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Today’s TV Addict Top 5: Questions with LAST RESORT Star Daisy Betts

In an attempt to convince you to carve out a little time for LAST RESORT — ABC’s ambitious new action adventure that is unlike anything else on television right now — theTVaddict.com caught up with series star Daisy Betts. Betts, an Australian native, plays Lt. Grace Shepard, one of the first wave of female officers to serve on a US submarine and was only too happy to take some time out of her busy shooting schedule to fill fans in on what life is like as one of the US Colorado’s few female officers, shooting those adrenaline-fuelled action sequences and what challenges are in store for her character moving forward.

1 Your character took quite a literal beating two episodes ago during a standoff with some Russian insurgents. What was it like shooting such an action intensive scene? Daisy Betts: It was hard work! But I try and kind of do as much of it as I can, sprinting up hills, bringing my gun training into practice. At one point the stunt guy said to me, “That was really good, you’re spot on, that’s exactly how you shoot a gun, but we need you to bring that gun down, because we can’t see your face on camera.” And I”m like, “Hey… I’m trying to do this for real!” So I have a lot of fun doing that stuff and a couple of the people in the crew refer to me as their favorite action hero. It’s been fun.

2 Did you talk to many female officers in preparation for this role? Yeah I definitely did. I’ve talked to a handful of women but obviously no one who is in this exact situation. And not just this situation, but this exact rank on a submarine because this doesn’t exist. This is something that I think they’re working on, but a submarine is really really close quarters and they’d have to rearrange the whole thing just to have a women’s rack. From what I understand, they have now have one on one sub to allow women on board, but it’s a slow process and something that ex-submariners have told me “I don’t know how that would work.” The corridors are very narrow, there’s no privacy at all, so there are a lot of interesting issues that arise when having women on submarines.

3 What will be some of the challenges Grace faces moving forward? Every week is something huge and I think that’s what so exciting about the show, it never settles down. The stakes are too high with people from all over the world trying to get to them, kill them, steal the sub, and get a piece of what’s going on in the island. But Grace has a lot of good stuff coming up. Particularly in the October 25th episode called “Skeleton Crew” where she’s basically left in charge of a skeleton crew and gets to show why she’s so capable, why she’s in the position she’s in and gets a lot of respect for it.

4 Much to the chagrin of this OC fan, it would appear that Autumn Reeser’s character won’t be finding her way to the island anytime soon. That being said, can we expect other interactions between Grace and the other women on the island? Yes, absolutely. And I think that’s one of the great things about our show, on a seemingly male subject of the military it’s not at all about that. Five of the main players are women, all really strong woman who are standing up for what they believe in. Grace has most of her interactions with Sophie — Camille De Pazzis’ characters in the NATO listening post — and they stand for very different things. Essentially they want everyone to be safe but Grace is coming from a military background while Sophie is from a peacekeeping one. As for Tani — played by Dichen Lachman — they come face-to-face in a future episode because Grace feels, woman-to-woman, that she has to warn Tani about certain things and it’s a really great interaction.

5 And finally, with Grace spending so much time surrounded by sweaty men in tank-tops… and LAST RESORT sharing a night with both GREY’S ANATOMY and SCANDAL… is there any chance at all that Grace might find a little time for love!? There could be! She’s definitely pretty occupied at the moment, but she’s a person who has needs and we’ll see how far she can actually push it until until she’s going to crack in one direction or another. But you’re right and I think… on to something there.

LAST RESORT airs Thursdays at 8PM on ABC (GlobalTV in Canada).