Eline Powell on ‘Siren’: Even mermaids need training

Eline Powell in “Siren”

With a character that requires as much physical strength as dramatic stamina, Eline Powell has her work cut out for her.

The Belgian actress portrays the teenage mermaid Ryn Fisher in Blue Ant Entertainment’s critically acclaimed series, “Siren.”

In our e-mail interview with Eline early this year, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada)-trained actress told us why she thought playing a

mermaid could benefit from training.

Eline didn’t just wing it or rely on her innate talent. She knew she could make better use of her dramatic gifts if she also trained well. She went to Rada in London, where her skills were nurtured and fine-tuned.

Asked how her academic background helped “shape” her portrayal of Ryn, Eline explained, “Rada helped me immensely as an actress. We obviously get a lot of training in school, in which we’re taught to discover everything about a character. [You deliver an ‘informed’ performance.] You don’t just find out about the core of what drives someone, but also the little outer layers that add texture to the role.

“The training helped me a lot with Ryn, specifically because they’re (her teachers at Rada) great at building a character on every level of  her journey—not just physically, but also where she comes from, where she’s going, or how she behaves with others.

“Obviously, portraying a mermaid is a very different kind of work, especially when compared to any other character you’d probably get asked to play in a show.

“With Ryn, you can do a lot of work in terms of the imagination involved. You try to bring to life what her world is like, what her daily routine is—on land and underwater. You have to figure out what life is like out there.

“I have to use my imagination for Ryn, because she doesn’t know how to ‘operate’ as a human. Besides, how do you interact with other human beings? There are so many issues: What is a car for? How do you use a hairbrush. Everything! I had to appear convincing the first time Ryn needed to deal with all that stuff.

“For me, exploring that was a really fun exercise, because you start to realize how weird we humans are sometimes.”

Fola Evans-Akingbola and Alex Roe

But Eline also likes the metaphor that hovers over Ryn’s tale. She explained to us why, beyond the series’ rousing sci-fi adventure, people needed to see “the bigger picture.”

“Every time you come across someone who looks like an outsider, the best way to go about it is to open your mind a little bit. You have to try to understand somebody who isn’t like you,” Eline stressed. “Soon enough, you’ll find you have more things in common. Sometimes, we have to work hard to understand the divergent paths we take.”

“What the show is about can be explained better by our writers. I’m an actress, but if I had to give my opinion on it, I think the show wants to say that nobody is an outsider—there’s no them versus us. There’s only us. That’s what ‘Siren’ is all about.”

“Siren’s” 16-episode Season 2 airs on Blue Ant Entertainment every Sunday at 7:55 p.m., and can be seen on Skycable channel 53, CableLink channel 37 and Cignal channel 120. The series was renewed for a third season on May 14.