Allison Mack on How Smallville Prepared Her To Get Lost in Oz

07/31/2017 10:18 pm EDT

Allison Mack is best known as Chloe Sullivan, a smart, beautiful hacker who helped Clark Kent actualize his destiny as Superman during ten years on Smallville. Now, she's playing Evelyn Gale -- another relatively new character created to help shape the destiny of one of American fiction's most iconic figures.

Evelyn is the mother of Dorothy Gale, of The Wizard of Oz fame, and in Amazon's new series Lost in Oz, it's Evelyn rather than Dorothy who was the first traveler to Oz. Like Chloe, Evelyn did not exist in the source material, allowing Mack to step into the universe of a long-established mythology and still bring a fresh perspective to it.

"I think anytime you're playing something that's either true-to-life or something that's existed for a long period of time, there's a lot of responsibility but also a lot of privilege in that because it's just a minefield of goodies and ideas and backstory and things that other people other people have laid out and you're actualizing," Mack told ComicBook.com. "So it feels like you're being indoctrinated into this really cool club with people who have been creating these stories about these great characters for such a long time. I think we always had that feeling on Smallville, that we're honoring something that has really influenced the culture and society for a long time. And Lost in Oz has that same feeling as well."

In Lost in Oz, 12-year-old Dorothy Gale discovers her mother's magical travel journal hidden beneath the floorboards of their Kansas home. The book triggers a tornado, which rips her house from its foundation and transports Dorothy and her dog, Toto, to Emerald City, a bustling, modern, metropolis. In order to get home, Dorothy learns she must acquire every element on Oz's "periodic table of magic" – while the city faces the worst magic drought in eons! Along the way, Dorothy and Toto meet unlikely allies in West, Ojo, Reigh the Lion, Scarecrow, and Glinda the Good, who are each eager to help, but struggling with their own problems. Together, they navigate the magical landscape of Oz while undergoing their own unique journeys of self-discovery.

As Evelyn, Mack gets to play a smart, badass female role model without all the punching and kicking that the "strong female character" archetype tends to lend itself to. In that way, she is similar to Chloe, and Mack said that she couldn't be happier to take on that sort of part.

Lost in Oz, the highly-anticipated animated kid series for children ages 6-11, is scheduled to premiere August 4 on Prime Video in the US and UK. The new series, which expands on the multiple Emmy Award-winning Amazon Original special, Lost in Oz: Extended Adventure, is a magical, modern adaptation of the beloved Oz books from L. Frank Baum for today's generation of families.

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