Spotlight on Shoshannah Stern

As a huge fan of the cancelled CBS show, Jericho, I can’t tell you how grateful I was (and still am) to have the opportunity to interview Shoshannah Stern, who played Bonnie Richmond on the show. Shoshannah is not just an actress, but she is the only deaf actress in history to have main roles on 2 prime time television series during the same season (Jericho & Weeds). She has a number of film, television, and theatre credits to her name and this is only the beginning.



How has your life changed since the success of Weeds and Jericho?
I hope I haven't changed that much! My friends and family would totally smack me upside the head. I do get the odd free drink sometimes. I think it's made me hungrier, because even after having these amazing opportunities, there's so much more I want to do. In a weird juxtaposition, it's also made me calmer, because I used to have this huge fear that I was wasting time. I would always feel like I had to go out there and make something happen for myself. Now that I've actually done something, I'm a bit less anxious during down periods. I'm much better at sitting still. I'm still not the greatest, but I'm definitely getting better! It's still an upward battle because of the severe lack of deaf roles, but it is what it is, and I'm just going to keep on doing it.

Tell me about your experience being honored as one of the Seven Fresh Faces in February 2008 at the Sundance Film Festival.
It was actually a bit weird. I didn't really know until two days before I was going who the other six fresh faces would be, and they turned out to not be fresh faces at all! Adventures in Power was my first substantial role in a film, so I was definitely a fresh face. I figured it would be other people who had just made their film debuts too, but when I saw the list, I already knew most of them by name because I'd seen their work so many times before. It was also my first day at Sundance ever, so it was a lot, but I had a great time! I met a lot of interesting people and I was able to enjoy myself and just let the experience sink in.

How did you become part of the pro-Barack Obama web video, “Yes We Can” along with other celebrities including Scarlet Johansson and John Legend?
People have asked me about this pretty often, about whether I auditioned or if my agency was called. This is the first time I've really been involved in anything like this, but I don't think that's how things work if you want to do something political. It's not a role, it's something you believe in, and to do something about that, I guess you have to find other people who believe in the same things as you do. My friend, Sarah Pantera, had opened a restaurant a year and a half ago, and I came in to have dinner. We had a conversation about who we were hoping would replace Bush, and Obama's name came up. She had just started working for the campaign, and she brought me on board the Young Hollywood committee for a fundraiser they were doing for Obama a few months later. Then the "Yes We Can" music video happened, in a matter of days, really.

Did you always intend to apply to Gallaudet University or were there other University options you would have been okay with going to?
I always intended to go to Gallaudet University. I had been mainstreamed through most of elementary school and returned to the California School for the Deaf in the sixth grade and remained there until I graduated from high school. I evolved so much as a person during that time, not just from growing up, but because I was able to learn from my peers, not just from my teachers. When I was mainstreamed, I know this sounds bad, but I was mainly friends with people who didn't mind being friends with the deaf girl. Time spent with my friends consisted mainly of giving sign language lessons and having conversations in sign language. I felt like being deaf was almost my complete identity. When I returned to the deaf school, I was able to become friends with people who I related to on so many different levels. I was able to pursue almost anything I wanted in terms of extracurricular activities and sports, and really figure out what made me tick. That experience was so precious for me that I wanted to elaborate on it by going to Gallaudet. However, by the time I finished my freshman year, I knew that what I truly wanted to do was act, and it wasn't just a childhood fantasy. It took me a while to figure out how I was actually going to do that. In retrospect, I would have loved to go to UCLA, USC, NYU, or even Julliard, so I could be better educated in the arts. At the same time, when I was planning my college experience, I don't think I was quite ready for that jump just yet. I honestly think that things are meant to unfold in the way they do for a reason. So, no regrets.

What would you like to say to the fans who rallied so hard for a second season of Jericho, got it, and then the series was cancelled after that season?
It's so hard with this business, because your success is measured by what's ahead of you. People are always asking the minute you've finished a project, what's next, what's next? It's so easy to get caught up in that line of thinking and feel like, wow, there's nothing coming, so I must really suck. I really hope they don't feel that way. They accomplished something that's never ever happened before. That's amazing, and that will go down in history. I want them to remember that they were responsible for bringing about a huge change, and that the rest was really out of every body's control. The whole thing was totally an absolute victory.

Were you given a heads up that your character, Bonnie was going to die before you were given the script for that specific episode of Jericho? By the way, you kicked butt in that episode!
Haha, thank you! Yes, they told me, right before I went in to shoot the episode before that one. So, it wasn't a lot of notice, but it was really the perfect amount of time to prepare for it. I'm glad I didn't know in the beginning of the season or during my first episode back. I flew in from New York for a meeting and the producers were really eloquent and genuine with their reasons. I saw it as a honor and a great collaboration. I was on a show before where a regular found out he was going to die when he read it in the script for the episode, along with everyone else in the cast and crew. That really sucked, to put it mildly. I don't know how I would have handled it if that had happened to me! I'm very fortunate that wasn't the case and that it went down the way it did.



