Not just breathing, but flourishing – Kate Liquorish is loving life right now

A reinvigorated interest and investment in South African content has seen actress Kate Liquorish find her face “everywhere” and she can’t help but express her excitement for what these developments hold for the future of the continent’s entertainment industry.

Liquorish currently stars alongside Pearl Thusi in Netflix’s first African original production Queen Sono, but she is also the star of another one of M-Net’s first English language drama series in more than a decade – a show called Still Breathing.

As far as English language drama series go on M-Net, Trackers, based on Deon Meyer’s thrilling crime story, re-opened the doors for local drama series producers to get their work on air. It was quickly followed by Still Breathing and Liquorish confirmed that there may be another coming to the channel soon.

“I think in South Africa we’re not making enough of our own original content that breaks away from the sphere of telenovela and soapie. There’s a worry from big producers that South Africans aren’t actually interested in that kind of story-telling and I think that it’s changing.”

Because she has one of the kindest, most-welcoming faces, watching her play the sexy, lethal and stoic character of Ekaterina Gromova on Queen Sono has been quite the experience. Gromova is a high-level security contractor and primary owner of the private military company Superior Solutions, as well as a Russian heiress to the Gromova crime family.

Still Breathing’s Abi (also known as “A-Type Abi”) on the other hand, is described as someone who still “needs lists and a plan to follow”.

However, that all goes out of the window when all her plans fall apart and she gets lost in the disappointment of not being able to bear a child, among other things.

When asked about her approach to each character, Liquorish explains by drawing a comparison between local and international casting process, stating that local casting agents and producers tend to cast actors who, in real life, are as close to the fictional characters as possible. Whereas international castings are more daring.

“It’s very seldom that you get a chance to play a character who is so different from you. That often happens in Hollywood; just look at Charlize Theron with something like Monster. She produced that herself because no one would cast her in ugly roles. She was the beautiful woman, the sex symbol.”

Kate Liquorish. Picture Supplied.

While Liquorish owes this to the fact that actresses in Hollywood often end up producing the kinds of films they wish they would get cast in, she also says the kind of long-standing relationship she has built with the production leads behind Queen Sono allows them to take a chance on casting, much in the same way Kagiso Lediga and Tamsin Andersson did with her.

“The journey for Abi was so much more about the script. The journey for Ekaterina was about preparation leading up to those shoot days. The fight training, the learning Russian, the British accent and tuning that…

“It was just an immense amount of hours and hours and days and weeks leading up to the actual shoot days… All of that preparation had to be done so that on the shoot days I could actually act and be present in the scene instead of trying to listen if I’m doing the accent right.”

Because she considered Abi’s character to be quite similar to who she is, Liquorish says she was able to find her character’s truth and portray the story as though it was real to her.

This required her to take the scripts apart and collate all of her character’s dialogue and repeatedly pour over it in order to get a good grasp of her character journey, which is currently ongoing.

Still Breathing airs on M-Net on Thursdays at 8pm and Queen Sono is currently streaming on Netflix.

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