Morena Baccarin — already a part of one of TV’s very best dramas, Homeland — is keeping quite busy during her hiatus from the Showtime hit. Tonight at 10/9, she’s reprising her role of mischievous matchmaker Erica Flynn on CBS’ The Mentalist, and then on March 4 she’ll pay a visit to The Good Wife to accuse Dylan Baker’s Colin Sweeney of, well, the impossible. And that’s not to mention the film she’s shooting next month, starring opposite director Michael Rosenbaum (Smallville).

TVLine spoke with the brunette stunner about her “intense” reunion with Patrick Jane and facing off against Lockhart Gardner, as well as tried to secure some top-secret Homeland Season 2 intel.

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TVLINE posted a new interview with Morena about Homeland. Spoilers!

It’s rare that a nightmare is capped by a (seemingly) happy ending, and yet that twist of fate was dealt Jessica Brody on Showtime’s Homeland(airing Sundays at 10/9c).

Having been led to presume that her husband Nicholas (played by Damian Lewis) was killed in Iraq eight years ago, Jessica – and the world – learned that the U.S. Marine sergeant in fact was alive, and had been held prisoner all this time. And while CIA analyst Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) suspects that this war hero was “turned” during captivity and now is part of a terror plot to be exacted on American soil, Sgt. Brody suspects that his wife found comfort in widowhood with his colleague and best friend, Mike (Diego Klattenhoff).

This Sunday, the men in Jessica’s life have their most intense war of words yet. Morena Baccarin, who shines as Brody’s conflicted bride, spoke with TVLine about how she went from playing an out-of-this-world queen V to the grounded, very real Jessica. (more…)

By Jolie Lash

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. –

Morena Baccarin is leaving those human-skinned aliens of “V” behind and heading to “Homeland” on Showtime this October.

“It’s nice to be human again and play emotions and to have a lot going on emotionally,” Morena told Access Hollywood after Showtime’s “Homeland” panel at the Television Critics Association Summer Session 2011 in Beverly Hills on Thursday.

In “Homeland,” Morena stars as Jessica Brody, wife to Scott Brody (Damian Lewis), a military man who is rescued after being an Al Qaida prisoner of war for eight years, long after everyone thought he had been killed, and after her character has moved on with a new lover.

“It gets very intense,” Morena said of her upcoming story line, which finds her husband starting out unaware of her new relationship. “And you can’t blame her – [her husband Scott] was gone for eight years and at a certain point you have to assume he’s dead. And just as she was putting that behind her, he comes home, so it’s just a really impossible situation for everybody and it gets really intense.”

While her short, Audrey Hepburn-esque crop was a trademark of her “V” character, alien leader Anna, Morena has a softer, chin-length ‘do for “Homeland” thanks to a wig, and the actress confirmed she’s ready to leave her short haircut behind in her own life.

“I’m growing it out, yeah,” she said. “I’m just ready for a change.”

“This woman is a very different woman from Anna and I felt it was very important for me to play this character to morph into something else and the hair was a part of that,” Morena added.

The role also sees the actress playing a mother of two children whose lives are rocked when their presumed-dead father comes home.

“I did have a daughter on ‘V,’ even though [in real life] she was five years younger than I was — and a lot of incubated babies. It’s really fun, it’s very grounding, it’s different,” Morena said of playing a military wife and mother. “I don’t have kids of my own, but I think any woman can imagine having children. It’s really nice… It’s very real and it’s very grounded in the home stories of these characters. I think that adds to the heartbreak aspect of this man being gone for eight years.”

The show also reunites Morena with Claire Danes (who plays CIA agent Carrie Anderson), her former junior high classmate.

“We were in the same homeroom and we were together for about a year, a year in a half,” she said.

As for what she remembers about a pre-teen Claire?

“I remember she had orange hair or pink hair at one point after she’d got back from doing [the] ‘My So Called Life’ pilot and [we] were just [recently] bonding over the fact that we had the same bully in junior high,” she laughed.

“Homeland” premieres on Showtime on Sunday October 2 at 10 PM ET/PT following the return of “Dexter.”

Copyright 2011 by NBC Universal, Inc. All rights reserved.

