By Christina Radish
The Lifetime drama series Blood Ties follows fearless ex-cop turned private investigator Vicki Nelson (Christina Cox), as she finds herself suddenly immersed in a whole new mystical world. Based on Tanya Huff’s best-selling The Blood Books, Vicki specializes in solving supernatural crimes, with the help of 450-year-old vampire Henry Fitzroy, (Kyle Schmid) and her ex-partner and paramour, Mike Celluci (Dylan Neal).
Best known for her involvement in FX: The Series, and her role opposite Vin Diesel in The Chronicles of Riddick, Toronto native Christina Cox knew as soon as she read the pilot that she wanted to be involved with Blood Ties. “It was so easy to do this job,” the 35-year-old tells MediaBlvd Magazine in an exclusive interview. “I’m not entirely Vicki, but it just fit. After my first audition, I read all of Tanya’s novels and I think I’m being pretty true to who Vicki is in the books. We don’t get to see women who are unapologetic about their behavior, their emotions and their opinions very often because those women have typically been labeled as bitches. This is someone who’s got a pretty complicated history, with her family and her childhood. She was a homicide detective for a number of years, and the things you see there are pretty horrifying. The decrease in her vision has now stopped her from doing the one thing that she felt she was born to do, which was to be a police officer and catch the bad guy.”
{quote_top}“I just love that she’s complicated and screwed up, and she hasn’t gotten it all right or all figured out. And, as a result of that, she has lost her need to worry about herself. She’s like, ‘How much worse can it possibly get? I’ve lost my job, my eyesight sucks, my friend is a vampire and I’m chasing zombies.’ She throws herself into it and she’s become cavalier with her own safety because the whole thing is just so bizarre, she can’t even begin to unravel it. It’s not going away, and she’s not interested in having Henry do all the dirty work, partially because that’s not who she is and partially because she’s like, ‘You know what? If I get hurt, fuck it! Big deal. At least I’m doing something to actually help someone.’ She had to quit being a cop and wasn’t able to help people, or be a voice for the victim, anymore. That was a pretty huge part of her identity that was taken away from her. Becoming a private investigator, by and large, meant that she was going to be chasing down unfaithful husbands and investigating employees who were stealing from their boss, or whatever, and that’s soul-killing to her. It’s not what she saw herself doing. Even though she is being handed these cases that involve real life-or-death jeopardy, she is more than willing to put herself out there, regardless of the risk, because it means that she’s going to make a difference in someone’s life, not in someone’s bank account.”
As passionate as she was about the role, upon reading that first episode, Cox still had to audition, just like everyone else who was being considered. “When we were shooting in Toronto, Tanya Huff gave me a humongous compliment. She said that, when she had watched FX: The Series a number of years earlier, she turned to her friend and said, ‘You know, in a couple of years, when she’s a bit older, she’ll make a perfect Vicki.’ I don’t think it gets any better than that. But, by the same token, I had to go through the auditions for the investors, production companies and networks, all of whom have different opinions about people. If you put three pictures of gorgeous women in front of 100 guys, there’s going to be a split vote.”
Because the love triangle between Henry, Vicki and Mike is also a big part of the show, getting the chemistry right was important in the auditioning process. “The minute I got in the room with Dylan, and the minute I got in the room with Kyle, I was like, ‘Well, this is a no-brainer. If they want me, then this is the Henry, and this is the Mike, for this Vicki.’ There were three Vickis, three Mikes and three Henrys, and everybody was great. Everyone had their own unique take on it, and they were all very different, which was really interesting. They were all solid, but it comes down to chemistry and what jumps off the screen.”
Growing up with two boisterous, talkative, strong older sisters, Cox felt like, as the youngest, she really had to fight for air time. “I know a lot of actors who are the baby of the family. You have to do a lot of jumping and screaming of, ‘Here I am! I’m over here! Look at me!’ I played a lot of sports, as a kid, and gymnastics led to dance training. I went to an arts high school for dance and theater. I intended on going out into the world as a dancer. And then, I just started to look at what my options were after graduation, and considered the reality of how long a dancer’s career is, since I was already battling some injuries and a chronic hip and back problem. I wanted to be a performer and I wanted to have a voice to share with the world, but that wasn’t the venue, so I looked at expanding on my acting base. Aside from the dance, I’ve never studied this hard to be anything else. I’ve never put this much time and attention into anything, but being an actor.”
