From Scifi.com
Nana Visitor—who played Madame X/Renfro in Fox's Dark Angel—told SCI FI Wire that her character's speedy demise resulted from her decision not to stay with the show. "I think they were angry with me," the actress said in an interview. "I know they were angry with me, because they perceived [that I was] trying to manipulate for a lot of money or something like that, when it was really just life. It was just impossible. So they were a bit angry with me, and my demise may have been given a little short shrift." Madame X took a bullet and was burned to a crisp near the end of the current season's premiere, "Designate This."
Before that, Visitor said that she was initially set to become a series regular. She liked the idea and was ready to relocate from New York to Vancouver, B.C., with her two young sons (one from her first marriage and the other from her marriage to former Star Trek: Deep Space Nine co-star Alexander Siddig). "That's a big deal when you have two boys at school age," Visitor said. "Then they decided that they wanted to make the show's target audience younger and didn't want anyone over 40, really 35, in the cast. So they fired everyone that was older, except John Savage. And they offered me the same deal that they did him, a recurring role. Well, financially, I couldn't keep up an apartment I own in New York and take two boys to Vancouver. What they wanted me to do was commute. So what that would have meant was having someone else raise the boys while I went back and forth for weeks at a time. I found out afterwards that with the work schedule the way it was, I would have been in Vancouver, and my boys would have been [in New York] with a nanny on 9-11. So it was a heartbreaking decision and a financially difficult one to make. But I had to say no. At a certain point, you can't think about lifestyle. You have to think about having a life." Visitor is now performing on Broadway.
Nana Visitor—who played Madame X/Renfro in Fox's Dark Angel—told SCI FI Wire that her character's speedy demise resulted from her decision not to stay with the show. "I think they were angry with me," the actress said in an interview. "I know they were angry with me, because they perceived [that I was] trying to manipulate for a lot of money or something like that, when it was really just life. It was just impossible. So they were a bit angry with me, and my demise may have been given a little short shrift." Madame X took a bullet and was burned to a crisp near the end of the current season's premiere, "Designate This."
Before that, Visitor said that she was initially set to become a series regular. She liked the idea and was ready to relocate from New York to Vancouver, B.C., with her two young sons (one from her first marriage and the other from her marriage to former Star Trek: Deep Space Nine co-star Alexander Siddig). "That's a big deal when you have two boys at school age," Visitor said. "Then they decided that they wanted to make the show's target audience younger and didn't want anyone over 40, really 35, in the cast. So they fired everyone that was older, except John Savage. And they offered me the same deal that they did him, a recurring role. Well, financially, I couldn't keep up an apartment I own in New York and take two boys to Vancouver. What they wanted me to do was commute. So what that would have meant was having someone else raise the boys while I went back and forth for weeks at a time. I found out afterwards that with the work schedule the way it was, I would have been in Vancouver, and my boys would have been [in New York] with a nanny on 9-11. So it was a heartbreaking decision and a financially difficult one to make. But I had to say no. At a certain point, you can't think about lifestyle. You have to think about having a life." Visitor is now performing on Broadway.
