The Space actress comes to Earth & explores past lives on the X-Files
You might not guess it
from her solemn Shane Vansen of Space: Above And Beyond, or her tearful,
traumatized Melissa Riedel in the X-FILES episode "The Field Where
I Died," but actress Kristen Cloke is a funny and lively young woman whose
gift for mimicry and impressions keeps her friends and colleagues constantly
bemused. Even in normal conversation, her wry view of life's absurdities
- and for an actress in Hollywood, life can be quite absurd - expresses
itself through permutations of voice and character. Born and raised in Los Angeles, as a child Cloke loved to pretend and make up stories. She was active in her school's theater program as well as skits at summer camp, but without any thought towards making acting as a permanent career. She initially majored in psychology at California State University, Northridge, with the tentative expectation of following in her psychiatrist father's footsteps. "Acting wasn't something that I was supposed to do," Cloke said. "We had relatives in show business, and it was for the wacky part of the family, for those crazy, devil-may-care folk. I was supposed to go to school and be something professional." A required course in statistics quickly convinced Cloke she wasn't cut out for psychology, after all, and she switched majors to English. She also took as many theater courses as possible and acted in college plays. In her junior year, she acquired an agent and opted to drop out of school and begin acting full time.
On her first audition, Cloke won a starring role in a feature film. Unfortunately, that film turned out to be pretty bad science fiction action movie called MEGAVILLE, which also starred Billy Zane, Daniel Day Travanti and Grace Zabriskie. "It's a fine, fine film," offered a poker-faced Cloke about her debut vehicle. "It's very out there. You can't understand it. I saw it once and I could not follow it. My grandfather told me what it's about. He finds it to be very good. I played a bomb specialist that defected from an army - I'm not really sure what army, because it was nowhere and no time. My opening line was such a great opening line," she declared, still straight-faced. "Billy Zane turns on me with a gun and I've got a briefcase, and I say, 'You've got a gun. I've got a bomb. Make one more move and we're both going to hell with our own luggage.' Seriously, it was a great experience and I got my SAG card. It was one of those rare occasions when a director believes in you and says, 'This is the person.' I think that that role foreshadowed my appeal to sci-fi fans as the serious girl with the deep voice."
MEGAVILLE was not only Cloke's first feature film, but her first time in front of a camera. She admitted that at the time she didn't really understand at first the changes she would have to make in her theater-based acting techniques. "I didn't understand the camera and what it can and can't do for you. You develop a relationship with the camera. I don't want to say that you act for the camera, but as an actor, you should develop a character and make choices based on what you know about the camera. Looking back at it, MEGAVILLE was probably one of those roles where I probably didn't need to make choice as big as I did for the camera in this or that scene, but I was so thrilled and so excited to be working. If you're interested in working in film, you really have to feel everything deeply, so that it only shows up on the corner of your face. Acting on film is so much more subtle, because the camera is so much closer and the audience is looking down your throat. You have to develop with the camera. The further you go, the more you understand what the camera knows and what it can see. In a weird way it makes you work harder - you have to feel more and say less. It's completely different from theater, and I don't think that I understood that at the time I did MEGAVILLE."
After MEGAVILLE opened in 1990, without making any impression whatsoever on the public, Cloke found that subsequent roles were few and far between. "I didn't work for a long time, and I thought, 'Oh god, I'll never work again.' But that's kind of the way my career has been. I have these great successes, and then nothing, and then great succeses, and then nothing. And they're slowly, slowly building. So 'humble' is my middle name. There's no overnight success for me, that's for sure."
Eventually roles came her way. Cloke appeared in several feature films, including THE MARRYING MAN and STAY TUNED, and starred with David Keith in CAGED HEAT. She did guest roles in television series such as CHEERS, QUANTUM LEAP, DEAR JOHN and DOOGIE HOWSER, M.D, had a recurring role in cable's SILK STALKINGS and was a series regular in the short-lived WINNETKA ROAD. "I did a lot of television. My theory about my career always has been, never be famous for anything bad. So I did a lot of episodic television to keep my rent paid, and played lots of different fun characters no one really remembers. I turned down lots of roles I didn't want to do because I didn't want to be naked or be on a show that was going to an embarrassment. If it was a big feature, I would do it. But a lot of times I wouldn't because I couldn't get out of the nudity or I didn't want to sign my life away for five or seven years to a show that I knew would be horrifying."
