Joss, were Niska and Saffron designed to be recurring characters? by two

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Joss, were Niska and Saffron designed to be recurring characters?

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UPDATED: Friday, June 3, 2011 07:33
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Friday, June 3, 2011 7:33 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Joss Whedon's answers to 4 questions from an interview in Firefly: The Official Companion, Volume One (2006), ISBN 9781845763145

Q: Were Niska and Saffron designed to be recurring characters?
Only if they worked. I mean, you want everybody to be so good that you want them to be ongoing. And that worked out. I didn't even close the door on Early, or for that matter, even Dobson. I planned to bring him back - when I couldn't, I brought him back in the comic. He got shot in the eye. In the show, he was going to have a whole run about how Mal had shot him in the eye and not killed him and how pathetic Mal was. It was going to be really funny.

Q: What about the Blue-Gloved Men?
This was another change: they [the network executives] were very interested in the over-reaching arc. I wanted the show to play more episodically, because Buffy and Angel had gotten so caught up in their own mythos that I couldn't tell what was going on; and so I was like, 'Let's be very standalone,' and also because it reflected the sort of day to day pointlessness of these [Firefly] people's lives, not in a harsh way, just 'We got through today, now we have to get through tomorrow, so let's not be part of a grander scheme right away.' Eventually, we were going to build to it, because I think you have to, but [the network] wanted to bring that out sooner, so I created the BlueHanded fellas for that purpose, so there was sort of the ticking clock of the thing following [the main Characters]. I had not actually intended to use the same two actors. I wanted to indicate that there were a bunch of them, but nobody knew that [laughs], so when we had the BlueHand Men again, they had the same guys [Jeff Ricketts and Dennis Cockrum]. So I was like, 'Okay, apparently there's only two of them.' Because I was running three shows and so I missed that one, that fell between the cracks. That's not a diss on the actors, they did a great job, but yeah, the original idea was that there would be these guys everywhere. Blue Sun [Corporation, the employer of the Blue-Gloved Men] was going to be a big thing, part of the whole Miranda thing, but the movie just didn't have room for that.

Q: Interviews with the cast often give the impression that their characters really had a continued life beyond just 'action - cut.' Did you get that feeling from your cast on this?
I did. Here were very, very dedicated craftsmen, who were working on making it work and getting it right, but they lived their characters to such an extent that, yeah, sometimes the issue would become confused. I thought for a long time that Sean [Maher] was looking at all of us going, 'How did I get on board with these idiots?' Because he's very quiet and reserved. He's actually the sweetest guy in the world and was having a lot of fun, but I didn't know it for a while [laughs]. I thought he was just looking at us like, 'I'm smarter than them,' because he's got such incredible self-containment. But then, like Simon, he's just all mushy heart. Jewel's mom actually talked to me about what it was like when Jewel was playing Kaylee, that it was exciting for her to be playing somebody so optimistic and so full of love and life, because she had been cast in a different kind of role before that and it was like playing Kaylee opened her up, to an extent. Yeah, [the entire cast] embodied their characters to the point where I can't remember a time when those characters existed without those faces.

Q: Did they ever discuss with you what allowed them to jump into it so wholeheartedly?
I don't know. Part of it was a feeling - there was a history to the thing, that if they had a question, there was an answer, or we would work out an answer, we would find it together. But I don't know how I got so many grossly talented people all in one place who really enjoyed what they were doing and really liked each other. I've worked with great ensembles every time out and I've been very lucky, but there was something going on here that was really different than anything I've seen on any set. Nobody ever went to their trailer - they all just wanted to watch each other. It's not something to be taken lightly. Or canceled.

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