The Pit was able to catch up with actress Laura Kriss to speak with her about the new web series, “Lagged Out.” Kriss, who plays Amy Freeman, is one of the stars in the series about a group of video game ‘addicts’ and their quest to become professional gamers.
The series debuted on February 28 and recently released the ninth episode of the season. It is a BrokenLink.com production.
Laura Kriss: I started acting officially when I was 14 when me and a bunch of my friends from the theatre department in high school decided to get together for fun and shoot shorts and enter them into online competitions. It was always just for fun or, rather, that’s why I did it. I never limit myself in what I will do with acting, but I’m mostly limited to film because I prefer it to stage acting.
LK: Lagged Out is a story about a wanna be pro gamer who, after getting deported from Korea where she did commentary on pro gaming tournaments, decides to come back to the States and try her hand at the professional gaming world, with a crew of potentially pro level gamers in tow. It came to be when our director, who has carried a following of over two million independent readers for his publications in websites like Cracke, and College Humor, decided to put his talents of writing and knowledge of the “nerd world” to use and create a series that reaches his peers.
LK: What I find amazing about the final cut is how our chemistry shines through. All our characters, of course, entail bits of our actual personalities. Our character’s interactions work as well as they do because of how all us actors have built up our relationships and I haven’t seen every episode filmed, so when I watch each scene for the first time, I find it a genuine pleasure to witness that experience.
LK: I can tell you that every day is an adventure with the actors. When we’re all together it’s so difficult to finish an episode because we all have so much fun that we can lose focus. Some of the characters, we have so many so I’ll just cover the leads: Joseph Seibert is the king of improv and one of the funniest people I’ve ever known. There never has been a character more influenced by the actor, but that’s him. Dialogue has essentially stopped being written for him because he ends up improving most of it anyway and it comes out funnier than we all could’ve expected. Grady Chambless, who plays Hart Symanski, has such quick wit and can keep up with anyone if he’s not leading already. Vivian Rackover, who’s so delightful and lights up the set, has a feisty personality and has a damn sharp tongue with intelligence to back it up. This woman can hold her own.
Vivian is so well known for having issues with doors. I can tell you right now, any scene involving her and a door had issues. Whether she couldn’t open it, couldn’t close it or had a nasty habit of opening it up into people. It’s always anticipated when she’s on set, but no less funny every time! Or one time that took us nearly 20 takes because Joe (who plays Dave) couldn’t remember to use the word identical when describing Viv’s Character, Nicole, and would replace it with anything else.. the most notable word being incendiary.. INCENDIARY! Which resulted in an eruption of laughter every time we approached the line from there on out. Or the time my character was supposed to chug a beer down.. the specific beverage was particularly foamy and when I flipped the bottle too quickly it foamed out of my mouth like a volcano and I sprayed the floor and fellow cast members while choking on it. The time Vivianchallenged our Director, Anthony Jurado to a Halo match because she thought she was pretty good and Jurado spent the good part of an hour, with his character, hopping around her (yes, hopping) and killing her character with the gun butt rather than shooting at her, while she was unloading bullets directly at him. She failed so miserably.
Actress Laura Kriss (Photo by Damien Dennis)
