Dickinsons Lavinia Grounds Her Characters Humor With Regret

Dickinson’s Lavinia Grounds Her Character’s Humor With Regret

Describing Lavinia ‘governed by regret,’ Dickinson star Anna Baryshnikov unpacks what that meant when she returned for the show’s final season.

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Dickinsons Lavinia Grounds Her Characters Humor With Regret

SPOILER WARNING: This article contains minor spoilers for the Dickinson series finale.

Lavinia Dickinson is a lot like her sister Emily. As Dickinson progressed, she proved herself to be just as independent, stubborn and artistic as the famous poet. However, according actor Anna Baryshnikov, there is a key difference between them: Lavinia genuinely regrets the way her life turned out. Describing the real-life inspiration for her character as “governed by regret,” Baryshnikov unpacked what that meant when she returned as Lavinia in the show’s third and final season.

Speaking to CBR, Baryshnikov broke down Lavinia’s journey with grief and regret. She explained why Lavinia’s exploration of grief through her art was a healthier coping mechanism than Emily’s. She recalled her delight at getting to homage real-life artists like Marina Abramovich and Bea Camacho and revealed how her final performance allowed her to flex her improvisation skills. She also described Season 3’s family dynamic as relatable, shared her hope that Lavinia inspires viewers to stay true to themselves and more.

CBR: This is a particularly challenging season for the Dickinsons, who are going through their own civil war. What was the most challenging part of approaching that for you?

Anna Baryshnikov: I think that we, in previous seasons, had had so many of these dinner table scenes, where it’s the Dickinsons returning to being with one another and having all of their familiar family dynamics ground the show, and it was a completely different challenge to have the family be divided in this season. I hardly had scenes with Adrian [Blake Enscoe] this season. Hailee [Steinfeld] and I had a lot of separate material that we had never had before.

I think, for Lavinia, getting into the characters’ mindset, she’s the youngest sibling, and I don’t think her family necessarily turns to her in these moments of conflict. So she was, I think, kind of given space to do her own thing in this time period. Also, unlike Emily and Austin, isn’t really forced to pick aside or take a stand because they often think the baby of the family gets overlooked in that way. Even though she might have actually seemingly agreed with Austin since the beginning, she looks up to Emily, so much so that when Emily is really siding with her father, she listens to her and follows along.

So yeah, that was such a fascinating part of this season, because I think complicated family dynamics are so relatable, and especially during this time, when a lot of people spent a lot of concentrated time with their family this year. A lot of children are trapped inside their house with their parents this year. [laughs] Unsaid conflicts boil to the surface, so it felt very topical.

Lavinia really leans into the humor this season. How did you approach her for Season 3? How did you keep her grounded, despite all her antics?

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Well, it really does come back to the trip that the cast and I took to the Emily Dickinson Museum, when our incredible tour guide, I asked her, “Tell me anything you know about Lavinia.” She said, one, that she felt Lavinia was very sensual, which was funny, and I feel like we’ve gotten to explore in other seasons, and two, that she feels like Lavinia’s life had been governed by regret. There’s a letter of Emily Dickinson’s that describes Lavinia as governed by regret.

So I had been kind of putting off playing her that way, because I really did want to save it for a moment like this season, when we do see that her choices to be an independent woman and to reject some of the standards of femininity and marriage come back to bite her in the form of — not that she should have ever compromised those ideals, but that she made choices that limited her options. Especially during the Civil War, when all of the men were being drafted, she really had to come to terms with the fact that she had chosen a different path for herself…

She wasn’t afforded what women are afforded today, which is the ability to have a partnership and have a family in a way that doesn’t challenge their core beliefs. So, in that way, she was kind of like Emily. She was ahead of her time and she wasn’t willing to compromise, but it doesn’t mean that that didn’t come along with pain and grief. So I think this season, as wild as her journey with performance art gets, it was grounded in the very real feeling that she had decisions that she might regret and she wished her life had turned out differently.

Lavinia is an artist in her own right, and she really does explore that in this season. Which one was your favorite and why?

Sheep No More has to be up there. I mean, that was just so much fun, because [showrunner] Alena [Smith] and I both come from a theatre background, and Sleep No More in New York had such a moment and this idea of challenging highbrow immersive work really exploded. So to borrow Marina Abramovich’s work, but then have it be a sheep and called Sheep No More. It’s one of those references in the show that I’m like, “I have no idea how many audience members will care about this joke, but it’s so specifically funny to me that I just feel so lucky to do it.”

Especially, also, that last episode, the knit cocoon, which was the Bea Camacho piece. I think all of those ideas were really grounded in Alena saying, “In many ways, Emily is avoiding feeling the grief of this time period by pushing through and trying to find a way to help, and in some ways, what Lavinia is doing is pretty healthy.” She’s letting herself feel the enormity of this moment in history, and expressing it any way that she knows how. I think it’s why, even though she’s not a poetic genius like her sister, they actually have a lot in common.

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That last one really got me!

A lot of that last one was improv and that’s normally not true on this show. Alena is so good with her words, and normally we all want to honor that, but she really — because she was directing that episode — gave me free rein to try anything. Then, in between takes, she would come over and whisper to me and say, “Okay, try one where you say, ‘I am a woman! I have a vagina!'” and I’m doing that and I’m seeing Toby [Huss] cracking up and he’s like, “I can’t! I can’t watch this for the rest of the day!” Then it was so brilliant, the way they edited it together. They grabbed all of the funniest, funniest bits.

Despite being set in the mid-1800s, Dickinson touches on some modern-day issues, and Lavinia really does have some modern-day sensibilities. What did the time period allow you to do with these kinds of messages, that perhaps you couldn’t in a traditional period piece?

I think especially with all of the fun that I was able to have with her performance art, the references that we — you know, we referenced Marina Abramovich in one moment; we referenced… Bea Camacho, who we actually credited and compensated for her performance that we kind of stole for the show. There’s one family singalong when I was given free rein to dance however I want and I started doing TikTok moves, because it felt like that was in the same spirit of what Lavinia would be doing when she’s trapped at home with her family for her dad’s birthday.

So I think it just gave me a tremendous amount of artistic license to reference things that there’s no way Lavinia would have known about at that time and to infuse her with so much more of myself and to be inspired by my friends. It made her a much more accessible character to me.

What do you hope viewers take away from the series and, in particular, Lavinia as a character?

I hope they understand how ahead of her time Emily was — and Lavinia was as well, for that matter, and that if there’s any way that they are living their life that feels out of the ordinary, that it probably means they’re being true to themselves and that, possibly 100 years from now, that might be so much more common than anyone realizes. So really: to do you, at all costs.

The Dickinson complete series is now available to stream on AppleTV+.

Link Source : https://www.cbr.com/dickinson-season-3-anna-baryshnikov-interview/

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