The Umbrella Academy: Emmy Raver-Lampman Talks Allison and Vanya, Auditioning, and More at Denver Pop Culture Con

In February, The Umbrella Academy Season 1 dropped on Netflix following the lives of seven children adopted by Sir Reginald Hargreeves. One of those children is Allison Hargreeves, who is is played by Emmy Raver-Lampman. 

Emmy Raver-Lampman appeared at Denver Pop Culture Con in one of her first convention appearances without one of her co-stars. 

We attended her spotlight panel where she discussed auditioning, transitioning from stage to film, and Allison’s relationship with Vanya in The Umbrella Academy.

On Moving from Stage to Screen

Raver-Lampman is an accomplished stage actress whose credits include Elphaba in Wicked and Angelica Schuyler in Hamilton. The Umbrella Academy is her first television production. Moderator Karl Brevik asked her what it was like going from stage to screen. 

“I think I grew up thinking it was a huge difference,” Raver-Lampman said. “I think I grew up being like, well there’s an audience and there is a give and a take. A receiving of the energy and applause, and then going to film there’s a tiny little thing that you’re trying not to look at that’s three inches from your face.” 

“I think the biggest thing for me is just, the scale is different,” she continued. “When you’re on stage and you’re performing of a live audience that can be as many as 3,000 people on Broadway or on tour, you have to reach the back of row because those people paid a lot of money to see your performance and they want to feel what you’re feeling and go through the journey with you and go through the story.”

“When you’re on camera your emotions don’t have to reach as far. It’s almost as if you think it and you really, really feel it, it comes across. So, I think it was finding that balance for me of kind of scaling it back a little bit, and just feeling it in a deeper, fully grounded way,'” Raver-Lampman said. 

Raver-Lampman also elaborated on the difference between production and rehearsal times. 

“When you’re doing a show, you spend four weeks learning it, and then you do that show eight times a week,” she explained. “You do the same thing over and over again eight times a week, six nights a week.”

“But then in TV and film, you have a five-minute rehearsal when you’re already in costume and makeup and hair. You talk about where everybody is going to stand, and then you have a rehearsal for the stand-ins, and the camera guys, and the lighting and the stand. Then you do it, and sure you do it twenty-five times that day, but then you never go back and do it again.”

On The Umbrella Academy Season 2

The Umbrella Academy has been renewed for a second season. At the time of the panel, Raver-Lampman and the cast were getting ready to get back to set to shoot the second season in Toronto. While plenty of people asked what she knew about the second season, she couldn’t divulge any spoilers, mostly because she doesn’t know herself.

“I’ve read episodes one and two and you guys are in for a real treat. They’re really going for it.”

Raver-Lampman talks about the fan’s response to the first season and how the writers have turned it up a notch with the next batch of scripts. 

“It’s because you guys watch the show, because you guys love the show, and there are so many fans of the show,” Raver-Lampman said to the audience. “Over 60 million people have watched it. It’s because of that that they just were like ‘Oh great,’ and they are taking it to a crazy, insane, next level. The opening of the first episode is bananas. I think they blew the whole budget in like the first ten minutes.” 

On Similarities Between Angelica and Allison

The floor was then opened up for audience questions. The first question from an audience member asked Raver-Lampman about any similarities she saw between Angelica Schuyler in Hamilton and Allison on The Umbrella Academy.

When Raver-Lampman was originally cast in The Umbrella Academy they asked her what she wanted Allison to look like. 

“The Rumor in the comics has the purple hair, she’s always rocking the seemingly leather pants and jacket, and she has this hard edge to her,” explained Raver-Lampman. “They were like, do you want to rock your own hair, do you want to do a wig. What do you want to do. I was fighting to have this hair, and Netflix and everyone was like, ‘Great, we’re on board with that if that’s what you want.'”

“The further we got into the camera testing, and getting ready to start shooting, I was like ‘I have spent the past three years of my life doing a show where I had this hair,'” she said. “So for me, I wanted to separate Angelica and Allison, but I think there is so much strength in Allison and Angelica.”

On the Source Material for The Umbrella Academy

The next fan asked Raver-Lampman if she had read the comics the show was based on. She had read the script for the pilot first but immediately ordered the comics because the script piqued her curiosity. 

“I immediately ordered the comics because I was so interested, and I wanted to see what they looked like,” said Raver-Lampman.

