PASADENA, CA -- Rarely has such a cute and harmless looking person been as evil and deadly as Emma Hill on Fox's The Following, which returns Sunday night at a special time, following the conclusion of the NFC Conference Championship football game (approximately 10:30 p.m. ET).
Valorie Curry, with a slight build, pixie haircut and a heart-shaped face, cut quite a swath, literally, through the show's first season, which ended with murderous Svengali Joe Carroll getting burnt to a crisp in a huge gasoline explosion.
Sunday, after a quick resolution of last season's cliffhanger, everyone takes a fictional year's hiatus, and when we return, Kevin Bacon's Ryan Hardy has sobered up and moved away from pursuing the perpetrators of grim murder. But, wouldn't you know, here comes more grim -- really grim -- murder, and just when Ryan thought he was out, he pulls himself back in.
Emma slipped away from last year's carnage, and she's back, too, though maybe not exactly where you'd expect to find her. She'll be a key character all year.
Emma is the big breakthrough role for Curry, a Southern Californian 10 years out of high school with a theater degree from California State, Fullerton. She had a small part as a vampire in The Twilight Saga finale and, prior to that, in a few guest episodes of Veronica Mars.
Curry relishes Emma's personality contradictions. She told writers at the Television Critics Association Press Tour last week, "I think people are compelled to watch and love to hate her because she undermines their expectations so much. ... She looks so sweet. She looks so innocent. She can behave that way and convince you that she is that -- and turn on a dime ... which is what makes her so fun to play."
Not as much fun, perhaps, as Curry's most unusual role, as Kara, a cyborg who comes to life in a proto-type short developed by a computer game company. Kara represents a new generation of emotionally fleshed-out game characters.
The short of the same name, Kara begins with Kara/Curry's head being mounted on a frame as she is being built as robot. It's very powerful.
"It was just a random audition," she told me in an interview. (Actually, she beat out more than 100 actors for the role.) "It was a wonderful blending of theater, vocal and body work with special effects. There were 64 cameras."
The short caused quite a sensation in the gaming world. Sony even released a "making of" video.
Curry got to go to Paris for the trail-blazing job. "Everything about it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience."
Not that it upped her PlayStation game. Her husband, Joe Colarco, whom she met in college, is an adept gamer, but, she said, "I've never tried to play that much. I'm always walking into walls."