During this period Cloke also kept active on the stage. She joined the Alliance Repertory Company in Burbank, for which she not only acted, but wrote, produced and directed, eventually becoming Associate Artistic Director of the group. She is particularly proud of her direction of the play DIRTY MUSTARD, by Gina Wendeklos. "I love directing!" she enthused. "I recommend it to any actor, because you have to verbalize your choices and say, 'I think it's like this.' And then you give your ideas to the actors, and they come up with something different. It's such a great process. When I'm acting, my favorite directors are ones with eyes that I can look into and feel something from, because sometimes I have to work with an actor from whom I can't find anything, and if I can just get the director's eyes for one second, I can open up like a flower. Sometimes, that's all it takes for me. It's really cushy if someone gives you direction or really acts with you, but it doesn't happen that often."
Although Cloke had enough work to keep the bills paid, she was still one of hundreds of young actresses in Hollywood all looking for the big break. Her chance finally came when her agent told her about auditions for the new Fox war-in-outer-space television drama, Space: Above And Beyond, written and produced by Glen Morgan and James Wong - two names completely unfamiliar to her, since she watched very little television, and had never seen THE X-FILES. But as soon as she read the script, she was intrigued by the character of Shane Vansen, one of the raw recruits who is molded by a strict drill sergeant and the heat of battle into an officer and a pilot. Cloke found the practical, yet caring, Vansen to be a rarity among the usual run of television's female characters, and she told her agent she'd read for the part. Her first audition was for Randy Stone, vice president of talent at Fox. At first, she thought she had given a poor reading. "I was hitting my head, thinking 'Oh my God, I'm terrible. This is so embarrassing, oh well, I'm not going to get this job, but that's okay.' The way the script was written, when Cooper Hawkes goes to kiss Shane, she gets all upset, like 'You know... God,' Cloke said, mimicking Shane's crying. "I said to Randy, 'You know, I just don't see that this character would cry. If a guy did that to me, I would laugh. 'You think because we're having an intimate conversation that you can kiss me, right? That's really cute.' So I did it the way I saw it, and he said, 'That's great! That's exactly it! You'll come back tomorrow!' So I went in and I read for Glen and Jim. They are not exactly effusive people, so I got this sort of wallpaper reaction: "Good, good.' Glen and I have talked about that day and he says, 'No, no, the minute we saw you, we knew you were great.' But I would never known it. When I walked out of the room, Glen did not even look at me. So I went home, I called my agent, I said, 'I'm sorry,' and he said, 'No, no, you're reading for the studio tomorrow.' I went, 'What?' I thought for sure I had blown it a million times and it turned out that I was the first person cast for the show. I was the only person that anyone could really agree on, so I was the easy sell, which is kind of funny. But it was great."
While Cloke loved how
her character expanded during SPACE's one season on the air, she
found the physical task of filming to be arduous almost beyond all endurance.
"There were a lot of times when doing that show was such a grind. Just trying
to go to the bathroom was difficult because of all the gear you had to wear.
You couldn't eat. I was always filthy and tired. You couldn't breathe because
there was so much smoke. Sometimes I just hated it. You're covered in dirt
and crap, and at the same time you're supposed to cry because your character
thinks she's never going to see her unit, the 58th, again. I felt like,
'Oh god! Why don't you just stick needles in my eyes too? You people hate
me. Could you torture me any more?' By the middle of the season when we
asking each other, 'We have how many episodes left?' But when we thought
the series might be cancelled and we might not be doing it anymore, we said,
'I never want to leave this job.' It's the best job I ever had. It was hard
for the 58th, because as they got closer and closer to possibly losing each
other, they got closer and closer to never wanting to lose each other. That
was an interesting dynamic, and I really loved the way Shane evolved and
became even more and more of a momma bear. She was a great character. I
would be so lucky to play someone like that again. I really miss her." Although SPACE was cancelled at the end of the its first season, Morgan and Wong remained close to their show's stars and were determined to cast them in THE X-FILES, to which they had returned for half a season. For Cloke, they wrote a role that incorporated some of the characters and voices that she loved to act out for fun in her everyday conversation. But what made for humor in real life turned tragic in Morgan and Wong's episode, "The Field Where I Died,' in which Cloke played a deeply disturbed woman, Melissa Riedel-Ephesian, one of six wives to a charismatic cult leader named Vernon Ephesian. After the FBI raid the cult's compound, looking for weapons, and arrest Vernon and his wives, Melissa is interrogated by Agents Mulder and Scully. Under the pressure of the interrogation, she suddenly takes on another personality, leading Scully to suspect that Melissa is suffering from disassociative personality disorder, while Mulder believes she is channeling past lives, especially after she becomes "Sarah," a Civil War nurse who sees in Mulder the soul of her husband, a Confederate officer slain in battle. Besides Melissa and Sarah, the other two personalities that came out in the episode were Sidney, a tough-talking man with a distinctive squint and hand gestures who claimed Truman was president, and a small child named Lily.