{quote_middle}Although Cox never became a professional athlete or dancer, her physical training has come in handy throughout her acting career. On Blood Ties, both she and the other actors prefer to do as much of their own stunt work as they can. “I did work with our stunt coordinator, Steve McMichael, to come up with some signature moves. Vicki is an ex-cop, so her moves are going to be based on police holds and disarms, and stuff like that, and we wanted them to be very efficient. Whether or not she still has a badge, in her core, she is still a cop and she has that training and sensibility, and that’s going to play into all of the action sequences. There are some things I don’t know how to do properly, to do them safely, and then the stunt performer comes in. And, there are certain situations where, if doing the stunt results in me ending up wet or muddy, and we don’t have the time to reset everything, then the stunt performer will do it. But, on our show, as much as I can, I try to do the fighting because, no matter what you do, fighting styles are pretty personal and it’s really important that you don’t jerk the viewer out of the moment by suddenly having someone who doesn’t move the same. That being said, I’m really fortunate that the two women that I primarily work with on this show are excellent and that’s not even a concern.”
Cox promises that, over the rest of the season, the stakes will get higher and the risks will get bigger for Vicki, and for everyone around her. “Vicki is going to have a lot of challenges, in terms of her allegiances, both to Mike and Henry. The Astaroth character that we saw in the pilot knows that there are things that she wants, and she has been marked. She’s had her little demon GPS tattoo branded onto her, and that mark has opened her up to a lot of challenges of soul and faith, and what is right and wrong, and what that will mean in her relationships. I think that the ongoing tension and indecision that she has with the two guys may drive some people crazy, but there is plenty of romance and plenty of action, both in the bedroom and on the street. These dynamics are going to get better and stronger, and develop more and more, as the show goes on.”
In the next two episodes, Julian Sands (24), who has played some very memorable bad guys, will be joining the show as Javier Mendoza, Henry’s nemesis. “He was terrifying, but great. When you know that much about someone’s career, and they’re that well-respected and talented, it ups your game. Not that anyone on our show is ever dialing it in, but you really remember that you’ve got to be on point, to even come close to his level, in terms of meeting him in the performance. His character is very dangerous and creepy, and he brings a very dangerous element to the show that stays with us.”
{quote_bottom}Having done extensive work in television throughout her career, Cox also recently completed an independent film with Ving Rhames, called Ascension Day. “That’s a period piece about the Nat Turner uprising in Virginia in 1831. He was a slave who organized an uprising against his owners, and I play a not very nice slave owner who was trying to purchase Ving Rhames from another gentleman, and I use that term loosely. It all goes down rather wrong. I’m at this farm the day that it all goes down.”
With a professional career that has lasted for over a decade, these days, Cox admits that she is really only interested in doing good work, regardless of the medium. “I want to work with people I like. Life’s too short to work with miserable people. I want to play characters that I like and that I identify with. I want to like the script. I want to be happy when I get up in the morning, and when I come home at the end of the day. If that’s in a film, great. If that’s in a TV series, great. I really think the lines have blurred between film and television, in the past few years. I think the stigma of television being cheesy is really not true anymore. For me, the criteria is always whether it’s a good project that I want to be involved with.”
When thinking about the future of her acting career, Cox doesn’t have a specific role or type of character that she’s looking to play because she’d like to be seen in a number of different ways. “I don’t think that I’m likely to play the perky, young mom-next-door, but I would love to do a smart comedy. I would also love to do more period stuff. I just want to read a script and be excited by the character, whatever it is that she’s doing, and feel that it’s something that I have a unique insight into and that I can contribute something that no one else can, whether or not she’s someone’s wife, or she’s some fictional sci-fi character. I would just like to have the opportunity to do as wide and as varied a cross-section of characters as possible.”
