An Interview with Yael Stone from ‘Firebite’

Yael Stone is a supremely talented actor that is known all around the around. Courtesy of her many roles on Australian television and by way of her turn as Lorna Morello on the hit series Orange in the New Black. Currently, Yael is starring as the mysterious vampire, Eleona on the AMC+ series, Firebite, and we here at Nerds That Geek had the honor of speaking with Yael about acting and all things Firebite.
 
John Betancourt: What was it that got you into acting?
 
Yael Stone: Oh, wow, I didn't expect that. Do you know what, I was kind of like a pretty sickly kid. I was always in and out of hospitals with like asthma and pneumonia and things like that. And so, I didn't do like sport or anything like that, you know, I swam because that was supposed to fix my lungs. But you know, I wasn't good at anything like that. And I wasn't particularly good at school when I was little and but on Friday evenings, and Saturday mornings, I would ride my bicycle to this woman's house, named Robin Fraser, who was a local lady who did Speech and Drama. And in her little extra room in her house, we would sit, her and I, and we would look through poetry books, and through stories, and I would read them out loud and we would talk about them. And then I would learn them off by heart and start performing them and writing my own little scripts. And it was a place that felt… it was just a magical place. And she treated me like that, like an adult. But she treated me with, I guess respect, and that imaginative world that grew out of that was so safe and so precious. And when I you know, when I started reading, you know, some of the great poets, it kind of made me come alive in a way that nothing else had. So yeah, that was that's really the start of it.
 
John Betancourt: Now jumping forward a little further… what was it that attracted you to the character of Eleona?
 
Yael Stone: A big jump, again! You know, I read some… I don't get a billion auditions. But I read some stuff. And a lot of stuff is just not for me. But because I'm a little odd. You know, I'm a character actor, really. And it's got to be right for me, it's going to be right for me. Do you know what I mean? I'm sort of not in the… I'm not in the big swathe of the middle ground. It's like, the hitting zone is quite specific. And when I read something, and not necessarily it's not necessarily a character thing, like with this, the whole concept was I just thought: “Wow, this is such a great concept.” And, and the coming together of, of Warwick Thornton, who's a big figure in Australia, and this particular kind of world was really fun. And I didn't know how heavily genre it would be, I didn't know how far we were going to go. I certainly didn't know I would be doing lots of fighting, you know, martial arts kind of fighting and doing lots of stunts. I did not know that.
 
But conceptually and character wise, it just felt really cool and really right on. And, you know, I have to say like, this is not a role that was offered to me, I auditioned multiple times for the role. I really did just feel quite strongly about it. And it's also… I didn't consciously think of this, but it's unlike anything I've ever done before. And she really is, we can say now, she's a bit of a she's a bad guy. You know, she's done some really terrible things and motivated by you know, her own ways of justifying things but she does some really God-awful things and in the next few episodes we'll come to see just how kind of misguided her decisions are. So yeah, I guess I played some misguided characters before, but she's violent and at times evil.
 
John Betancourt: Now, it is definitely safe to say that the reveal about Eleona is one of the biggest surprises of the season since no one saw it coming. How did you as an actor, work to keep that so seamless and so secretive?
 
Yael Stone: Um, I guess it's just like playing those intentions around. Like, the link between. Eleona is a vampire who's trying to find a new way to operate in the world. Eleona as a woman, before, we know the rest of that, is a woman who's trying to find a new way in the world. She's trying to eke out an existence in this strange town. So, I guess if you play both of those intentions, they meet up quite nicely. And then… it was a relief, I guess. What I remember the feeling of getting to, I think it was episode four or five, when we started shooting stuff where I could sort of let it loose a little more and let her energy out a bit more. Really before that, there wasn't a lot for me to do. Just, I mean, screen time wise, but what I did get to do was still really fun. You know, the stuff with Tyson with Rob Collins, you know, who's just fab and the kind of building energy with Callam is very cool. So yeah, I think playing the intention from for both those stories, the human story in the vampire story, they seem to marry up nicely.
 
John Betancourt: Speaking of the actor’s perspective. How do you get yourself into the mindset to play a character that’s basically born to do evil things?
 
Yael Stone: Well, I think there's kind of two parts of that, there's like the feeding element, the hunger element, which, which to me makes, again, you can kind of extrapolate from your own humanity, we know what it is to be hungry and to have physical needs. So, I kind of changed gears from the wanting world into the needing world. And so that there's a need for blood. And that was kind of interesting. You know, we were working the script quite actively along the way and making some pretty big decisions, you know, things were getting written as we were shooting. So, I would get to have these great conversations, specifically with Brendan, for episodes, seven and eight. And, and I sort of, I put it to Brendan like, this should be like, this should be like a vegetarian having their first steak in a while, you know, I say that as a vegetarian. Like, it sends her off. The taste gives her this whole new energy and power.
 
So yeah, finding those useful analogies, I guess is always helpful as an actor, I think there's so few working acting theories around that. It's the like, ‘what if’ kind of world. Yeah, so and then in terms of the second part of doing terrible things, so there's the feeding world, and then there's some really weird, misguided decisions she makes that have some double layers because of the race element. So, her decisions... that gets into a really sort of sick place of like… deep subjugated racism. And I think the setup is essentially that the vampires are essentially racist, and then a kind of metaphor for our for deep, deep racism, unchecked racism. So, in a way, I sort of see her like a parable, comparison to modern day colonial Australia and some of our still unchecked racism as we, as we even view ourselves as allies. And I say this, as you know, about myself as a person who has an Aboriginal partner and an Aboriginal child. Of course, there's unchecked racism that we have, of course, there's a notion of being “Saviors” as allies when that is in fact not helpful. So, I think Eleona is kind of a bit of, for me, it's a bit of a thesis around that.
 
John Betancourt: What would you say you’re most proud of when it comes to Firebite?
 
Yael Stone: Um, that’s a good question, that there's, there's different kinds of things, I guess, getting out of a comfort zone and really embracing a genre world. And that includes doing fights, you know, and I really wasn't prepared for that kind of stuff. And, and giving, I guess, always giving everything despite, you know, on paper, these silly, crazy outlandish stakes, “stakes.” But that's the game, right? Like I was talking to my friend, Eamon Farren, who's in The Witcher at the moment. And we were just talking about, like, there's only joy in that full commitment, you know, when the scenarios kind of get wild and, and outside the zone of our kind of lived life. It's the joy in performance has to be like really just always going there, and always going for what you really, really want to bring to the scene. So, that's what I'm proud of.
 
John Betancourt: What are you hoping fans take away from the finale?
 
Yael Stone: I mean, I hope that they feel conflicted. Yeah, I hope they feel conflicted about Eleona’s journey because here she is. A woman who's been subjugated and pushed down, down, down and kind of terrorized by her partner this, by a vampire king over centuries. And she's stood up and she's taken the reins. She's faced her fears and beaten him. Right. Which is exciting, and definitely a part of us is cheering for that. But then on the other hand, she's doing this, like violent, racist, horrible shit, and getting high on her own supply. You know, yeah, she's just getting off on the power. So, I hope they feel conflicted and, and kind of drawn in and asking bigger questions about who she is and what she's going to do next.
 
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

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