"Glen and I talked a little bit about the script," Cloke said. "Some of the personalities were based on characters that I did. There were imitations of people, or characters I had worked on, that he had seen me do. When I read the script, I sort of molded them into it." Sidney was based on an agent Cloke had known. "He had these certain mannerisms, and I would do them for Glen. He liked it, and built a character around it. When I read some of the online reaction and saw the criticism that I was channeling Gilbert Gottfriend or some other man, I thought, 'At least it was a guy!' How many women can you say successfully channeled any man? So I took that as a compliment." To create the personality of Sarah, the Confederate nurse, Cloke read the famous Civil War letter from Sullivan Ballou to his wife Sarah Kavanaugh, absorbing the letter's deep emotion. Sarah's distinctive accent was "less educated and Southern, as opposed to upper-middle-class. She wasn't specificially from any one place. Kind of a basic regional accent."
"The Field Where I Died" was Cloke's second time acting with star David Duchovny, who she had met some time back when they were both doing promotional work for Fox. Duchovny agreed to guest star in the SPACE episode "R&R," to help boost SPACE's sinking ratings. He played a pool shark named Handsome Alvin, and his rival across the pool table was Cloke's Shane Vansen, who for once got to wear a little black dress instead of a grubby uniform. Since Handsome Alvin was an Artificial Intelligence Silicate - a walking, talking computer - the role required Duchovny to wear contact lenses that covered the entire surface of his eyes. "Having him on SPACE was fun, and it was really sweet of him to come," Cloke said. "I felt bad for him, because he thought he was just going to come in for an hour and do his thing and leave. But it turned out to be all day.and he had to wear those lenses. You should have seen him at the end of the day. He was having a terrible reaction; his eyes were swollen shut. It was just awful. He hated it. But he was as excited as I was to do 'The Field Where I Died.' "
Cloke also appreciated the opportunity to work with director Rob Bowman for the first time. "I love Rob. He was wonderful. I couldn't say enough great things about him. As a guest on the show, I was treated so well. I got to go first sometimes, like during Melissa's hypnotic regression scene. He let me do things until I felt like I was ready. It was so hard; the part required me to cry all day, every day. And some days it was just harder to get there than others. Rob and I communicated a lot through music. He'd say, 'I think it feels like this,' and he'd give me earphones and put some music on to get me ready for a scene. The music depended on what the scene was. One time, he put on Barber's Adagio for Strings. I was weeping like a baby. Or Gorecki's Third Symphony. We'd talk a lot about music and say what about it felt like. Rob really understands music and he feels through music. We talked about Melissa when I first got there, before we started shooting, and then he let me roll with it. He would give me little suggestions and words here and there, but a lot of the time he guided me along with music. He was really excited about the episode because it was a chance for him to do something besides an alien of the week type story."
Was Melissa channeling past lives or was she suffering from a multiple personality disorder? "I asked Glen from what standpoint I should play this, because there were two viewpoints. There was Mulder's point of view and Scully's point of view. He asked me to take it from Mulder's point of view, which in a lot of ways allowed for a lot of leeway, a lot of interpretation. So I took Melissa's personalities as her past lives, but the impetus to change personalities was the intensity of her pain, as it is in multiple personalities. Whenever something was strikingly painful, that caused her go into Sidney, which was the protective personality, or back to Melissa, or whatever personality that could access that particular area. I used the psychological disorder as a skeleton, but chose that she was channeling past lives. But I don't think that Melissa herself believed that she was channeling past lives."
The climatic scene for Cloke, as an actress, was Melissa's night time hypnotic regression session, with Mulder, Scully and and a therapist attempting to call out "Sarah" to see if she can give them the location of Civil War-era underground bunkers where Vernon's cult may be hiding weapons. But it was Melissa, the core personality, who Cloke found the most challenging to play. "It's because she was the most in pain. I think about Melissa and all I can think is, she was in so much pain. And then to rise into that pain, and to switch to the other characters was hard. That regression scene was shot in one, so all those changes from personality to personality really happened without a break. It wasn't like I got up and had a cigarette and came down and said, 'Okay, I'm ready for Sidney now.' They all came, one after the other and I had to go through all those emotional places."
Bowman handed in a cut that ran 20 minutes over the prescribed 45 minutes, and Morgan and Wong were forced to excise much of Cloke's material, including another personality named Jobie, who was dropped entirely. Jobie, again based on one of Cloke's own characters, had a foul mouth from which spewed forth streams of scatatological fire and brimstone. "Jobie's a character that I do for my mother. I used to entertain the SPACE cast with Jobie, too," said Cloke. "Whenever they were bored, they'd make me do Jobie. One day my mother and I were getting ready to go out somewhere and she had on Sally Jessie Raphael or some talk show, and Latoya Jackson was on. She was talking about how her father had had all these illegitimate children, and Sally Jessie goes, 'And what's the name of this sister of yours?' and Latoya goes, '. . . Jobie.' Like she made it up. So Jobie became the bastard child that lives in the closet. Jobie hates everything. Jobie's responsible for all ruin. Jobie is the reason that everything goes bad in the world. And that's how Jobie came about."
