This is a profile piece featured in NKD Magazine’s November 2018 issue.
By Louis Oprisa
Streaking through the multiverse, CW’s The Flash has returned, to much fanfare, for a fifth season for more super-family high-stakes drama dipped in delicious science fiction. At the center of this latest season, however, is the emergence of Barry and Iris West-Allen’s child, Nora, who’s managed to propel herself backwards in time to meet the younger versions of her parents. As her father, Barry, can attest to, the implications of traveling back in time to alter events can have disastrous consequences. As such, the role of Nora West-Allen, also known as XS, represents a pivotal turning point for a wildly successful TV installment of an already classic franchise. Filling the shoes of that role is established CW veteran, Jessica Parker Kennedy.
Born in October of 1984, Jessica grew up in Calgary in the Canadian province of Alberta with her mom and dog. Her mother took her to plenty of plays a kid, planting the initial seeds of a love for theatre and performing that would blossom later on in her life. Awarded with “Best Actress” honors in both junior high and high school, she says that the 1996 version of Romeo & Juliet was a pivotal inspiration point for her: “As soon as I saw Romeo & Juliet, I wanted to watch everything with Leonardo Dicaprio in it. I’m a massive fan of his and I really followed his career from all the stuff he’s done when he was young.” Noting her admiration of the deliberate and certain nature of his acting style, her other inspirations include Cate Blanchett and Michael Shannon, who as she puts it, “is a beast of an actor, and I would give my left foot to work with that man.”
Despite a seemingly idyllic upbringing, Jessica’s experience in acting education wasn’t always easy, especially at the outset of her college career at the Mount Royal Theatre Arts program. In fact, she’s quite quick to point out her growing pains.
“It was pretty traumatizing at first. I think school is a strange place. I remember in my first semester, in my voice and diction class, I was doing the best I possibly could, I was trying. I remember getting a ‘D’ in my first semester and not being able to understand why,” she explains. In addition to taking five acting classes, she was also enrolled in three electives on the side, spending most of her busy and free time on campus. One of the five acting classes was actually called ‘Acting,’ while the other four were more mechanically focused on stretching, movement, yoga and voice control. While somewhat awkward and uncomfortable for her at first, Jessica grew to like the supplemental technique classes more than actual Acting class: “My least favorite class actually was the Acting class. I really liked doing everything else cuz everything else came from this organic place, getting to know how to manipulate your body into different characters. It’s the kind of stuff I found really, really interesting and rewarding.”
Reflecting on those college years, the struggles to make the grades aren’t something she misses, but she does look back on the experience in a fond light. “We were just at the school for hours and hours and hours on end and I would happen to go to school all day and we’d do rehearsals until 11 o’clock at night, go home, and we’d be back at school at 8 AM. Those were kind of some of my favorite times in my life, being so wholly dedicated to what we were learning and what we were creating,” she elaborates.
Jessica’s first-ever professional role was as Lucy the Elf in the TV movie Santa Baby (2006) and in the time since then, she feels more comfortable about her craft than at the start of her career: “ Like anything, you’re more settled in your own skin when you’re comfortable in an environment that was new before. Set, no matter how different the storyline or where you are in the world where you’re shooting, is still set, and they’re pretty much all the same. Obviously budget can be very different, but what happens and how it happens - the rules are all the same. There’s a camera, someone yells action, there are directors.”
It’s this kind of approach that she’s taken with her across a variety of projects over the last decade. From Smallville to The Secret Circle and 90210, her filmography boasts an impressive range of of sci-fi, action, mystery and drama ventures, which are arguably emblematic of her preference of genre. Much like her own favorite actors, skillful versatility is what she tries to embody. Noting that her last few roles are so starkly different to her work on The Flash presently, she says, “ I’m inspired by actors who are the kind of character chameleons, who change over time, cause that’s what I would like to be and I feel like i’m slowly getting there. That’s something I want to do more of, all the time, playing different, different people.”
