She’ll seduce you with her eyes and enchant you with her smile but don’t let that fool you because Suren is a deadly vampire on Syfy’s Being Human and is responsible for a bloody massacre 80 years ago. Dichen Lachman (Dollhouse) plays Suren and has been a recent mainstay of science fiction television and playing a complex vampire fulfills one of her most coveted roles as an actor. I recently spoke with Lachman on a conference call with other journalists to talk about her character and experience of joining the Being Human cast.
Lachman describes Suren as “incredibly complex,” and “very damaged and reckless in many ways.” That spells out trouble for Aidan (Sam Witwer), a vampire who is doing his best to kick the vampire lifestyle, who has his own bloody trail of murder that’s followed him to the present day. He makes a deal with Mother, the vampire matriarch to train her daughter to succeed as the leader of the Boston chapter and be released of his obligation and duties to the vampire nation.
“At the same time,” Lachman said. “She’s sort of striving to grow up and mature and be the woman that her mother would like her to be. I think you guys will enjoy watching her journey through the show because she’s one of those things that just keeps pulling Aidan back into the world of vampires which he’s constantly trying to escape.”
Just as we saw with Bishop in Season 1, Aidan has a long and storied relationship with Suren, but Aidan has changed from the savage killer he once used to be several decades ago. She has to adjust to what he’s become and work together with him or meet the wrath of her mother.
“Well, it’s one of those love-hate relationships. They’ve had a very long history together–a very complicated past and I don’t think their relationship has ever been consummated. It’s a very strong attraction they’ve had. She’s been away for 80 years underground and he’s had the opportunity to go through all these changes and change his ways.”
But is her character going to fall under the same central theme of temptation that the others will experience? I asked Lachman whether or not there will be something to pull her down too and whether the theme extended beyond the three (four counting Nora) main characters.
“I think there is some. She’s just been in this world for so long and she’s so deeply entrenched in that because her mother is like, the queen of the vampires. If it’s there it’s very fleeting because she knows her fate and that’s why in a way she’s so damaged.
“You’ll see more of the temptation creep in with Aidan who’s constantly being pulled back into this world. He’s always trying to escape it and he’s always trying to sort of run away from who he is and the people around him. And Suren’s just there pulling him back in.”
Since this was one of the central stories of the new season, I asked Lachman if there was a difference in playing Suren in the flashbacks as opposed to the present day where she’s been unearthed and given the responsibility of Boston.
“It all becomes relative and if you’ve been alive for 500 hundred or 1000 years, 80 years isn’t really that long. In the grand scheme of things, maybe it’s like, five years or something. But yes, she’s been a part of his life for a very long time and yes she was gone for a little while. But, she’s back and so is that sort of feeling with him, even though he’s never let it really live and occupy too much space [in him].
The fact that he’s working so closely with her is making that harder and harder for him. So I think you will see her go through a little bit of that [temptation], but her fate is very much, pre-determined. There’s no question where her future is. And it’s a very hard thing I think ultimately for her to accept, but it’s just something that she knows.”
We will come to find out that Suren has always let her mother down and Mother’s standards were always too high to achieve. Lachman described the relationship as “very strained,” with hate, resentment and disappointment. Because Lachman has such a wonderful relationship with her own mother, she found it difficult to find a personal experience to connect to in trying to bring that out in the performance. I asked Lachman whether her interactions with Deena (Aziz) more on a flashback basis or if we’ll see Mother lurking in the background as a constant presence watching over what Suren and Aidan are doing?
“Yes, she is in the flashbacks. Absolutely, but Suren’s relationship with mother is played out in the present and in her conversations with Aidan and you really understand that dynamic with the way Aidan and Suren communicate.”
Lachman worked diligently on Suren’s accent with her dialect coach Mary McDonald-Lewis, creating something unique. She was born in Kathmandu, Nepal and her mother is Tibetan descent, her father is Australian. And like so many Australian actors, she can morph and create something specific to the role. Lachman had her ideas and Jeremy Carver and Anna Fricke shared theirs. Does she sound like someone who was living 500 to 1000 years old? How does lying in the ground for 80 years affect that? On the first day of shooting they had to come up with Suren’s sound and after finding it, Lachman went to the sound booth to nail the accent down in ADR.