SOURCE: Access Hollywood

On the sci-fi drama V, actress Morena Baccarin plays Anna, the beautiful leader of the Visitors and a Queen born to rule the advanced alien species whose spaceships have arrived on Earth and positioned themselves over 29 cities around the world. To the people of Earth, she appears to be charming and peaceful, as she offers gifts and invites humans to live on her ships under the guise of friendship, but in reality, Anna is cruel and cunning, ruling the Visitors with an iron fist and manipulating humanity in horrifying and unpredictable ways. No one knows her true intentions on Earth – not the Fifth Column resistence, and not even her daughter, Lisa (Laura Vandervoort) – which makes her all the more dangerous.

While at the party to celebrate the ABC portion of the Television Critics Association Winter Press Tour, Morena Baccarin talked about working with original V star Jane Badler this season, the continuing changes in her character, the addition of Marc Singer to the cast and the love she still receives from fans of Joss Whedon’s Firefly, on which she played Inara Serra. Check out what she had to say after the jump: (more…)

When V returns to ABC Tuesday (9 p.m. ET), Morena Baccarin as Anna, leader of the Visitors, will continue to be up to no good.

“In the first episode of the new season, you see what the red sky is and what my plans are with that,” she says. “By the second episode you’ll see a full lizard body—not mine,” she hastens to add, “but you will see some weird Anna body parts, other-worldly things.”

Jane Badler, who played the alien leader Diana in the original V series in 1983, will be unveiled as Anna’s mother. “We wanted to find someone who Anna might be intimidated by,” Baccarin, 31, says. “That was hard because Anna is such a hard-ass.”

Would Baccarin say the same about herself? “I do have those qualities about me,” she admits. “I’m very strong-willed and determined, but I think I’m a lot nicer than Anna and softer.”

She credits her short hair with helping provide menace. “When I auditioned, I had this haircut,” Baccarin says. “I’d just finished Death in Love. They wanted me to have a certain look that would remind people of a concentration camp.

“I wanted to keep the haircut for Anna, but there was a question from the network about whether it would alienate people. Some people have strong opinions about women with short hair. They find it very masculine and severe. Others think it’s soft and feminine and makes your features stand out. It can be an Audrey Hepburn kind of thing.”

The look works. “Everyone knows that Anna is an alien, so that element of weird is already there,” Baccarin says. “I try to make her as human as possible, and I find that’s actually scary. There’s a cold quality to her, but I play against that and say things with a smile or in a nice way. I want to give mixed messages and confuse people. I’ll say, ‘Go kill that person,’ but I’ll say it nicely, and they’ll go, ‘What did you say?’”

Baccarin was born in Rio de Janeiro but moved to New York with her parents and younger brother when she was six. “My dad was a news editor for a Brazilian news station, and they had offices in New York and London,” she says. “At the time the economy was in terrible shape in Brazil, although it’s booming now. They were worried about us growing up there and what kind of life would we have.”

Baccarin recalls the move being traumatic because she didn’t speak any English. “And it was difficult not being close to my grandmother and my cousins. About a year in, my mother told my father, ‘I’m moving the kids back to Brazil. You stay here, and we’ll figure it out.’ She put us in an American school, and we lived in Brazil for a few more years until I learned to speak a little English.”

Baccarin, who attended the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts (the school made famous in Fame) and then The Juilliard School, wouldn’t mind doing Shakespeare somewhere down the line. Anna almost fits in, if you compare her with Lady Macbeth. “There’s a lot of ambition in there, for sure,” the actress says. “Anna is a larger-than-life character, a very complex character, with big wants and needs. She takes the expression ‘Kill them with kindness’ to a whole new level.”

Copyright © 2010 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

(Source)

Morena Baccarin has promised that viewers will get some answers in the second season of V.

The actress, who plays Anna, told the New York Post that the new episodes have a much quicker pace.

“We really hit our stride in the last few episodes and while season two picks up right where we left off – we’re going 150 miles an hour faster now,” she said.

Baccarin added that fans will start to learn more about the Visitors.

“By episode six, there is a ton revealed about who the V are, what we want, what their plan is and why Tyler is important to it,” she said. “Every episode has a big reveal. Fans are going to be really happy.”

Baccarin also dropped some hints about what viewers should expect from the season, saying: “Everyone’s double-crossing everyone. You’ll never know who to trust. And that makes this year a whole lot of fun.”

The new season of V will premiere on January 4 on ABC.

(Source)