'56 Days' Cast Discuss Their Daring, Duplicitous New Series
dove cameron, avan jogia, karla souza and dorian missick discuss their roles in amazon’s steamy new thriller
Book adaptations have remained a fixture in pop culture, but it feels like the demand for adaptations is now more popular than ever. These past few months, projects like Heated Rivalry and People We Meet on Vacation, have been all the craze, and just in the wake of Valentine’s Day, Amazon Prime and Atomic Monster Productions are releasing ‘56 Days,’ a new twist-saturated, steamy thriller based on author Catherine Ryan Howard’s novel of the same name. This adaptation drew buzz with the casting of its two leads, Dove Cameron (Descendants, Liv and Maddie) and Avan Jogia (Victorious, Zombieland: Double Tap), both of whom gained large Gen-Z fanbases from their roles leading roles in popular Disney Channel and Nickelodeon series during the early 2010’s.
56 Days marks a bold new chapter for the career of both leads, as it is a darker, more adult thriller series that shows audiences new sides of these beloved actors. Cameron and Jogia play the roles of Ciara Wyse and Oliver Kennedy, respectively, with the series following a whirlwind romance between the two characters over the span of, you guessed it, 56 days, starting with a meet-cute, and unraveling with numerous dark twists and reveals along the way. On the other side of the series are Karla Souza and Dorian Missick, as Boston detectives Lee Rearden and Karl Connolly, whose separate plotline takes place after the 56 days of romance, following a murder investigation in Oliver’s apartment, with the series cutting between the two main plotlines as it tiptoes to a deadly convergence that reveals the central mysteries.
The series’ four leads sat down to speak with FilmSpeak about creating their characters and actualizing the stakes of the story.
Check out the full interviews below, or continuing scrolling for the remainder of the article.
Both Ciara and Oliver withhold many secrets from one another, and in a way, are putting on a kind of performance around one another at first. Cameron and Jogia spoke about what it was like to play that extra layer of these secretive yet volatile characters, while leaving levels of ambiguity and duplicity in the process.
AJ: " What was really attractive to me about this part is the idea of playing somebody who has a front-facing personality, but then also has all of these versions of himself that he has sort of held and trapped away, that was really attractive to me. Yeah, it is a tightrope.”
DC: “I really tried to approach, in the earlier episodes, this kind of idea that [Ciara] had created a version of herself that she thought would attract Oliver. She had studied him in such a way where she had not only adopted his interests, but she put on this kind of idea of women she had seen in movies, or women she deeply admired, and the ways that she lowered her voice when she was around him, and she spoke more softly, and slowly. She kept this air of mystery… because she was tailoring herself to be his type of woman… she only had one goal in mind. She didn’t want to be honest with him, or make a connection with him, so she wasn’t struggling. Until, she gets to the point where she’s like, “Oh no, I am falling in love with this man,” and and then morally grapples with who he is, and who I know he is. Then, you get to the point of disparity between the two roles [Ciara] is playing, and she’s like, “How do I bring the other one in now, and how do I introduce the vulnerability?””.
As mentioned, Detectives Rearden and Connolly’s plotline, while concerning the main events following Ciara and Oliver in a presumptive aftermath, exists in a different point of time for the show, and was filmed separately, with some information intentionally withheld, which created some unique acting challenges for actors Souza and Missick.
KS: “We did not know, we just had episodes 1-4, I think, and then we were revealed, something like that.”
DM: “Right, but there were some discussions about what was going on, we had read the book, so it was like a general idea of where this thing was going, you know?
KS: “Yeah, and for us, because it all happens in one day, it was kind of [about] reminding ourselves what we knew, in terms of the body in the bathtub, that discovery, and then what we knew about each other’s personal lives. That was, I guess, the most challenging part to do in a period of, what was it, 3 months filming in Montréal. We had to stop and start a lot, and so it was kind of bringing all of that [story] stuff back when we’d have a 5 day break or something like that. So, that was challenging.”
DM: “I’m quick to forget things, so I could read the story, and then 2 seconds later, go ‘Wait, what happened?’. So, it worked to my advantage! You know how they say, you should take your disadvantages and turn them into your advantages, that’s what I did. I turned my weakness into a strength.”