Strike Back's Alin Sumarwata talks benefits of knowing multiple languages
Australian actress Alin Sumarwata often jokes about the questions she gets asked about her heritage during auditions, but her multiple language proficiencies helped when she had to learn to speak some Arabic for her latest role on Cinemax’s Strike Back.
“I have used Indonesian (Bahasa), but I haven’t spoken Farsi in film and TV yet… in the show (Strike Back) I speak Arabic… People tend to think Persian and Arabic are the same, but they are very very different, very different sounding,” the actress said in a phone interview from London.
“I guess having the different language skills makes it easier to pick up other languages,” Sumarwata said. She had a three-year stint with long-running Australian soap opera Neighbours, as well as a role on Australian crime drama East West 101.
“I always joke about this. People will ask me, in auditions, maybe where I’m from, and I always say ‘I’m sorry, I’ve never really played those characters (of Iranian descent),” she said.
Sumarwata’s character, Lance Corporal Gracie Novin, is an Australiam Army Special Operations Command soldier, assigned to the revamped Section 20, and also speaks Russian in the show.
“Maybe because I’ve got different sounds in the back of my head, so with other languages it kinda makes it easier,” Sumarwata said, adding that she had yet to encounter a role where her background gave her an advantage.
“Indirectly, there’s always that thing about language flexibility. Maybe cultural flexibility, that you’re more empathetic or sympathetic to other cultures because I’ve been exposed to quite a few,” said the Tehran-born actress, who moved with her family to Australia when she was a child.
She and co-stars Daniel MacPherson, Warren Brown and Roxanne McKee pick up the Strike Back mantle from Philip Winchester and Sullivan Stapleton, who themselves took over from Richard Armitage (Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit), and Andrew Lincoln (Rick Grimes in The Walking Dead) from the very first six-episode season of Strike Back.
Sumarwata even complimented her Strike Back seniors Winchester and Stapleton, calling them “really generous and amazing guys”.
“We got the chance to meet Sully (Stapleton) who came to the set for a visit very early on, and I’ve spoken to Phil over the phone… for them they said that ‘there was nothing like this job, enjoy the ride, and you’ll never forget it, and there will be nothing like it’,” she said.
“(They said) ‘We wish we could come back.’ Those were their words. And for us to hear that and to have their blessing and encouragement… we felt really honoured by that and truly enamoured by it.”
New episodes of STRIKE BACK Season 5 premiere at the same time as in the US every Saturday at 11am with a same day encore at 10pm, exclusively on CINEMAX (StarHub TV Ch 611). The series will be streaming on HBO GO and will also be available on HBO On Demand (StarHub TV Ch 602).
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