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Twilight alumna Rachelle Lefevre has been tapped as the female lead in the NBC drama pilot The Crossing. Written by Josh Brand, it is set in a Missouri town during the post-Civil War Reconstruction era and centers on Jason, a Civil War soldier who crosses the country and settles into a complicated town where he is welcomed as its savior. Lefevre will play Anna, a war widow in the town who watched helplessly as Union soldiers burned her husband and two little boys alive in their barn. Now living with her five-year-old daughter, Anna is smitten with Jason at first meeting and embarks on a torrid affair with the troubled outsider. For Lefevre, the casting is in second position to ABC’s midseason medical drama Off the Map. Lefevre, repped by Gersh and Pearl Hanan Management, most recently co-starred in the features Barney’s Version and Casino Jack.
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good for her! she got screwed by the Twilight people and she’s a wonderful actress.
Althought Twilight is anethema to me, I actually think Rachelle Lefevre is kind of cool and this pilot sounds shockingly interesting, especially for NBC. As it would require the viewer to have even a passing familiarity with basic American history, though, I presume it will not be going to series. NBC seems to have a number of interesting pilots, so at least they’re trying to offer something to a viewer like me who isn’t quasi-braindead.
So, I guess this means if it’s picked up, her character is dying in ‘Off The Map.’
wait, so what does this mean? OTH is getting cancelled for sure? they’re killing her off (her character does have a heart condition)? or that she’ll join/do this only if OTM gets cancelled?
woops, i meant OTM instead of OTH.
Second position means that if/when Off the Map gets renewed, The Crossing will have to recast the part because she’ll be staying on Off the Map. While second position issues do indicate that the show that’s in first position is at the least on the bubble regarding renewal, it doesn’t mean that any given first-position show is for sure going to get canceled. IIRC, at least one actor on Dawson’s Creek had to pull out of a role when that show was unexpectedly renewed for its last season. What *is* for sure is when a situation like this occurs is that the given network truly isn’t sure what it wants to do with a given show and in that context, it helps to remember that renewing a bubble show is far from uncommon and could even happen depending on issues not directly related to ratings.
LeFevre’s situation is interesting. IMO as radiant as she is (she was also great as a paralegal in last year’s shortlived Grey’s-in-a-Law-Office series The Deep End), they’ve had a hard time integrating her character, the nearly tragic Ryan, into the show. Her time was so brief in the pilot that it appears to me that her character was added long after the episode was filmed, with her two scenes likely filmed and added to the episode during the shoots for the second episode. Thus, Ryan doesn’t really read as being one of the core audience-point-of-view newbie-doctor characters alongside Dhavernas, Gilford and Gummer. Consequently, her leaving so new a show wouldn’t kill it. Thus, I have the feeling that if whether or not Map gets renewed comes down to budget issues, LeFevre could be released to join this new show.
Moreover, LeFevre is clearly a rising star and Shonda could simply be doing her a solid by allowing her to go for what, after all, is *the* starring role in that pilot. Which, as a period piece has a FAR-harder-to-sell premise than a modern medical show set in a South American jungle. OTOH, if we suddenly heard that the show’s higher-profile, leady-er leads Caroline Dhavernas and/or Zach Gilford and/or Mamie Gummer were signed to other pilots, then I’d say that the show’s dead.
On the OTHER other hand, it appears that at least some of the decline in Map’s ratings two weeks ago was due to sampling of the Criminal Minds spin-off, which resulted in some of those samplers returning to Map last week. So I’d say that Map isn’t anywhere near dead yet. Seriously injured, for sure (I mean, it airs opposite L&O: SVU, after all), but still alive and, moreover, ABC needs to stick with *something* in this 10pm Wednesday night timeslot that has been a bit of a black hole for the net for most of the past twenty-to-twenty-five years. If not a creatively solid new show like Off the Map in that timeslot, what will ABC *ever* stick with there?
Of course Off the Map is dead, just look at the numbers.
the casting is fine, but i don’t think the show is the right direction for NBC. Sounds like it would be a better fit with a premium cable channel where you can have smaller audiences.
Congratulations to Rachelle. She is an amazing actress.
A Twilight alum in a new TV show? Sounds like must-miss TV to me!
Off the Map is so unbearably awful, unfocused, stagey, and politically correct — ack! Such a shame wasting the true talent that’s on the show and what could be a decent premise if it hadn’t gone the route of the sucking chest wound in every episode.
I hope she moves on to something better + so do Gilford, Gummer, etc.
Rachelle is a nice person and very talented. Unfortunately she has a history of losing projects because of her hard-nosed management team who push harder than they should. It cost her the Twilight series and at least one other movie project which is now why she is relegated to television. So I wish her well, but sure wish she’d get a new manager.
I love OTM…it has given me something to look forward to in the middle of the week! All of the episodes have been great so far and I sincerely hope it does not get canceled!
You know who would be a great male lead for ‘The Crossing’ Joshua Holloway.
Well not Josh Holloway but it seems they got Martin Henderson and that’s good enough for me.
I guess I’ll just transfer my Ben/Ryan shipping to this show.