Actress Luisa d’Oliveira recently spoke with “Breakthrough Entertainment” about her role in the Reelz television series “Cracked,” which follows teams of cops and psychiatric professionals who make up the Psych Crimes and Crisis unit.
Listen to “Breakthrough Entertainment’s” full interview with d’Oliveira by clicking HERE. The following is an excerpt from the interview in which the actress discusses role in “Cracked” and, specifically, how she was able to tap into her character’s mindset.
“I play Poppy Wisnefski. She is the one youngest person on the team. She was brought into this unit because her inspector believes that she has a lot of good qualities to be a cop but being in this unit will help give her a lot of the empathy, understanding and connection to people that she needs to really get better at her job and develop into a good police officer. She brings a true-blue cop mentality and her viewpoint of crimes and criminals is very much black and white so there is a bit of a learning curve for her because nothing is black and white with these cases on the show. Everything is grey.
“[Law enforcem enforcement] is such a guarded community. They trust each other and there really are not any articles or handbooks on what it is like to be a police officer. But just paying attention to people is probably one of the biggest things. I started walking around Toronto when we started shooting the show and just paying attention of people. I started observing, as if I was a beat cop, and I was looking for anything out of the ordinary.
“The shift that happens in your mind when you stop, completely forget about you and just start watching everything around you is amazing. Something different happens in your body. It is really interesting. So that was one of the first things that I did and, obviously, quite a lot of research in talking to different officers. The co-creator of the show is currently with the Emergency Task Force in Toronto, which is the equivalent of SWAT in the [U.S.], and he has done a bunch of other jobs as well within the police force. So he has had some pretty interesting insight as well.” – Luisa d’Oliveira