“We were trying to find sort of that balance,” Lachman shared. “What does she sound like? You have mother who sounds very, specific and strong. And so does she sound like her mother exactly or is she a little bit different? Finding the voice, the accent was very tricky on the first day. We designed sort of an accent and a voice for her that was a little bit American, but a little bit British, sort of like a mid-Atlantic-esque type accent, but not specifically. We kind of modernized it slightly and made her a little bit more youthful.”
Lachman continued to explain her reasoning for the ADR work. “I wanted there to be some consistency with the character obviously, because you don’t want that to take someone out of the show or getting carried away with the storyline. If something doesn’t sound right, people won’t believe it. And it’s very important for me for the characters voice to be specific and consistent and settled. Hopefully you like her sound and it’s something that fans respond to because it was one of the things that was really important for me.”
The alluring Aussie who looked ravishing and ravenous as a brunette in her first episode of Being Human went on to describe the biggest physical challenges included acting with her mouth open far enough in certain scenes to allow dots to be seen for visual effects to add in the fangs in post-production. Another was to act with the black contact lenses that all actors playing vampires are required to wear. They cover nearly the entire eye making them cumbersome to wear.
“It’s very uncomfortable for the first sort of 15 minutes because the things are so large and so foreign in your eye,” said Lachman. “There’s a tiny little hole for your pupil to see through, but it’s not very big. So your vision is limited. You can still see, but your peripheral vision becomes extremely limited and you can only really see what’s directly in front of you.”
“I remember Sam (Witwer) and Kyle (Schmid) had a big fight scene and they wanted them to wear these contacts and they were like on the top of a building with no balcony. They’re on the roof and Sam just had to say, ‘We can’t do this with the contacts in. We may fall off and we can hardly see.’ It was so completely dangerous.”
But what brought a smile to Lachman was shooting the flash backs, because Asians are rarely cast in period pieces outside of stereotypical roles like servicemen, hookers, or extras – a reason perhaps more futuristic and science fiction roles have opened up for her. She’s dreamed of being on a period western show like Deadwood, but unless some a producer and casting agent out there is reading this interview about the following scenario, she doubt that will happen.
“It’s sad because I am half-Australian and my father’s family is European and I really respond to that,” Lachman said. “I understand that time and I would love to explore that, but I can’t. Unless someone writes a show or a movie about one of the little people or the women who work in like in an opium den way back or something, it’s just not going to happen. Obviously there are stories like that that are really fascinating, that occurred in those communities, but I feel like no one wrote them down.”
“So one of the most exciting things about reading the scripts as they came in I knew I could be a person or a vampire at least, but in that period. I get to be a person that people acknowledge [and fear] and not just like one of the Asian people that do something in the background. So that was really exciting!”
In Being Human Lachman gets to exist, roleplay in the 1920s and 30s and her character belongs there. It all makes sense. One of the coolest things about supernatural stories is that they can set the rules, then break and redefine them. They have all the flexibility to bend the genre to make it original. That’s why Lachman was a perfect choice for Suren. She’s the freshest breath of air amidst the thick fog of pale-skinned British and American actors who have seemingly cornered the market on playing vampires.
Lachman’s character has this fascinating back story where she appears to be responsible for an uncontrollable killing spree and that was the last time she walked above ground. We don’t know how long Suren and her mother have been vampires, when they were both turned, and how Mother rose to power, as well as, how long Suren has had the weight of vampire politics on her shoulders. We’ll soon find out when Suren’s story eventually bleeds out; it is all a part of being vampire after all.
Follow Dichen on twitter @DichenLachman and see what incredible things are in store for her in seven episodes of Being Human Season 2 on Syfy, Mondays at 9pm ET/PT.
