At the end of this season’s first episode of the FX biker drama “Sons of Anarchy,” Gemma Teller Morrow, the biker gang matriarch played by Katey Sagal, was knocked out, handcuffed to a fence, and raped by a masked white supremacist played by punk rock firebrand Henry Rollins.The scene was graphic, and hard-to-watch. Knowing that the showrunner responsible for that scene was Sagal’s third husband, “Anarchy” creator Kurt Sutter, makes it more powerful — and peculiar. Even so, Sutter has given his veteran actress wife the most challenging role of her career.
“I’ve had to do a few things where I had terminal illnesses, and one time I played a part where I lost a child,” says Sagal, 55. “That was difficult, but this was right up there.”
Sagal says that the shocking plot twist was already set by the time she learned of it.
“We don’t have a lot of conversation about, what would you think if we did this,” she says. “He’s very clear about where he wants to take things. He told me, this is what’s going to happen, and I just said ‘OK.’ As husband and wife, we’re one way, and the creative process is another. It’s not as collaborative as, what should we make for dinner, or, who’s driving the kids to school. It’s not that kind of conversation.”
In filming the disturbing scene, Sagal welcomed the chance to bring the tough-as-nails biker mama — who choked her son’s ex-wife half to death last season while the woman was confined to a hospital bed — in new directions.
“I looked at it as an opportunity to take a character and turn it upside down,” she says. “Because what this does to someone like Gemma is, it brings about a vulnerability. It strips her down. This is a person who runs on defenses — who’s very guarded, protected, and in control. So to give her a situation where she’s totally out of control, that’s interesting to play.”
While Sagal was helped along by detailed walk-throughs of the set and the scene’s physicality — being bound overhead by handcuffs can certainly scare the bejesus out of an actor — she also called upon rough events from her past to place her in the correct frame of mind.
“I use it all,” she says. “I’ve never been in that situation, but I’ve definitely been in others that have scared me to death, or situations that were physically harmful. So I relied on some of that experience to make an experience that’s completely unreal to me real.
WATCH NOW:
