25 Actors: Day 19 - Morgan Thomas

  As part of the 25 Days of Sine Fine Films extravaganza leading up the 25th Anniversary I have decided to write a series of posts celebrating the 25 actors who have been the most dedicated by participating in the most productions.   

Actor of the Day: Morgan Thomas

Morgan joined the company in the winter of 2001 when she volunteered to be crew and ended up as an actress in The Curse. She has participated in 12 productions as cast and/or crew.

I first met Morgan in when I was at college at SIUC and part of the student TV station SPC-TV.  I was working on creating the logo for my new TV show The Curse when Morgan stopped by and asked about it.  I told her about the show and asked if she wanted to join in the fun. She said she'd like to help out as crew and on the second day of filming for The Curse she was the Assistant Director and held the script for me. 

The next day we were scheduled to do the big, all day shoot at Ferne Clyff State Park and the actress who was supposed to play Maria called off at literally the last minute.  I scrambled to find someone else to play Maria and since Morgan was the only female on set who did not already have a part I "asked" her if she wanted to do it.  And by "ask" I mean coerced/forced her to accept.  I threw her into shoot without having read the script and completely unprepared.  

Here’s how it basically went:

YIBBLE: So…Morgan, right?  You wanna play Maria in the series?

MORGAN:  Well…um…I—

YIBBLE:  Great!  Here’s the script – she’s only in a couple dozen scenes (and 8 more episodes). You can read it in the car.

MORGAN: I get carsick.

YIBBLE:  That’s okay. I’ll give you some time to read it on the set before we film.

MORGAN:  Really?

YIBBLE: No. 

MORGAN: Do we have time for me change into better clothes?

YIBBLE: No.

MORGAN:  Can I at least put on some makeup?

YIBBLE: No.  You look great!  Now get in the car.

MORGAN: Am I being kidnapped?

YIBBLE: Yes.  You don’t need to eat right? Cause I didn’t bring any food.

Casting Morgan was the Best. Decision. Ever.  

For me, not for her.  Well, hopefully for her as well.  

From the very beginning she did a fantastic job.  Morgan was, and still is, amazingly talented and she showed her skills despite being throw into the part at the last minute.  You couldn't tell she hadn't read the script or acted in a TV show before, she was so good and I was so happy!  If she was that good without any preparation, how good would she be if she had a chance to prepare in advance?  Better then good, that's the answer. Amazing. 

Even though Maria is one of the more three-dimensional characters in the script, with an air of mystery and serious attitude, Morgan took the part and made it her own.  She did such a great job as Maria that it inspired me and she played the character in two more TV shows - a prequel and a sequel. To this day Maria is one of the most iconic SFF characters and placed #1 on the Top 5 SFF heroes list.

Despite remarkable performances from actors like Morgan, The Curse was a short lived show. I planned for it to be 30 episodes but it didn't even make it through it's first full season. Mostly because I went crazy and canceled it, but that's another story for another post. 

After not finishing The Curse, I wrote and began the next TV series I wanted to do about time travelers - T.O.A.S.T.T.  Did you think I was going to say The Gift Bearer?  Well, that is the next production I did because stuff happened and TOAST got burned. When inspiration struck me in the summer of 2001 I created The Gift Bearer and cast Morgan front and center as Minerva, one of the three main sisters. 

Fun side note, Morgan had seniority coming into GB since she was as the only actor who played a major character in The Curse.  That means she got top billing in not only The Gift Bearer but also in every other TV show she's been in since.  Being listed first in the credits means you're important, which also applies to being last with the or "and" or "featuring" which Morgan has also had in multiple productions. 

Anyway, I cast Morgan as Minerva - the silly, slightly insane, goofy and yet also really intelligent and creative middle sister. Minerva is a Mary Sue. She really is.  If you don't know what that is, google it. She also has the highest body count of any other character - and some of those kills were before she turned evil!  Minerva is complicated and Morgan did an excellent job playing her as I knew she would.  

Honestly I think Minerva is closer to Morgan's personality then Maria is.  I also noticed she's played a lot of characters who name starts with the letter "M" - Maria, Minerva, Marion, Malicia, Mime #3, Maria again, Minerva again, Alysia - aha!  Okay, that's where the "M" streak stops. But she played a character with a "M" name from 2001-2012.  That's eleven years. That's a lot. 

I keep going off on tangents, sorry.  Anyway, Morgan was as amazing as always in The Gift Bearer and was hilarious both on camera and off.  I will never forget filming the scene where she sacrifices a muffin, or the ad libbing she did with the others in a scene from Episode 3.  So funny.  I only included the muffin sacrifice in the script because I knew she could do it, but the result was even funnier then I expected!

It wasn't all fun and games - there was a lot of drama on the set and Morgan got caught up in it too, but ultimately the show ended...well?  Well the show ended.  We got it all filmed and I'm still friends with some of the cast so my craziness wasn't quite as bad as The Curse. 

Despite all the drama, the cast was also very close - which actually probably fueled the drama now that I think about it. We didn't just film together once or twice on a weekend, Morgan and the other leads filmed at least three or four times a week, with full day shoots on the weekends and evenings during the week. That much time spent with others is bound to make a film set feel like a family. Families may love each other but they don't get along all of the time.

Morgan and Russell, who played Xavier, were a fantastic combination on screen and good friends off screen with a sibling sort of vibe that probably resulted from them playing siblings.  They had more screen time together then any other pair of actors and both actors were truly amazing in their roles.  It was great filming with both of them.  Although I think they had fun filming most of it they did not have as much fun filming the fight scenes in the final episode.  