Along with Jobie, Morgan and Wong cut a good portion of Melissa's regression sequence, including a scene where Melissa, in her child personality, reveals to Mulder and Scully that she was physically (and probably sexually) abused by her stepfather. If there is one scene Cloke felt should have been retained, it is that one, because it explained why Melissa sought refuge with a domineering cult leader, a man who on some level reminded her of her father. "I fought so hard for that scene, but there was nothing I could do. It came out because of time requirements. The regression scene was long, and Glen and Jim felt that was the part they could cut because it didn't have anything to do with the actual story. But I approached Melissa as I did, because I knew about her past, and knowing that at some point she was going to have to tell her worst, deepest, darkest secrets. That part of the regression scene was a very difficult thing to get to and do, and I was upset it didn't make the cut because it was heartrending."
At the end of "The Field Where I Died," Melissa is forced to join the cult in a mass suicide by downing a cyanide-laced drink. The Sidney personality takes over and fakes drinking the poison, but when Melissa feels it's finally safe to open her eyes and look around, she finds one survivor: Vernon, waiting for her with yet another cup of the liquid. When Mulder breaks into the compound a few minutes later, he finds a horrific scene, with Melissa's body among the dead. "Melissa thinks she's okay, but then she looks into Vernon's eyes, and it's her stepfather all over again," Cloke explained. "It's 'Oh fuck,' she's caught. There's that moment where she looks into the light and she thinks, 'There's a better place for me out there. It's time for me to go now. This is just terrible. Maybe it's okay I go.' I think she's just terrified of Vernon. That's part of what her whole life was, trusting that which terrifies her. That thing that beats her down and that keeps her in line is also the thing which keeps her alive. Melissa knew that Vernon was going to take care of her in a way that was familiar to her. I remember that feeling, when I looked up at Michael [Massee, who played Vernon], and I had that feeling of, 'I'm caught.' It was as simple as that. 'I'm caught. I'm going to die.' And then there's this moment, 'It's okay, it's all right. Because this life is just too painful.'
As with all the fourth season Morgan and Wong episodes, audience reaction to "The Field Where I Died," was divided. Cloke was surprised at some of the negative reviews, but reserved her wrath for an X-FILES episode guide in Entertainment Weekly, which gave "The Field Where I Died" the guide's one and only F. "I'm probably the only person anywhere associated with THE X-FILES who will talk about this, but they reviewed those X-FILES episodes as X-FILES fans, not as journalists," Cloke steamed. " 'The Field Where I Died' was in no way an F. The direction was fantastic, and David worked hard and he was excited. How often do we get to see Mulder have a feeling about anything, ever? I thought it was fantastic. You want to see an F? I can pick out a couple of shows where I go, 'F!" The writer told Glen and Jim later that the reason he gave it an F was because he had given all their other episodes an A and they had to have one F. I thought to do that in such a public magazine was so hurtful to them. I was just happy that they compared me to a decent actor - Joe Pesci!"
In the year since SPACE left the air, Cloke has been experiencing one of those professional dry spells she periodically endures. She made a film called THE RAGE and also an ABC Afternoon Special, THE LONG ROAD HOME, for which she received a Daytime Emmy nomination. And she has a cameo in the pilot of Morgan and Wong's new show, THE NOTORIOUS SEVEN. She continually goes to auditions but has rejected some offers; in a way playing Shane Vansen has made it harder for her to find work. "I don't want to sacrifice certain strides that I've made, or a certain level that I want to work at, by taking something that is different from that," she explained. "It's just not where I, Kristen, want to go with my career. So it does make it harder. I think it would be really fun to do a comedy."
Whether comedy or drama, whether performed for a few friends or before the camera, Cloke's characters arise out of an intense identification with the people she portrays. "I really try to become as empathetic as possible - empathetic to the ninth degree - so that you really feel their feelings. I think that's why I wanted to be a psychologist when I was younger. I'm pretty good at feeling people out, and knowing, 'They feel like this.' I feel it in my body. They resonate on that level. And that's what I do with characters. I read them, and I go, 'They feel like this.' And then I develop them from there. You feel where their energy level is, what makes them tick, what makes them burn. And you put that into a soup and you develop little external nuances, little tics that they might have. It's just extreme empathy. I just try to feel like what they feel like, and then become as emotionally naked as humanly possible."
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