“Smallville” bad girl has Tulsa roots
She may play a bad girl on “Smallville,” but actress Cassidy Freeman won me over when, in mid-interview, she shouted out, “Boomer Sooner!” As a child, the Chicago-raised actress spent Thanksgivings in Tulsa, where she remembered running up and down her grandparents’ upstairs hallways with her five cousins, until they were quieted so the adults could watch University of Oklahoma football.
“You cannot interrupt Sooner games,” Freeman said.
As Tess Mercer on “Smallville,” the new head of Lex Luthor’s business, Freeman started this season as a thorn in the side of Clark Kent (Tom Welling).
“I had to come in this season with guns blaring. People were missing Lex Luthor; people needed someone to fill that role,” she said. “But I think also what’s very interesting is that he as a character is destined to be a villain. Whereas, no one really knows what I’m destined to be. And my future doesn’t necessarily rely on what’s been written, or mythos necessarily. I have that freedom to become something different, which is cool.”
Freeman joined a long-running series, but she said the cast was extremely welcoming. Star Welling is easy to work with, Freeman says, and she expects he’s an actor who will have no trouble with a Superman “curse.”
“He’s very, very smart,” she said. “He’s obviously beautiful, so he has every opportunity that lies in that fact, and he’s a really nice guy, which in Hollywood is going to get you a lot farther than one might think.” He’s also a talented director, Freeman said. Welling helmed last night’s “Smallville” episode titled “Injustice.”
After “Smallville” wraps, Freeman will go to work on a thriller starring her and her brother. (Her brother’s name, coincidentally enough, is Clark.) The film, “Yellow Brick Road,” is about a New Hampshire town that, in 1940, basically disappeared. The town’s population followed a trail into a forest and never returned. In 2009, a group of eight people investigates the disappearance.
“The tagline is ‘They went to find the evil in the forest, and instead, the forest found the evil in them,’” she said.
Freeman can’t reveal whether she’ll return for “Smallville’s” ninth season; two characters are said to perish in Thursday’s season finale. Regardless of whether she’s back for another year, or whether “Doomsday” is her last episode, Freeman said working on “Smallville” was a great experience.
“It’s really been such an incredible year of work. These are people that I hope to know for a long time.”
- by Matthew Price
From Friday’s The Oklahoman
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