Two-time Oscar-winning actress Hilary Swank stars in the new ABC series “Alaska Daily” as a celebrated reporter whose career takes a turn, landing her in Alaska. What she finds is a string of murdered indigenous women whose deaths have largely been ignored by local authorities. Hilary Swank joined Lisa McRee on “LA Times Today” to discuss the show and other upcoming projects.
Swank said that spotlighting the “harrowing” problem of indigenous women going missing and being forgotten drew her to “Alaska Daily.”
“It’s happening in all of North America... How is it that it’s 2022 and this is happening? These women go missing, they get murdered, and no one looks into it. It’s like they don’t even matter. This is happening to mothers. It’s happening to sisters. It’s happening to daughters... It’s hard enough to lose someone and not know what happened, but then that no one cares to do anything about it. There’s no words. Doing this show, being able to shine a brighter light on it and to continue to start a conversation, to continue a conversation and to hopefully get people in there to do something about it,” Swank said.
The series also touches on subjects like animosity toward the press, gentrification, and political division. Swank talked about how television provided the freedom of space to explore all those themes.
“I love movies because I like walking in different people’s shoes and seeing through their eyes. It breaks open my blinders of how I see the world. But really getting to dive into all these different topics is wonderful. And to dig deeper into them. And like I said, get into the gradations and the minutia of those storylines, rather than just the big paint stroke,” she shared.
Vancouver, Canada often steps in as Alaska on the show, but the crew does shoot some exteriors in Alaska. Swank shared how she hid her pregnancy on those location shoots.
“My crew didn’t know. My cast mates didn’t know. I was really trying to hide the morning sickness as best as I could,” she said. “Obviously, I was starting to grow because I have twins. So, I was growing bigger than just one. At one point, like the week before I shared with everyone, I had to cut my pants open in the back!”
Swank also has two other projects coming out soon, “Ordinary Angels” and “Mother’s Milk.”
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