Skylines Star Lindsey Morgan Praises Creative Control in the Franchise

Lindsey Morgan, just months removed from the end of her long stint on The 100, appeared this week in the new direct-to-streaming release Skylines. The third installment in a trilogy that started with 2010’s critically-panned Skyline, the movie has earned solid reviews as it follows Morgan’s Rose, originally born in 2017’s Beyond Skyline, through a harrowing and emotionally draining trip into cosmic wars and family drama. Torn between two father figures — played by Frank Grillo, who plays against type as the one with a heart of gold, and Alexander Siddig, who is not as great a father figure — she has to learn her place in a battle bigger than herself.

The end result is part action movie, part character sketch, not unlike what Morgan did for all that time on The 100. But one of the things she liked the best was the creative freedom for the movie to blaze its own path in spite of technically having another two movies in the same shared space.

“I’ll be honest, I don’t feel very connected to the other films,” Morgan told ComicBook.com. “It’s probably because my character was born literally in the second one, midway through, and this is kind of her fledgling journey…and yeah, I feel connected to her story in Beyond Skyline, but again, it was midway through, and then we’d see the future with her. I will say it was really nice working on the franchise because we had so much freedom. I mean, I love all the studios and networks I get to work with, but they do have a lot of say in our projects, and they do have a lot of say in what they want to see. And they’re paying for it, so let them have that. What was interesting with Skylines is we got a lot of freedom, and we got a lot of room to play and just make something that we thought was cool.”

Part of that “cool” was working with filmmaker Liam O’Donnell to craft a very specific vision for her character — one that was able to juggle her familiy drama and the weapon-wielding, alien-fighting destiny she has had since birth.

“The thing with Rose is she’s quite complex,” Morgan explained. “Me and Liam would be going back and forth about [her origin] all the time. And halfway through the movie, Liam got this idea that the whole time when I was losing power, it was the Matriarch speaking to me, and trying to pull me back in. So that whole backstory didn’t even exist until we were halfway done. So I had layered a backstory for Rose that rang true to me and was creatively interesting to me. And a lot of it was her time working for the government, or under the government rein, essentially like a ward of the state, of the country. And I’m just imagining if the Colonel, played by Alexander Siddig, was this very dysfunctional father figure in my life that I wanted to make proud, but then also felt very restrained by.”

Skylines will be available in select Theaters, Drive-ins, on Demand and Digital December 18th.