Anna Torv is lost and found on Fox’s ‘Fringe’
By now, Anna Torv thought she would know her character better.
Torv plays FBI Special Agent Olivia Dunham on Fox’s “Fringe,” which returns for a second season Thursday at 9 p.m. on WFXT (Ch. 25).
At the end of last season, Olivia was transported to a parallel universe.
“I actually feel like I’m getting further away from Olivia, to tell you the truth,” Torv said in a recent interview in Pasadena.
“I feel like when we started and I first read the pilot, there was this woman and she was fresh-faced and really energetic and a hard-working FBI agent, and all of the sudden her world got turned upside down. Now a year into it, I want her back and I don’t know how to get back to her. I always ask the writers questions and they say, ‘That’s just what Olivia’s feeling.’ ”
The season premiere will focus on Olivia’s traumatic return from the parallel universe. The show is set to become even more complicated with the introduction of several alternate realities.
“The one we are seeing now is slightly skewed, and then there’s the one that’s a little bit further away and one that’s a little bit further and a little bit further forever and ever and ever,” she said.
Even though she’s more confused about Olivia, Torv said these kinds of stories are the ones she loves the most.
“I love playing that stuff because it’s something solid to play. I love that much more than I do the autopsies and the bodies,” she said.
“What I find really difficult is all the procedural stuff that there isn’t any kind of personal connection to.”
Many fans are waiting for Olivia and Peter (Joshua Jackson) to become romantically involved. But the Australian native, who is married to season one co-star Mark Valley, isn’t sure that’s what she wants for her alter ego. Though Torv says she likes the idea of Olivia, Peter and Peter’s father Walter (John Noble) forming a family.
“I’m tempted to believe that at the end of the day, the nice shift would be for Olivia to become the nurturing maternal figures to these two lost boys,” she said. “The Wendy to their kind of Peter Pan. So I’m kind of resistant to making the Peter/Olivia thing a strong story line as opposed to going, ‘You lost boys really need someone to wrangle you a little bit.’ ”