Although probably best known for her role along side her twin sister (Tia Mowry) in the television show Sister, Sister, Tamera Mowry has many credits to her name.  Mowry was cast in television shows such as ABC TGIF, Full House, and Strong Medicine.  Her movie credits include Seventeen Again, The Hot Chick, Twitches, and Twitches Too.  Although she has often appeared with her sister during many of her roles, she can definitely hold her own.

Mowry recently joined the cast of the new ABC Family original comedy, Roommates, which is slated to air tonight.  Mowry stars along side Tyler Francavilla, Dorian Brown, Tommy Dewey, and David Weidoff, as the character of Hope, one of four roommates, in the ensemble cast.

Question> From the quick synopsis of the show, it sounds like it’s a little like Friends.  How would you describe it?

Tamera>  Actually, ever since we shot the pilot, a lot of people who have seen the show, whether they’re in the audience or just family and friends, they compare us to Friends.  And it puts … pressure on us because Friends was obviously just an amazing, amazing show, but it also gives us a lot of encouragement.  I tend to compare it to Friends in the sense of having five different characters meshing together and seeing how that works.  However, we’re not all friends in the beginning.  We’re just roommates.  The only friend that my character, Hope, is friends with is Katie, so that’s how I would describe it, just us experiencing life post-college, so they’re younger than the character of Friends because we’re just starting to embark on, I think, one of the most scariest moments of your life, which is basically post-college, just figuring out where do you fit in life, in general.

Question> It also says she’s a career woman without a career.  What is she looking to do?

Tamera>  Well, Hope, the character, she wants to be in TV.  She was a television executive.  That is her ultimate goal.  The thing is, Hope is very opinionated and she can be a little bit narcissistic, so that gets her in trouble a lot.  So because she really, really cares about what other people think about her, she hides the fact that she got fired and then she’s working as a barista because she wants her best friend to look up to her and she doesn’t want to lose that.  So she definitely wants to be a television exec, and you never know.  Maybe that will happen in the future, maybe not.  Maybe she’ll embark on something new because you change careers maybe about eight times in your life I think they say.

Question> What attracted you to the character in the first place?

Tamera>  Well, you know what, I was really, really, really attracted to the script, mainly because I think we have a lack of the original formula of sitcoms and comedy nowadays, and I just loved Hope because she is just basically “Miss Congeniality would like to have a word with you”.  She’s very nice, but she doesn’t take any mess, and that’s what attracted me to the character.  I think she’s very talented.  She just can be misguided at times, but she’s also very loving and she just cares for her best friend so much.  She can be a bit overprotective, and I’m kind of like that in real life, so I could somewhat relate to the character.

Question> As we all know, you became famous acting with your twin sister, Tia.  How does working with your sister compare to working without her?

Tamera>  Working with my sister, I have to say, is not work at all.  We naturally have this chemistry.  We always say we’ve been born with a yin and a yang kind of a thing, and we both have each other’s best interests at hand.  So we’re constantly, it’s a weird phenomenon, I have to tell you.  When I’m working with Tia, it’s like she can automatically give me feedback because she’s looking at me, you know what I mean?  And I’m looking at her, so we always help each other out.  We have that inside encouragement, so if we’re doing a scene together and I feel that she needs to give me just a little bit more emotion or vice versa, we’re very, very comfortable with telling each other that whereas not working with her, I love my cast mates.  Dorian Brown and I, we really clicked as just best friends and we literally spend so much time together off set as well, but the thing is, you have to find that chemistry at first.  It’s not like just a natural thing, do you know what I mean?  But I have to say, by doing other shows and working with other people, other than my sister, this had to have been the quickest that I found chemistry with the cast mates.

Question> Your performance on Strong Medicine a few years back was very enjoyable.  Are you excited to be switching gears and doing a comedy instead?

Tamera>  You know what, I have to say yes.  Drama, I love drama.  I would love to tap into that as well as comedy.  Being an actress, I’d love to be able to do both, but comedy is where my heart is.  Honestly, I just think I was born to do comedy.  There’s a feeling when you shoot in front of a live audience.  You get satisfaction in this, I don’t know.  When you make people laugh, you feel good about yourself, especially the times now with the economy and the war and the world and all that, it makes me feel good when you hear laughter.  It’s very uplifting to me.  It’s harder though, I have to say.  As an actress, it’s harder to do comedy than it is to do drama, but I think, because of that, it’s more fulfilling when you get that laugh.

Question> So how did you get the part?  Did you audition for it?

Tamera>  To tell you the truth, I did have to audition for it.  I had to fight for it, but I totally believed in this character.  I loved her.  I loved her immediately.  The first time I read the slides and I saw Hope, I was like, oh my God, I see myself, bits and pieces of myself in this character, and I know I can have fun playing her.  So I had to audition and then I had to do a test.  Auditioning is a very interesting process, but I had fun and I made the character my own because originally she was supposed to be this very mean-spirited individual, just bitter at the world.  But doing comedy for years, I knew that you have to have a bit of like, a likeability factor to her, so I made her fun but she just spoke her mind.  And, actually, the producer, Michael Hanel, told me, he said, “That’s one of the main reasons why you booked the role.  It’s because you put your own twist on it, and we saw that,” so I had the part.

