“Did I just say what?”
The Tempest (RECAP)
Bay and Emmett take a little planking adventure around the city. Meanwhile, Daphne becomes friends with Simone and considers quitting the Carlton basketball team in order to play for Buckner with Simone. However, this doesn’t sit well with John, who frowns upon quitting a commitment. After meeting with the reporter who wrote the article about her family, Kathryn decides to write a memoir about her daughters and the family situation.
Toby and Wilke turn to making fake IDs for Daphne and her Buckner friends to make money in order to fund their Guitar Face music video. When Daphne goes out with Simone and the girls, Wilke shows up at the bar and expresses his feelings for Daphne. She pretty much shuts him down, and he leaves, a little heartbroken.
Bay tries to make a good impression on Melody, who is still unsupportive of her relationship with Emmet. Along with Regina, she goes to a game night with Emmett and Melody, but things fall apart when Melody hurts Bay’s feelings. Later, Emmett is surprised when the police show up and arrest him, especially because there’s no one around to interpret for him.
Courtesy of ABC Family
Starry Night RECAP
To Bay’s annoyance Daphne surprises Emmett at the East West music festival. Bay joins Daphne and Guitar Face at the festival, but doesn’t understand why Emmett doesn’t want her help around hearing people. Simone, Bay’s old friend from Buckner, is also at the music festival and shows interest in an oblivious Toby.
Kathryn secretly meets with the nurse from Angelo’s lawsuit to find out if her story is plausible. Meanwhile, Angelo pursues a relationship with Bay, giving her a glimpse of what life with her biological parents might have been like. Daphne still wants nothing to do with Angelo and is hurt by his return.
Courtesy of ABC FAMILY
Switched at Birth Q&A: Katie Leclerc and Vanessa Marano
Hey, Switched at Birth fans! It’s just two week until the big winter premiere, and we can hardly wait! In the meantime, click through this Q&A photo gallery with Katie Leclerc and Vanessa Marano to learn more about their work, their characters and what’s to come this winter season!
Question: What do both of you like best about your character?
Vanessa Marano: What I like most about Bay is that people don’t always love her. She’s kind of difficult. She’s a little bit socially awkward almost. She says what’s on her mind without really thinking about it. She has a sense of humor that a lot of people don’t get and she really just genuinely wants to be loved and accepted by people but she has a really hard time with it.
Katie Leclerc: My favorite thing about Daphne is that she’s never a victim. She is a normal high school girl, who struggles with boys, and she gets good grades and she plays basketball, and she has all these day-to-day activities that anyone can relate to. No matter who you are, you can relate to it; the struggles, the ups and downs. And oh, by the way, she happens to also be deaf. It’s almost secondary to the rest of her life.
Question: Could you tell us one thing that we don’t already know about what’s in store for your characters in the second half of season one?
Vanessa Marano: What’s in store for Bay Kennish in the second half of season one is she kind of is making a decision whether or not to give up street art. There is a situation that she runs into where it almost costs her something pretty major in her life and that makes her start thinking about well, is it really worth the risk of illegal activity? And decides something that—it’s an interesting thing for her because it’s a big part of her that she has only shared with the two men in her lifetime, and it’s a big part of her identity that she could be losing.
Katie Leclerc: For Daphne, there’s a lot of rebuilding for her and Angelo to do, or building to start. It’s not even re-building. She needs to get over a lot of things in regards to him, and she really starts to figure out what it is she really cares about.
Question: As two young women, how have your lives changed since Switched at Birthbecame this big phenomenon the last couple of months?
Vanessa Marano: I honestly wouldn’t say my life has changed that much, other than the fact that I have a job, which is awesome. It’s a job with fantastic, talented, wonderful people, and I’m so pleased that I’m part of something that really has hit home with both the hearing community and the deaf community. So, if anything, I think my life has changed in that aspect is that I feel like I’m a part of something that people genuinely love and are genuinely caring about.
Katie Leclerc: For me, it seems quite a bit. I was working as a receptionist before this job and I was able to, literally, have my dreams come true. I was able to quit. I became successful in something that I had worked for ten years to achieve. I’ve made incredible new friends. I’ve gotten to go places and experience things that I never would have otherwise. Every day is a new lesson in gratitude.
Question: What was it like for the two of you to present at the American Music Awards.
Katie Leclerc: It was awesome. It was the best night ever. It was really, really fun and to get to do it with my good friend, Vanessa, was that much more special. It was super cool.
Vanessa Marano: We had the best time. We had so much fun. It was great!
Question: Switched at Birth has so many fans. What has been your favorite experience or reaction from one of the fans?
Katie Leclerc: I tweet, and I love Twitter. It’s just the immediate response that is so readily accessible. I love going on and we’ll get comments from fans that are small mementos like, ‘I learned how to be patient with my deaf cousin because of Switched at Birth, or big mementos like, ‘I understand the importance of and the need for interpreters so I changed my major to American Sign Language because of Switched at Birth’. I mean, it’s a very broad spectrum, but I think the response has just been overwhelmingly positive and I understand why. When we working on it, I think all of us felt like we were doing something that was special and important. Now that those fans have kind of responded similarly, I’m just proud to be a part of it and thankful to have been along for the ride.
Vanessa Marano: Katie and I both did a signing at Planet Hollywood in New York and it was amazing to see the hearing fans and the deaf fans; how many of them there were and to see them together and to see each community that there is not necessarily a divide between, but both joining a program for different reasons and similar reasons. I think that that’s been the most amazing thing is that we have such a colorful group of fans because they’re hearing, they’re deaf, they’re teenage, they’re mothers, they’re male - a lot of them which is surprising. And I think that that’s great.
