A coffee date with Shannon Esra from ‘Lionness’

Actress Shannon Esra knows how to make anyone feel at ease. The Lioness star has a larger-than-life aura about her, piercing green eyes and a commanding yet gentle nature. She can disarm nearly anyone with a kind demeanour that feels mysterious and incredibly open at the same time.

One thing about Shannon Esra, and you notice it immediately, is that she is as authentic as they come. There’s no airs and graces about this actress, rather a realness and matter of fact openness that’s refreshing.

A coffee date is an unforgettable experience with an individual whose talent has driven a career with forward momentum sans pause.

Esra presently stars in the second season of the M-Net smash hit Lioness. Her character Sam, who looked down the barrel of life’s disintegration in the first season continues a tour de force, in the same direction, in the show’s second season. It’s a festival of double jeopardy, intrigue and painting outside the lines of the laws man made to shape our, and Sam’s world.

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The Lioness role is an emotional rollercoaster

Lioness is more than storytelling, it’s an emotional roller-coaster ride and as an actor, Esra found the role challenging but very fulfilling. She describes how, after reading the script at least three times, getting to know the character that she is about to play is one of the most important aspects of preparation for a role.

It is almost a physical experience for Esra. “Every role will have a different demand and Sam literally grew into me from the ground up. It’s like I found her in my feet first and then in my hips,” said Esra. She immerses herself completely in the person she must become on set.

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Filming can be a massive challenge for a performer. Because shows are shot out of sequence it requires a different set of emotions, different circumstances daily. On top of that, when there are past and present versions of a character, like with Sam, it makes the complexity of playing a role even more challenging.

How Shannon Esra prepares for her roles

Esra said that earlier on in her career the back and forth between scenes proved very challenging. And starring in a role demands that while being involved in the minutiae of different scenes, every day, you cannot lose sight of the bigger picture, the overall narrative.

“I have become an organised creative, it’s a skill that I had to learn because of the nature of production,” she said. Esra worked out a system that helps her prepare for the roller-coaster ride of filming.

Esra said that she spends a lot of time before filming commences working out the script, the production schedule and the demands of each day’s performance well before anyone calls ‘lights, camera, action.’

“I sit for weeks mapping out the emotional continuity from start to finish,” she says. She does the same thing for the characters that her role interacts with. At the end, a dozen pages or so summarises her own journey during production, which she then distils even more.

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Esra adds: “I then summarise [those dozen pages] to a cheat sheet so that I can just have scenes, a brief description and then I start crossing them off as we start going along the process. In season two, we’ve got three different time frames and we use a lot of different times, there are a lot of flashbacks.”

When she prepares for a role emotionally, and it’s particularly true for Sam and Lioness, Esra said she seeks out empathy. For her it is important to understand the nature of the character she is playing, and not to question actions, but to have an understanding.

If you separate yourself from the character too much, she said, the risk is that passing judgement on (in this case Sam’s) actions could alienate an actor from discovering depth and it could impact the performance.

Character immersion on set is almost a 360-degree dunk into someone else’s shoes. Sometimes literally so.

Esra said that she quite literally doesn’t wear her own shoes when playing a character either, no matter the discomfort, but rather steps into the soles of the person she is playing. It prevents any dissonance between real life and teleplay and informs important physical cues like body language and expression.

What was it like playing Sam in Lionness?

Playing Sam was a rewarding experience for Esra. It allowed her to stretch her craft.

“It’s just the most rewarding thing for me as an actress because it also allowed me to really sink my teeth into something and then just suck the bone marrow out of it,” she said.

That, she does. And her performance is as compelling on screen as her charismatic personality is in real life.

What’s next?

Esra’s next is at the opposite end of her role in Lioness. Soon, a comedy launches on streaming that will unwrap yet another aspect to this talented performer’s growing repertoire of achievement.

She also has plans to test the waters in other creative outlets. The next few years may see Esra behind the camera, creating and telling stories and producing and directing. For her, it’s about challenging herself as an artist, and sharing her love for her craft and industry with the rest of the world.

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