Shining Vale Star Mira Sorvino Weighs in on Walking Between Worlds for New STARZ Series

With the upcoming STARZ series Shining Vale, Mira Sorvino plays the mysterious Rosemary, a figure from the past who also has ties to the present. The otherworldly nature of the character brings with it some unexpected challenges, as Sorvino is tasked with playing the character in multiple eras, all while being influenced not only by her setting, but also by the characters she interacts with. The actor recently discussed how, despite playing multiple versions of a character coming with inherent challenges, it also came with multiple gifts. Check out the new series when Shining Vale premieres on STARZ on Sunday, March 6th.

"It was really challenging, in a good way, and there were versions of Rosemary, because Rosemary is ... There is a historical Rosemary that actually existed as a human in the '50s who lived in that house, and we do get to know her as we go through the series a bit more, and so she's definitely more repressed," Sorvino shared with ComicBook.com of playing various versions of her character. "She's got an innocence that gets thwarted, stomped on. Her husband is rather abusive and controlling and she feels completely invalidated and unheard, unseen and put upon, and she's living a very unhappy existence in her daily life."

She continued, "Then we have Rosemary, the manifestation, the spirit, the muse, whatever you want to call her. Now, this Rosemary is like the other Rosemary's dream of how it would be fantastic to be this empowered, glamorous woman who is the 'hostess with the mostest' and who gets to talk about going to Paris and meeting a strange gentleman and just this fulfillment of all these desires, and she's the one who reaches out to Pat, Courteney Cox's character, the slightly unsatisfied writer trying to get her mojo back and rebuild her marriage after a peccadillo in New York and then moving to the country to try and fix things and they move into this haunted house and I'm what haunts it."

Shining Vale is a horror-comedy about a dysfunctional family that moves from the city to a small town into a house in which terrible atrocities have taken place. But no one seems to notice except for Pat, who's convinced she's either depressed or possessed -- turns out, the symptoms are exactly the same. Patricia "Pat" Phelps (Courteney Cox) is a former "wild child" who rose to fame by writing a raunchy, drug-and-alcohol-soaked women's empowerment novel (a.k.a. lady porn). Fast forward 17 years later, Pat is clean and sober but totally unfulfilled. She still hasn't written her second novel, she can't remember the last time she had sex with her husband (Greg Kinnear), and her teenage kids are at that stage where they want you dead. She was a faithful wife until her one slip-up: she had a torrid affair with the hot, young handyman who came over to fix the sink while Terry was at work. In a last-ditch effort to save their marriage, she and Terry cash in all their savings and move the family from the "crazy" of the city to a large, old house in the suburbs that has a storied past of its own. Everyone has their demons, but for Pat Phelps, they may be real.

Proving just how compelling Sorvino is as Rosemary, the figure initially had a much smaller role in the overall narrative, only for Sorvino's performance to earn her a much more significant presence over the course of the rest of the season.

"I always thought she was going to be an important part of the series because of the way that [producer] Jeff Astrof talked to me about her, so I do realize that originally, I guess, their concept was she was going to be a lot more minimal, but when I spoke to Jeff, he had these visions for her and what she represented in terms of also the mental health aspect of a woman hitting a certain period in her life," Sorvino pointed out. "So I always thought she would have some importance, so I was very glad to see that it did" 

She added, "But also, Jeff would do things for me, like I would be like, 'Oh, you know, in these '50s movies, they'd break into dance or song or whatever and I love singing and dancing. And he was like, 'I'll write you a dance number.' So he wrote me and Courteney and Greg, all in one episode, we all dance and it was fantastic and it's minimal, it's short, but I literally got to have an homage to the Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly dance with the mop or the coat rack. Like, it was joyful, those kind of things were just joyful to me that they would be like, 'Oh, you want to do that? Let's bring that in. Let's paint with that color on the palette.'" 

Shining Vale premieres on STARZ on Sunday, March 6th.

Are you looking forward to the new series? Let us know in the comments below or contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter to talk all things Star Wars and horror!