Question: How do Bay and Daphne deal with Angelo’s return this season?
Vaneanssa Marano: They deal with it really differently. Bay has, the sane half of her that she, for 16 years, didn’t realize she was going to have. She just wants him to be awesome. Wants him to love her and in a way, she even wants him to accept her more than he does Daphne. Because in the long run, everybody has accepted and loved Daphne and while everybody accepts and loves Bay, it’s a little bit harder to get to know Bay. She just wants the Angelo thing to work and she wants him to live up to her expectations so much that she is almost blinded to anything negative about him.
Katie Leclerc: Daphne never had Angelo in her life but she had a place to put every ounce of anger, every ounce of distrust in humanity, every negative. Daphne is a very optimistic person but I think it is a result of her stashing away every negative feeling she ever had and blaming it all on Angelo, and at the same time, blaming all of his decisions on herself because she has guilt and anger and sorrow and loneliness and so much to deal with, with him. There is a lot of rebuilding to do. So I think it starts slow and you have to take him with baby steps.
Question: Do you have a favorite episode so far from either the episodes we have already seen or the upcoming winter seasone?
Vanessa Marano: I’ve always been partial to episode seven because that was kind of the first episode that Daphne and Bay were working together, and Katie and I actually had more than three scenes with each other. That was fun. It’s always been one of our funnier episodes, too.
Katie Leclerc: I think maybe episode four where we have the big fundraiser party at the Kennish house. That episode has so many shots where you can see everybody; so everybody was on set all the time and we all kind of got to hang out together. Yes, I think that one has a special place in my heart. Plus, Emmett on the drums is just awesome.
Vanessa Marano: Really awesome. And I’m going to brag about Katie for a second. Because in the first episode coming back this season, she has quite possibly one of the most beautiful, amazing, emotional scenes by this gorgeous lake in Santa Clarita or in St. Louis because that’s where it takes place in the show. The entire crew was just in awe of her and she did an awesome job, so I’m taking on the challenge of bragging about her and there it is.
Question: Could you share a reason why your character belongs with Emmett and a reason why your character doesn’t belong with Emmett?
Vanessa Marano: This might be a little bit hard for both of us. Because I know that Katie is Team Bay and Emmett and I’m a little bit Team Daphne and Emmett, which is weird.
I think Bay and Emmett belong together because they both have very similar views on the world and they both care enough about each other that they’re kind of stepping outside of their comfort zone to learn a different language or to speak. Which both of them I don’t think would have done under normal circumstances but they care so much about the other person that they’re going to do that.
The reason why I think Bay and Emmett don’t belong with each other is that they have very similar views on the world and it’s almost too similar. I don’t know that they balance each other out enough.
Katie Leclerc: I think Daphne and Emmett should be together because Emmett saves Daphne. I think she will always have this adoration for him that will be unquenched by anyone else because he was the person who showed her who she could be with the deaf culture and introduced her to a language and a people that she really very much is a part of.
And they shouldn’t be together because it’s really hard, I think, to make the transition from best friend to relationship and especially, I think, in high school. I think the long-term final outcome would be that maybe they wouldn’t end up together, finally. I don’t know.
I think that Bay and Emmett are—the thing is I think we see the cuteness in each other, like I think Vanessa is the most adorable thing I’ve ever laid my eyes on other than my puppy, Gus. So, just seeing the two of them together, I just think is so adorable. I don’t know. I think that’s why we were rooting for the other team.
Question: Vanessa, with several actors on the show relying solely on sign language as a means to communicate, how is your own sign vocabulary coming?
Vanessa Marano: Okay, so let’s talk really quickly about how in this upcoming season the person who does the most sign language on the show is not Constance Marie or Katie Leclerc, who’s fluent in sign language, or Sean Berdy, who is also fluent in sign language. It’s me because Bay has started to sign more with Daphne now and she signs with Emmett and, in a teaser sort of way, she’s signing a lot with Melody, Emmett’s mother as well.
So, I am doing the most sign language on the show. I don’t know how that happened, but somehow it did. That being said, Bay’s sign language is excellent. Vanessa’s sign language is getting there. I hope to be as fluent as Bay in a little bit, but as of right now, Bay is way better at sign language than I am.
Katie Leclerc: That being said, Katie and Vanessa had a private conversation in sign language unbeknownst to everyone around them the other day. That was pretty fun. We’re telling secrets, everybody.
Vanessa Marano: That might be like my driving force to really learning sign language. Not communication, secret communication.
Question: You guys both clearly love your characters and love working on the show. When you first read this script, what was it about each of your characters that made you want to play them?
Katie Leclerc: I had never seen anything like what we were doing on the pages of Switched at Birth. It really resonated with me to be true and honest. Even in the pilot we talked about issues related to deaf cultures; the cochlear implants and the uphill battle and the humor that can go along with it too. Because deaf people are some of the funniest people I’ve ever met in my life. It just shined a light on a culture that I loved and was familiar with and wanted to share with everyone else.
Vanessa Marano: For me, the moment I truly fell in love with the script for Switched at Birthbecause when I read it, it was different and I’ve been doing this for a long time but whenever you’re doing a pilot you’re very skeptical. But the minute that we did the table read for the show and the words on the page that Lizzy wrote were brought to life, because she truly wrote for them to be said.
The table read flowed and was beautiful and seeing the actors sign and seeing the actors act and bring these beautiful words that were so different and were about something so unique to life was the moment that I was like, wow, this could work. This is actually going to work. And it did and people I think really responded to that, to these words that were meant to be said and were meant to be signed and to see it together is such a unique, fascinating different combination that you can’t see anywhere else.
Courtesy of ABC Family
