Genre: Movies > Thriller

Actress Carla Gugino, who plays Sally Jupiter aka the original Silk Spectre, in Watchmen, talks about her role and the role of her daughter Silk Spectre II in the film.

"She (Sally Jupiter) wanted to fight crime. She wanted to do that for the good, but also for the attention," analyzes Gugino. "She wanted to be in the limelight and she wanted to use her looks in order to do that. Ultimately she ages and she has a daughter Lorrie, and she tries to hoist her dreams upon her. I think there's a lot of the element of living through her daughter, which is a classic mother-daughter dynamic."

 

The world that Allan Moore and Dave Gibbons created in Watchmen, was a Manhattan which was this 1980's, dark, underbelly side of things, says Carla. "It was about people's desire to do the right thing, but also what comes along with that kind of altruism. There's always a darkness to it, and that's what's interesting to me - that nothing is black and white, everything is gray. You see that in all the characters," says the actress.

 

It was challenging playing Sally Jupiter, says Carla. "It has been really great to establish just that kind of connection, because even if there is a lot of tension in our relationship, there is no doubt there is no one Sally loves more than her daughter, even though she has been an overbearing mother and she's got a lot of qualities that are not the most generous, but at the end of the day she would give her life for her daughter in a second," she says.

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Movie Story

Watchmen rolls back the years to 1985, where an alternate America is attuned to superheroes saving the day, and the tension between USA and the Soviet Union still threatens to destroy the world.

When masked vigilante Rorschach's former colleague is murdered, he reconnects with his former crime-fighting team of superheroes, and uncovers a disturbing conspiracy which threatens to bring forth a catastrophic future.  

Based on the well known graphic novel, Watchmen is directed by Zack Snyder (of 300 fame). The cast playing the superheroes includes such names as Malin Akerman as Laurie Juspeczyk, Billy Crudup as Jon Osterman, Matthew Goode as Adrian Veidt, Jackie Earle Haley as Walter Kovacs, Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Edward Blake and Patrick Wilson as Dan Dreiberg.

 

Incidentally, Watchmen was originally published by DC comics as a 12-comic book series between 1986 and 1987, before subsequently being collected into a trade paperback. It is the only graphic novel to win the prestigious Hugo Award and to be named among Time magazine's 100 Best English Language Novels from 1923.

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