“Later on in the process, Steve Blackman, and Netflix and all of our producers [said] obviously this is the source material, this is what we’re pulling from, this is where it started, but we are by no means holding this as gospel. We’re going to take our own right turns and forks in the road and kind of embellish and dive deeper,” Raver-Lampman shared.

On What She Discovered About Herself as an Actress Working in Film

Another question from the audience asked Raver-Lampman what she discovered about herself as an actress during her first TV production. 

“The thing that I think I am still struggling with the most is to slow down,” said Raver-Lampman. “There is this thing in TV and film where time is of the essence, because time is money, and if you’re wasting people’s time you’re wasting people’s money. [It’s] trying to find the balance of doing the work and getting the takes that you need, and getting the emotional discoveries that you’re looking for but also not wasting everybody’s time,” Raver-Lampman explained. 

Raver Lampman went on to elaborate about everything that goes on behind the scenes as well. The things the camera doesn’t see. 

“Yes, it’s just me and one person in the scene,” she said. “But there are three hundred other people in the building that are like ‘Tick-tock we have until twelve to shoot this scene and then we have seven other scenes after that.'”

“I think initially I was very much aware of the clock and saying my lines very fast, and kind of mumbling a little bit, and not wanting to take too much time. And if I flubbed a line or I forgot something I was always so apologetic,” she reflected. “That was the thing that I am learning still. Yes, yes, there is a clock, but the work also needs to be done and the story also needs to be told.”

On Referencing Source Material

The next question had to do with how often Raver-Lampman referenced source material. Both her roles as Angelica Schuyler and Allison had an abundance of source material to draw from, and Raver-Lampman explained that the decision to reference source material as an actor, is always a choice. 

“At the end of the day, actors are hired to portray characters the way that they are going to portray them. So you always have to bring some part of yourself to a role,” she noted. 

“People always ask me what’s your advice for someone who wants to be in the industry, or wants to perform, or wants to be an actor, and I always say, and it’s the hardest thing to learn, is to not imitate other people and try to be yourself and bring as much of yourself to what you’re doing.”

“At the end of the day, you got in the room, you got the audition, you got the callback, and then you got the job because you brought something that no one else was bringing to the table, and that’s what they want,” Raver-Lampman said. 

On Her Favorite Musical 

An audience member asked Raver-Lampman what her favorite musical was, or if she had a favorite character she’d ever gotten to portray. 

“So this is dumb, truly, because it is what it is, but the best musical I’ve ever been in is Hamilton,” said Raver-Lampman. “It’s been really hard to go back into theater, because I’m like ‘Well, what am I gonna do? Cats?’ As much as I love full spandex suits covered in fur.”

Raver-Lampman elaborated a little bit on what made her time as Angelica so special. 

“That story and the way that it was told, also being in the original cast, there is so much emotion and so much attached to it for me. It filled me as an artist. I didn’t expect it. I didn’t see it coming. And then, going from the ensemble to playing Angelica it just kind of came full-circle for me,” said Raver-Lampman. 

On the Show’s Condensed Time Line

Another audience member asked her how long it took her film the first season of The Umbrella Academy. It took seven months to film the first season, from January to July of 2018, but Raver-Lampman also reflected a little bit on how time passed in the series as well, particularly when multiple episodes might take place in the same day

“Yea sure, it took seven months, but it took seven months to shoot a season that’s eight days,” says Raver-Lampman.  “At the end of episode 8, for those that watch, I get really bloody, and I was just in that bloody get-up for like a month and a half.” 

On Working With Special Effects and Green Screens

Raver-Lampman also discussed how she approached working with special effects and green screen on her first television production, crediting her theater background. 

“When I was like, ‘I’m gonna try TV and film,’ I thought I would start with like, an indie, like Lady Bird or something. Where you know, no one is flying, there’s no stunts, there’s no green screen special effects, and then I just landing in this ridiculous show where there’s all of that. So I had to pretend like I’d done it before,” said Raver-Lampman.

“I think coming from theater, you have to use so much imagination, especially when you’re rehearsing and learning a show and you’re creating this world. So I think being able to use my imagination and see things that weren’t there, I actually really really enjoyed it,” elaborated Raver-Lampman.