Question> Where do you draw your inspiration from in the portrayal?  Do you find a lot of it coming from you, from your own life?

Tamera>  In the sense that I’m just genuinely a very nice person but you just don’t cross me kind of.  And just like if you hurt my family or if you say something or my friends, I’m very opinionated, and I get that from my mom being a drill sergeant in the army.  So I can draw a lot of those experiences to Hope, but a lot of the time I watched, well, Courteney Cox’s character on Friends and then Melinda on Sex and the City, so I kind of like meshed those two characters together and drew a lot of my inspiration from that.

Question> What’s your favorite part about working on this show?

Tamera>  To be with the cast each and every day, literally, mainly because we’re very open.  We hang out with each other at least once a week.  We always say we have to have our Roommates fix, and I really hope that that continues to happen once the show airs and everyone goes on with their lives, but because we’ve gone through so much, doing the pilot and then feeling the anxiety of it getting picked up to feeling the anxiety of run-through every day and hoping to make people laugh, you automatically bond.  And so just to see everyone’s faces and to see them smile and work hard and be there for you each and every day, that’s what I love, and to make people laugh.  I love it.

Question> Since you’re filming in front of a live audience, you have their reactions.  I’m sure it’s good for immediate, feedback, but how nerve-wracking is that?

Tamera>  Oh my God, to tell you the truth, I haven’t done comedy in ten years.  Oh God, that tells my age.  So going from doing Strong Medicine and doing single camera stuff to four camera, I literally though I was going to throw up because you know immediately if a joke works and if it doesn’t, so in your head you’re like, oh my God, I hope this lands, I hope this lands.  But what’s so great, I think, about our writers is they taught us to trust the material, so they just put all the pressure on them.  They were like, “You know what, just be real.  Say the words, and if it doesn’t work, it’s not on you.  It’s on us,” and then they’d change it.  So that helped a lot.

Question> Since you’ve been acting for a long time, along with your sister and your brother, were you ever worried about getting older and not being able to find certain jobs?  They always talk about child actors and you’re trying to grow up in the business.  Was that ever a worry or did you have a lot of luck with it?

Tamera>  Oh, yes.  If anything, when you’re in it, you’re not worrying about it, but obviously, when the show ended, so did all the benefits.  And people are like, “Oh, that’s the little kid from Sister, Sister,” and it was really hard to accept that.  But I’ll never forget, I don’t know if it was Tatyana Ali or Neil Patrick Harris that said you have to allow yourself to be forgotten in the sense that, live your life.  Naturally grow up.  So I went to college.  I traveled the world, and then when I came back, because of my life experiences, it naturally happened.  I didn’t have to take off my clothes or do something crazy in order for people to see that I’m an adult now.  But it was a very hard transition, I’m not going to lie.  I was out of work for at least two years, and then I hadn’t got a series in four until I did Strong Medicine. 

Question> What inspired you to start acting?

Tamera>  What inspired me to start acting?  Okay.  I think it was a natural desire, but I used to watch Star Search and I loved the soaps.  I loved Days of Our Lives.  I loved You Can’t Do That on Television.  That was my ultimate.  All I wanted to do was say, “I don’t know” and get slimed.  My sister and I used to practice with water.  If you say, “What?” you remember on You Can’t Do That on Television, you go, “What?” you get water poured on you and if you say, “I don’t know,” you get slime.  So it was definitely those shows.  I saw Alanis Morissette when she was younger, and they just looked like they were having a lot of fun and that’s what I wanted to do.  I felt like I had this creative part about me that I wanted to get out, so I tried singing, I tried pageants, I tried dancing, but acting really, really stuck to me.  So that’s how that started.

Question> What was your first acting job?

Tamera>  My first acting job was this syndicated show called Gilbert.  He was a puppet that had a big head.  It was kind of like, what was that, oh God, what was, “I love you, you love me,” I forgot that, what was that show?

Question> Barney?

Tamera>  Yes, Barney.  So it was before Barney, but it was like that.  And I remember, it was like a casting call and I just had to dance and sing.  My sister was with me, and it was in Dallas, and we shot that for a couple of weeks.  And then we went on to industrial films and a Chrysler commercial.

Question> Who do you look up to?

Tamera>  Oh God, Meryl Streep has always been one of my favorites simply because she is brilliant at comedy and she is brilliant at drama.  She really, really, really cares about her craft.  You know that she’s in the business for all the right reasons.  She loves what she’s doing, and I love an actress that moves you, that touches you, that touches your soul.  And then Kate Winslet, wow.  She is phenomenal.  We’re around the same age, and what’s so great about her is that she really knows how to balance normalcy, I think, and stardom.  She doesn’t get the two mixed up, you know?  And she’s grown as an actress, watching her, Titanic to The Reader, and she’s just, and in Revolutionary Road, my gosh.  She’s brilliant, absolutely brilliant.