What was the most memorable moment working on Jericho?
I think it was the season finale of Season One, with all the tanks and the helicopter. That was crazy. It was so huge, and I kept asking myself in my head, wow, is this actually the show I'm on? It was like a feature film and I was kind of walking around in a daze all day. It was so easy to believe we actually were in Jericho and in the middle of a civil war. Our director, Sandy, was actually walking around in personalized fatigues! There are other small moments, but I think that was the most memorable.

Being born deaf and the fourth generation of a deaf family, growing up did you know early on that you were part of a minority in your community or did that grow on you?
Oh, no. I thought the rest of the world was the minority, not me. Everyone in my world was deaf for such a long time, I really thought there was something weird about people who talked with their mouths and not their hands. I'd actually make fun of them, and I remember having moments where I felt like I was so much better than them. Then I started going to the public school in kindergarten, and I found out that I was actually the one that was the minority. So, at five years old I kind of figured out that me, my family, and my friends were the ones that the world actually saw as handicapped. Talk about a huge reality check.

Is it hard getting people to see you as an actor first and deaf second?
Not so much as an actor. I think it's harder as a person sometimes. No matter how much work I get as an actor, I still have to go through the same old things I deal with as a deaf person over and over. I'll miss a script because I didn't hear a knock on the door, oversleep because my alarm didn't vibrate and I didn't hear the people banging on the door. When I'm actually working, people know I'm coming, so they're pretty prepared. Then I have to leave the set and yell at people in the pharmacy who won't give me a pen and a paper to write down my prescription number.

What is it like communicating with everyone on set and in general? Explain to those who are not educated about being deaf.
I try my best to be as self sufficient as possible. I can have one on one conversations with most people. I need an interpreter with me on set at all times, though. It's not like the world just stops when one person is talking and everyone focuses on that person, like I do. There's always so much happening that I can't keep up with. I can't always hear the director, especially because often they're not even in the room where we're actually shooting. It just speeds things up when time is of essence. I have better luck with some people than with others. With some people, I can have endless conversations and get almost everything. With some people, they'll say, "Please pass the salt" and I'll ask them to repeat themselves twenty times and I still won't understand them. There's no real formula to it.

How have you used your celebrity status to help educate people about the deaf community?
Celebrity status? I don't really know if that applies to me. I get what you're saying, though. I mean, it's one person at a time, one day at a time. Every time I meet a new person and I have a conversation with them, I think they go away learning something. What it is, is up to them. I think it's so difficult to describe or represent an entire community. I'm just one person, and deaf people have wildly different experiences as individuals. I think the best thing I can do to educate is just to keep going out there, and keep meeting new people. People always have different levels of curiosity. Some people have so many questions to ask about what being deaf is like, while other people would rather just get to know me as a person. Some people have no questions at all. You can't force education down people's throats. They have to want to learn.

What has it been like to work with Marlee Matlin in your career?
It's been great. I was lucky enough to work with her relatively early on. I think we worked together on the third or fourth television show I did. I was really star struck and I couldn't stop staring at her! I had to keep telling myself to get a grip. She was really generous with me when we worked together then, and that's always a rare thing. I was lucky enough to work with her again recently on Sweet Nothing in My Ear, and that was great too. She's such a huge part of our history that it's almost like being able to work with Martin Luther King Jr.

Shoshannah is such a pretty name, what does it mean & how did your parents pick the name?
Shoshannah means rose in Hebrew, and my last name, Stern, means star in German. So if you translated my name, it would be Rose Star, which is actually the shade of lipstick I found once, which looked terrible on me. When I went to visit my sister, who lived in Tel Aviv for a year, people in Israel would laugh at my name because it's so old fashioned. It's like being named Bertha or Bronwyn here. I guess my parents were behind the times, but fortunately, we live in America, where people don't know it's actually kind of an uncool name. My nickname is Shoshi, which means little flower in Hebrew, and I picked that up when I was visiting my sister.

Other than continue acting, are there any other careers you would like to take on?
There are a lot of things I'd love to do. I love children, and I love working with them. I was a teacher when I was just starting out with the whole acting thing, and I'd love to go back to that somehow. I miss the interaction I had with my kids. I love to write, and I love to read. I'd love to keep doing that and maybe publish some of my short stories when I'm ready. I'd love to do consulting work. People have come to me with scripts and asked me what I think, sometimes about deaf characters, sometimes just for general sentiment, and I love doing that. I also do some artwork and create designs for clothes, albeit a bit sporadically, but that's something I'd like to continue doing, with a little guidance.