Joanna Going savors role that packs a mighty punch

NICK Jonas

Joanna Going’s name may not immediately ring a bell, but if you’re no stranger to channel-surfing or binge-watching, you can’t have missed the lovely actress who has hopscotched from one popular TV series to another (like “CSI,” “Criminal Minds” and “Mad Men”), and portrayed First Lady Tricia Walker in the second season of Netflix’s “House of Cards.”

In Season Two of the compelling fight drama series, “Kingdom,” telecast on RTL CBS Extreme (channel 104 on SkyCable and Destiny, Thursdays, 9 p.m.), Joanna savors another thespic challenge that packs a mighty punch, and turns in a thoughtfully limned portrayal of a former prostitute and junkie.

She plays Christina, the estranged wife of retired Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighter Alvey Kulina (Frank Grillo), who now operates his own gym and trains fighters, including his sons, the cocky Jay (Jonathan Tucker) and the “sexually conflicted” Nate (Nick Jonas).

The series also stars Kiele Sanchez (as Alvey’s current squeeze, Lisa) and Matt Lauria (as Lisa’s former flame).

In our recent phoner with Joanna, the 52-year-old actress admitted that, while Christina may have been a former hooker and drug addict, it wasn’t difficult to relate to her.

She explained, “Like Christina, I’m also a mom. She may not be well-equipped as a mother, but she wants to reach out to Jay and Nate. She longs to be with them.”

Excerpts from our Q&A:

How do you relate to Christina’s struggles? What did you have to work on to make sense of her “demons”?

I relate to her perseverance; she lived despite her “demons.” She’s quite a wayward mother, but she does love her children. In the second season, she faces her grownup kids, whose childhood she missed.

My daughter is 12, but I still see her as this 2-year-old kid—and I think that’s the way Christina looks at Jay and Nate. She’s like, “They were my little babies!” I relate to her maternal longing.

I also relate to how men relate to Christina—getting attention from men and parlaying that into her survival tactic.

Christina in “Kingdom” and the First Lady in “House of Cards” are very different characters.

How do you shuttle from one challenging character to another?

They’re about as 180 degrees as you can get. Every character is a role that you find a way to connect to. I don’t take on a role unless I have a glimmer of understanding of that person. Then, I do research and work on it some more.

As a character, the First Lady was poised, polished and very put-together. I had great concerns about her outward manners and the way she looked—being in the public eye and standing next to the president in the highest office of the land. But underneath, she has great vulnerability.

On the other hand, Christina just lets it all hang out. She was somewhat stunted in her youth. She is stuck in the time when she was around 18 or 19, when she was at a trajectory of being an art student and trying to figure out what she wanted to do with her art. She was on top of the world with Alvey—then, everything fell apart.

In the way Christina dresses, it’s provocative and inappropriate for her age. We always see her in two moods: She’s either dressed up in a sexy, assertive outfit, or she’s all covered up in a radial T-shirt with no makeup—and she’s got nothing to prove, because she’s very accepting about her own body. She doesn’t care what others think.

Initially, I didn’t know much about where my character was going when I signed on for “Kingdom” because, in the pilot episode of the first season, she appeared only briefly at the end.

GOING’S advice to the sexually conflicted character, played by Nick Jonas: “Be yourself. It’s OK to be who you are.”

All I knew about her then was that she was a heroin addict and a prostitute. I didn’t know how many times she’d appear throughout the series, and I’m not sure if show creator Byron Balasco did, either.

When I read the third episode, which opened with me riding in a car delivering a monologue about how I went to college, she suddenly became more real.

She had a lot more history. To go from there to [a scene where she] walks into a room full of young college men with her little skimpy outfit on—that was like, “OK, here we go.”

As they say, “mother knows best.” Do you think Christina feels responsible for her sons’ perceived woes—in this case, Jay’s “attitude” problems, and Nate’s struggle with his sexuality?

FRANK Grillo

That’s something she’ll come to understand over the course of the next episodes that are airing now. She will face the consequences of her actions and the effects they had on her sons. She still makes bad decisions, even if her intentions are good.

If you were asked to give advice to Alvey, Nate and Jay, what would you tell them?

Nate, Nick’s conflicted character, is the easiest. Christina said these words to him: “Be yourself. It’s OK to be who you are.” Nate is such a heartbreaking character, because he is suffering from a secret that doesn’t need to be a secret—except in the world [of MMA fighters] he grew up in.

In his eyes, if his secret came out, he feels like he’d be ruined in that world—and in his father’s eyes. Christina has lived with all sorts of people. She just wants Nate to be happy with himself.

For Jay, Christina just wants to remind him what a good man he is. He’s been working so hard to repair his broken heart—because of his parents’ breakup. Christina would want him to know that he is loved and has the capacity to share it.

For Alvey, she’d tell him to stop drinking (laughs)!