By Stacey Harrison
As Gemma Teller, the tough-as-nails matriarch of a California biker gang, Katey Sagal makes you all but forget the years she spent on the couch, eating Bon Bons and emasculating Al Bundy on Married With Children. Now in her second season on FX’s Sons of Anarchy, Sagal is in the midst of a gut-wrenching emotional arc. In the season’s first episode, she was abducted and gang-raped by members of the white separatist group looking to run SAMCRO out of town. But instead of telling anyone, and letting the attack have its desired effect of pushing the club into mindless revenge, she kept quiet. All the while, she’s watched tensions between her son, Jax (Charlie Hunnam), and husband, Clay (Ron Perlman) nearly destroy the club from within.
Sagal talked with reporters recently about her character’s trials and tribulations, and the show’s meteoric rise in the ratings this season:
On whom Gemma would side with between Clay and Jax: “I think it’s a tough question. Her allegiance is to everybody. I mean, you know, what she’s desperately fighting for, in my opinion, is to protect the whole system. This is her life, the whole thing. In my backstory of Gemma, she has nowhere else that she’s come from. I mean, where she’s come from, she doesn’t want to go back to, so her loyalty is to the entire situation. I would imagine if she really had to choose, oh, gosh. I really don’t know. I would say her son. That’s what I would say, but you never know with her.”
On filming the rape scene: “Those scenes are done very by the book and very choreographed, and it was a very safe environment. We had been to the space a couple of days before we actually shot the scene, so we could kind of take it in and realize where we were going to be. And the actual shooting of the scene probably didn’t take more than two, three hours. Shaking it off was actually a process though the next three or four episodes are pretty intense in terms of dealing with it, and so it kind of was hanging around. I mean, it hung around for most of the season with Gemma, but the really super dark, emotional visits I had to take, I would say, it was a good month. Not that I was walking around with it every moment of the day. I have three kids at home, but it was definitely a dark experience.”
On Gemma’s decision to remain silent about her rape: “I’m not sure that it’s the way anybody would deal with the situation. Her choice to not speak up and not tell her family what has happened to her, she’s doing it for a higher purpose in her mind, which is to protect them because she knows who her family is, and she knows that this is a violent world, and that they would protect her. They would go to any lengths to protect her, so she has decided to keep quiet. I don’t know that that is the message that women should pick up. I’m not sure that that would be the proper way to handle that situation for anybody really, but for Gemma, and in this world, it is, so that’s the storytelling going on. That’s the story that we’re telling. Any other woman in that situation, I would hope that they would go talk about it immediately.”
On the truth behind the death of Jax’s father: “It comes up in bits for this second season. I have a feeling that through the arch of the series, you will find out more about that history and that backstory.”
On the show’s rise in the ratings this season: “Family drama with really interesting, intricate family relationships — I think that that’s one of the draws. I think that it’s a world that people haven’t seen before. I think the quality of the storytelling is really high. I think the cast is really great. To me, it makes perfect sense that now that people have sort of defined it and word-of-mouth has spread that if you show up for it, you’re going to have a good experience. It’s not like, you know, somebody was lying to you when they say it’s a good show. I think that it’s been really exciting to watch, and it’s rare that it happens, so it’s good. It’s nice.”
