, Azita sat down with press to talk about Rachel falling in love and experiencing being a woman for the first time. In the process, she learns how to use her super-senses. With her sensitivity to touch and smell, intimate relationships have always been awkward for her.

“Rachel had a really hard time with boys and, in general, her issue is that she doesn’t know how to be loved,” Azita said, reminding everyone of what was established in season one for her character. “She feels like she’s been an inconvenience since her very inception and that’s her grain of sand, that’s the straw for Rachel throughout every episode. She wanted her parents to accept her. She wanted her community to accept her. She wanted her friends and family to accept her or even understand her. They thought she was weird, and they smelled weird, you know what I mean? Like she couldn’t handle them.”

This year, Azita revealed, Rachel will try to be not only strong, but loved. “She wants a boy to like her. And the ability becomes interesting because it does get, ah, a bit sexual in this interesting way because she has super-senses. And so we play that she can control her senses and make it something that’s a pleasurable experience for her and not just this gratuitous kind of sensation or feeling. We definitely play that because of her ability with her senses. It’s a hard thing for her to craft--how does Rachel actually handle human contact? And we definitely touch on that.”

Laura Mennell, Warren Christie, & Azita
Ghanizada (cr. Evans Vestal Ward/Syfy
with permission)

In fact, this season will deal with the human drama of what’s going on with all the Alphas personally, she revealed. The idea is to explore them overcoming the problems of their super-human abilities so they deal with them as pluses rather than negatives. “I think that the goal is to get away from their abilities being distractions in their lives and instead actually really empowering them.”

To the point where they might become hedonistic and a bit too powerful, using their powers for bad sometimes, she said. “You’ll see in one episode specifically Rachel gets betrayed by a team member. That’s a really big deal and the team member uses their ability on Rachel, to make her do something that she’s extremely uncomfortable with.


Alphas cast at Comic Con 2012
(cr. Evans Vestal Ward/Syfy
with permission)
 

So that kind of stuff happens and the really exciting thing for Rachel is she gets a love interest and she learns how to use her super-senses. It’s been hard for her to be a woman and be intimate with people. She’s always been very awkward because when she touches, it’s awkward and her smelling is bad. She gets zapped by this special… this weird thing of hers, it shifts the way she used her abilities and Rachel falls in love and you see her take on that ability to be a woman for the first time.”

Ad-libbing Their Way Through the Season

Zak Penn and Mike Karnow created a show that gave the actors room to adlib and do a little improv. “They really wanted to keep some space on the page for us to make it as real to our sensibility as possible,” Azita explained. “So on a show like this, and shows like this, a lot of times when you’re given 42 minutes, you’re packing in all this information and there’s a lot of exposition. You see: oh, he ran down the hallway and was laughing. And I smell chloric acid or whatever it is. You have to find a way to make that interesting and honest to your character.”

Azita Ghanizada as Rachel
(cr. Frank Ockenfels/Syfy
with permission)

As an example of what she had Rachel do, she mentioned a time she had to say scleroderma before they changed it to tightness. Because that is essentially Kevlar skin, she made it fun and sexy. “I wanted Rachel to be excited by all this science and information, so you just shift it around and you adlib a lot.” She indicated that she gets to adlib a lot with Ryan Cartwright (Gary Bell) because as a character, Gary gets to say whatever he wants to say. “In the show he puts in what he wants to say and you get to adlib quite a bit there with him. We never change the tone or shift the theme too much. We definitely make it as close to us as possible, trying to make it more human, less two-dimensional.”

Story Surprises

Asked if she’s ever surprised story-wise when she gets a script, she said, “They definitely come up with some really interesting Alpha abilities this season and I think the science of that is really cool. There’s somebody this year played by a terrific actor or guest actor—we have some great ones coming in—who’s essentially like a memory chip or something. He essentially becomes his one memory but can store other people’s so he’s basically a journal. They based it on all real science.”

Azita Ghanizada in "If Memory Serves"
(cr. Russ Martin/Syfy with permission)

Azita also finds learning how these Alphas connect to be cool. “There’s an episode this year where Rachel gets infected by intrasound,” she revealed. The noise is so unbearable on her super-hearing that it makes her go crazy.  “She literally loses her mind. She can’t see clearly. She can’t--what’s in her head isn’t what she sees and so she goes bananas.”

The fact that this kind of stuff is rooted in reality fascinates her. Of course she recognizes that it’s television and “they take liberties.” That there’s going to be scientists and doctors in the audience who will protest that something is being done wrong.  In fact, she mentioned getting notes that hummus isn’t a big food in Iran. “I’m like obviously, but it’s television. It’s okay, hummus works with the scene. That’s not the end of the world if we say hummus. It does take liberties but it’s really interesting to see the kind of science they give us to play with. And that’s always fun.”

Erin Way and Azita Ghanizada in
"God's Eye" (cr. Russ Martin/Syfy
with permission)

And finally she was asked which Alpha ability she would want if she could have one. “Oh, I would definitely take… as much as I would love to parkour my way through buildings like Hicks, I think Nina’s ability to push people to do whatever she wants… like if I just looked at you and said, tell everybody to watch the show every day… I think that would be exciting to be able to tell people what to do. It’s also a bit dangerous. I think that’s what’s so exciting about it and I think that plays this year, too, about how we can be a bit dangerous with our abilities and that’s been really cool.”

Share Rachel’s journey on Alphas on Mondays on Syfy at 10 pm ET/PT.