Particularly when it comes to The Flash, Jessica carries a deep admiration for XS, a role she landed without having to audition for(No big deal, right?). She sees the character of Nora as being fearless, which stands in opposition to how she is as a person, even offering an example of her now-faded love for rollercoasters that she no longer has the stomach for: “When I was a kid, I used to love going to Six Flags, but now recently as an adult I went and was overly aware of how it’s a human-made machine and anything can break, and I freaked out. Then I was like “No! I used to love this but I can’t enjoy it right now!”
Nora doesn’t have that sort of fear. Impulsive and flying by the seat of her pants, XS eschews a sort of child-like-ness, says Jessica, taking care to distinguish it as a sort of passionately burning curiosity about the world around her as opposed to childish naivete. When you consider the nature of the character’s parents, Barry Allen and Iris West, it makes perfect sense. Barry loves science and is guided by an internal focus to help others; Iris is driven by innate curiosity and is a natural leader, motivating her team members to forge on past whatever momentous adversity they and the world may be facing. The striking visual similarities to her ‘parents’ only goes skin deep - Nora West-Allen to her core is truly the synthesis of her parents, and what viewers will get a sense of, at the very least, is the opportunity to see Barry and Iris’ daughter grow up a bit, albeit in the wrong moment of time.
Given that the show deals with time travel, superpowers, heroes and villains, Jessica finds it useful to disconnect from her own experiences as she prepares for a role. “I like to dissociate from myself when I work on characters. Some people like to look for similarities in themselves and their characters, and that helps them. I don’t really like the method of ,“This is just like a time in my own life so I’ll tap into that emotion.” I like to [start] from finding that place of neutrality and then building that character on that blank page, so that’s how I went into it with Nora. The writing was really great, and it made the most sense, especially with a subject that’s so wild.”
Anyone who’s ever acted has had to deal with rejection. Auditioning, usually, is the lifeblood of how any entertainer can land a role and in turn, pay their bills. The way Jessica looks at it, she feels extraordinarily lucky to have landed with The Flash: “It happens now and again, definitely not very often. I audition all the time, I get told ‘“No.” all of the time, but I do now and again get offers and it is a very lovely, lovely feeling. One of the things that they teach you in acting school is that you need to love auditioning; I hate auditioning. Whenever I’m scrolling through my emails and I see “Audition Process”, I get sick to my stomach. That’s how much I hate auditioning, even though I want to be part of the project and I want to do it. It’s not that I think I deserve to get the offer, I just hate auditioning so much. It’s a very nice shortcut for sure.”
Aspiring performers all have to deal with that sort of insecurity - that aching pang of “Am I good enough? Can I do this for a living?” Jessica’s not immune to that, but says she draws on her schooling and training to get her through. She details that it’s not about shying away from the fear, but more about embracing the flame of her own nervousness. “I just work off adrenaline. My body takes over. It’s something as simple as “Oh, my God, I don’t know my lines today,” and then I get on stage and the camera starts rolling, and it’s all there. The work I put in is just there, so I like being nervous, I like feeling nervous on set. I like feeling nervous on stage. That’s my technique of psyching myself up,’’ she says.
From a more technical acting perspective, Jessica gives props to those working behind the camera, iterating the importance of understanding the relationship between actors and the camera crew, even recalling that she had to remind and teach herself to stand in her light on stage.“ I definitely wish I knew more about what happens behind the camera, and what setting up a shot is and all that the camera guys do. To some actors, camera guys are invisible, they’re just working on their craft, but at the end of the day, there’s a ‘T’ on the floor, and that’s where you’re supposed to stand, and that’s not ever gonna not be there, basically,” she says.
Sometimes, it’s the simplest advice that can mean the most. She reminds herself to take deep breaths, to keep asking questions, to not be afraid to be yourself. In a competitive industry and world at large, the best you can do is to focus on the task at hand, and as for now, that task is working five days and nights a week to portray Nora West-Allen. Jessica isn’t currently working on any other projects for the time being, with this commitment to The Flash being her central focus.
Given what she’s learned and experienced, she feels deeply for younger aspiring performers, urging them to not give up while drawing on her times in college and prior sets: “That’s the advice I’d give to my younger self: Stand on your mark, and find your light.”
Maybe she’s a little more like Nora West-Allen than she gives herself credit for.