Question> Have there been any funny or embarrassing moments on the set yet?

Tamera>  Embarrassing moments on the set, the only thing is I had this shower scene and I had to appear to be naked, and I was only in a nude Spandex-like tube top thing.  That was embarrassing, to have everybody look at you, it’s like, oh my God, and you have to act while doing that.  Oh, God.  That was embarrassing for me because everyone was looking.

Question> What has been your favorite role to play so far?

Tamera>  Oh, that is such a hard question.  Oh my gosh.  I’d have to say Princess Camryn in Twitches, mainly because she’s such a girly girl and she’s so oblivious and she’s such a romantic.  And she has magic, so I love doing fantasy kind of things.  I love pretending that I have magic, and she got to wear really cute clothes and ball gowns and crowns.

Question> What kinds of different challenges do you find working in Roommates compared with the other shows you’ve done?

Tamera>  Well, this show is definitely a different format from the previous comedy that I did, so I think one of the main challenges for me, because I’m a very expressive human being in real life, they wanted Hope to be very dry, so very one-liner, kind of like deadpan kind of a thing and have that, “Are you kidding me?” kind of look all the time.  And, in real life, I’m always smiling.  I’m always like, “Oh, it’s okay.  Don’t worry about it,” whereas Hope is like, “I don’t have time for this.  Get out of my face,” kind of a thing.  So that was the hardest

Question> What would be your dream role, the ultimate dream role?

Tamera>  My dream role would have to be in a romantic comedy because I’m a romantic at heart and I love comedy, so I’d love to play a girl who’s down and out on love but then meets the love of her life just by coincidence, something like that.

Question> Have you ever been interested in writing or directing?

Tamera>  No.  Writing is very, very difficult, and directing is very, very difficult.  I think you definitely have to have a gift to do that.  I don’t think I have the eye for specific shots and stuff.  However, I would love to produce.  I love producing.  I love everything about that, finding the talent and coming up with ideas.

Question> Do you have any other projects coming up besides Roommates?

Tamera>  My sister and I are doing a movie for Lifetime called The Wedding.  It’s from a production company, Twilight Productions.  It’ll be our first project, so we’re really, really, really, really, really excited about that.

Question> Did you and your sister get the lead roles on Sister, Sister right away, or was it a long process?

Tamera>  It was a very long process.  However, we did pitch it.  We didn’t have to audition for that role.  That was one of the greatest things about meeting a producer called Irene Dreayer.  She does The Suite Life of Zack and Cody.  She did Sister, Sister.  She did Smart Guy.  She did Out All Night, and that’s where we met her because my brother was on that show with Morris Chestnut and Patti LaBelle and she was like, “Okay, what do you guys want to do?”  And we were always fans of Parent Trap, the movie, and we said we wanted to do a show like that.  And we looked at different twin books like Sweet Valley High.  There was a show on TV at the time called Double Trouble, and we just liked the idea and pitched it to different networks at 14 not knowing what exactly we were doing, with just being ourselves and telling our life story , and just going in with our fingers crossed and prayers.  And that’s basically how we got Sister, Sister.

Question> Do you enjoy being in movies or TV shows more?

Tamera>  Oh, gosh.  That’s hard.  I guess it just depends on the project.  I think TV comedy is a lot, it’s more challenging because you have to do so much in such a little time.  You have to memorize … whereas, with film, you just do scene by scene, and you work for two months on the same material whereas, with a script, you have four days to get it right .  So I think I would say … I enjoy TV.  But if I just want to chill and relax, definitely movies.

Question> Okay.  If you could remake a movie or TV show, what would it be and what character would you play?

Tamera>  Oh my gosh, that’s such a good question.  Darn it.  I was just thinking about that.  Oh, Mary Poppins.  I would love to remake Mary Poppins and play Mary Poppins.  I know that sounds weird, but, as a kid, I loved Mary Poppins.  I loved the whole nanny thing, and I’m naturally a nurturer and a caretaker.  I’m called the mother of the two, between my sister and I, and I love to sing, actually, so I would love to show America that side of me.  I’d love to do Mary Poppins, have alike an interracial  Mary Poppins.  I think that would be cool.

Question> Would you like your sister to guest star in Roommates in the future?

Tamera>  Well, my sister and I made a pact because we did a show for six years together, we’re going to leave it that way.  I didn’t guest star in The Game and she doesn’t want, well, not that she doesn’t want to.  We think it’s safe for her not to guest star in Roommates.  However, we want to do feature films and movies together. 

You can catch Mowry tonight and every Monday night on Roommates on ABC Family.