She also took some time to discuss the character of Pogo and how the CGI worked to create that character. Onset, Pogo, a talking chimpanzee character, was played by an actor named Ken in a VFX suit. 

“For seven months, Ken was Pogo. And he was saying the lines, he was emoting, he’d be crying in scenes. He’s just an unbelievable actor. Then when we were shooting the tenth episode they showed us a rough cut of the pilot and we saw Pogo for the first time. And I started crying because I forgot that Ken wasn’t actually Ken, Ken was a monkey,” explained Raver-Lampman. 

On Allison’s Defense of Vanya

Prompted by an audience question, Raver-Lampman also talked a little bit about Allison’s relationship with Vanya and why Allison would always defend Vanya even after The Umbrella Academy Season 1 Episode 8, “I Heard a Rumor.” 

“When we pick up in the pilot, Allison is in the middle, and towards the end, of getting a divorce and her husband is actively taking her daughter away from her. She kind of finds herself at this crossroads where she finds out that her father dies and goes home, and finds that The Umbrella Academy might be the only family she has left,” Raver-Lampman explained. 

Raver-Lampman explained that seeing her family in shambles, and realizing the way that their father raised them has left them as shells of human beings prompts Allison to latch onto Vanya. 

“She kind of latches onto her sisterhood with Vanya, because she feels like that is a female relationship that she can salvage because she’s losing that relationship with her daughter,” she said. “And it’s a relationship that she never explored and ignored and had no interest in understanding growing up because Vanya didn’t have powers.”

“Vanya was an afterthought, and I think now, as an adult is realizing that was such a massive mistake.”

On Her Audition Advice

Another fan asked Raver-Lampman about her advice going into auditions. Raver-Lampman offered a way to reframe the audition process that she says has actually made her like auditioning. 

“This kind of broke my brain when I was in college in New York and starting to audition. There’s this feeling when you’re auditioning that you walk into a room, there’s someone sitting at a piano, or if you’re not auditioning for a musical there’s no piano. There are three to twenty people sitting behind a table, and it’s very easy to believe and to feel like they are the enemy, and/or that they are not on your side,” she began.

“That is incorrect because every single person on the other side of that table wants you to walk in and make their job easier, and for you to be what they are looking for. They want you to be what they have been searching for. They are ready to go to lunch. They are ready to go have a rose. They’re like, ‘Yes! There she is! Bing, bang, boom, and we’re done!'”

“They want you to be the solution to their problem, which is ‘We have a role to cast, and we haven’t found it yet,” explained Raver-Lampman.

Still, she acknowledges that it is hard to get out of this mindset. She recalls how she once felt like she was always wasting casting director’s time.

“I think it was really easy for me, for a lot of years, to feel like, ‘Oh god, I’m wasting their time,’ and ‘Oh god, they’re not going to like me.’ Whatever happens, once you left the room, is not your concern. You take your time. That is your room. Take the time you need. Don’t feel rushed, and it will be what it’s gonna be.”

On “That Scene” with Vanya

During The Umbrella Academy‘s first season, Raver-Lampman’s character gets her throat cut by her sister Vanya. Even though this was part of the comics, Raver-Lampman wasn’t sure it was making it into the show since the writers and creators weren’t holding the comics as gospel.

One of the final questions referenced the throat cut scene, and Raver-Lampman recalled the moment when she found out it was going to be in the eighth episode. 

“Before they released the scripts to us to read, Steve [Blackman] pulled me into his office and said, ‘Hey, just want to let you know, the end of Episode 8, it’s bad!’ And I was like, ‘You’re killing me off!’ and I was like ‘Oh my god! It’s my first TV job! I’m terrible. You’re killing me off before the season’s even over!’ He’s like, ‘No, no! But we are keeping like the neck cut with Vanya. It’s gonna be terrible, and you’re not gonna talk for the rest of the season,'” Raver-Lampman recalled. 

She does recognize this scene as important for the two characters and her relationship with Vanya. 

“It’s a really important part. It happens and then we see how she reacts. Everybody turns against Vanya, except for her still.”

For the two months following, Raver-Lampman was silent in her scenes. Even though Steve Blackman promised that she would be talking in Season 2, she enjoyed giving everyone side-eye while they filmed.

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Check out all of our coverage of Denver Pop Culture Con here. There is more to come!

The Umbrella Academy Season 1 is now available to stream on Netflix. 

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