Filming for those scenes was long, intense, and required a lot of running.  The plastic sword that Morgan had no longer had a hilt to guard her hand and by the end of the shooting both swords were covered in nicks and grooves. Morgan and Russell both had multiple injuries just on their hands as a result of the swords and other injuries from all the rough and tumble required in the choreography.  

The Gift Bearer fully finished by the end of the Spring semester in 2002.  During that spring a new series began filming called Tape and a Stick and I was one of the producers of it.  Basically three different directors would each make a short film using the two objects for that episode.  The first was a Tape and a Stick, the second was Balloon and a Sock, and the third was Soup and a Cookie.  

During the summer of 2002, Morgan and her sister visited me in CU for a few days which somehow turned into a week.  Eventually we got bored and decided to shoot a short film for Episode 2 of Tape and a Stick.  I had been toying around with the idea for the Medea School of Melodrama for a while but never did anything with it, so I decided to pull it from the back burner, incorporate a sock and a balloon into the story line, and shoot it. 

Basically The Medea School of Melodrama is a long infomerical about a school where you can learn the classic lessons of how to be a Hero, a Villain, a Sidekick, a Damsel-in-Distress, or a Sassy Vamp. I think the actors had a choice in who they got to play, but I'm not sure.  I may have just assigned them the roles.  Regardless of how it happened Morgan played the Villain who I later named Malicia Darkling.  

Obviously she did a great job, although there were not a lot of lines and most of it was improv, changing costumes, and goofing off on the set while I filmed it so it wasn't hard to be awesome.  The best shot is when Morgan comes out of nowhere, steals Annamarie's balloon, then whacks her on the head with it. So random, so hilarious, and so necessary to find a way to work in a balloon. 

I wasn't sure what I wanted to film when I returned to SIUC in the fall of 2002, but I knew I wanted to do something.  I had a project that I was playing around with in my head but I wasn't quite ready to write it yet.  In the early fall - either late September or early October, we needed another short film for Episode 3 of Tape and a Stick.  The items were Soup and a Cookie, so I wrote the...um...funny? script of Attack of the Cookie People. It was pretty stupid, but to be fair it wasn't meant to be anything special.  I wrote it to be tongue in cheek but by the end the tongue and the cheek were no where near each other and I think a lot of what I considered as jokes at the time I wrote it fell flat. 

I'm not going to go into the confusing plot, just know that it involved a lost tribe of not-so-pygmy Mimes.  Morgan agreed to play Mime 3 and brought makeup.  I should have tried hard to make sure all the mimes were in traditional mime outfits with full make up but to be honest I didn't really care so...whatever.  Morgan took the time to do a subtle job with not only her make up but the other mimes as well, doing more of a nod to a mime then a full face of white and black.  She's the only reason the mimes had any make up on at all. She did a great job and the mimes were one of the best parts of the whole thing - the other was Joe, but that's another story for another post. 

Aside from filming and editing Episode 2 and 3 of Tape and a Stick, I wanted to film another production, possibly another TV series. I ended up writing and film Dream Chasers, a prequel to The Curse about Maria Sanchez's mysterious past including finding out about her own curse that gets mentioned briefly in Episode 1.  Since it was all about Maria's past I obviously needed Morgan to reprise her role. She agreed and hopefully didn't regret it.  

The script was pretty confusing beginning with the fact that Maria Sanchez from the Curse was not actually Maria Sanchez.  Her name was Marion Smith and Maria Sanchez is a totally different person who's name and identity Marion takes over for complicated reasons.  Marion kills Maria and takes over her identity.  I guess it's not that complicated.  Well, it doesn't sound complicated but the reasons behind it and how it all happens are part of a confusing storyline that could be considered a plot if it made any sense. 

Unlike some of my other productions that are confusing and/or don't make much sense, Dream Chasers is fun to watch, and more importantly it was fun to film.  Although a lot of craziness was happening off the set at the time - which didn't involve the cast and crew while we were filming it - that did complicate things a bit behind the scenes.  However, the cast got along great and filming was fun most days - for me.  

They were not always fun for Morgan since there were many shoots where she ended up cold, wet, or cold and wet.  There was a day we filmed in the rain, a very windy night, the coldest day of filming ever, a cold night of filming just her walking around in early December with no coat on and a thin shirt, and many more tortures sessions film shoots.

There were long days and late nights, but some of the filming was at Morgan's apartment so she didn't have to travel to get to and from the set which was a bonus for her.  Although people filming in your apartment was not a bonus for her roommates, but Morgan was okay with. Thanks for letting us film there!

Although I swore never to film again after Dream Chasers that didn't last long. To be fair it lasted longer then the other times I've sworn off filming, but that's not saying much.  Dream Chasers was finished by the middle of December in 2002, and we didn't start filming the next TV Show until the end of May in 2004.  So that's like...hang on let me do the math...fifteen months?  That was definitely a record at the time!  

I almost got it out of my system but I kept thinking about all the unanswered questions in The Curse and Dream Chasers and started playing around with ideas on how to answer them.  I shared these ideas with what I affectionately call the Southern Trio, three of my best friends I met at SIUC and still hang out with whenever I can.  Which is usually when I'm filming.  Which is why I continue to film.

Anyway, the Southern Trio consists of Morgan Thomas, Brittany Ann Whalen, and James McKinley.  In talking things over with them I realized that I really did want to film the Curse sequel.  Like an alcoholic or a crack addict I couldn't deny the sweet siren's lure of my expensive addiction and decided to film what would eventually become Eidolon.

I got a lot of help from the Southern Trio about the characters they were going to play - although Morgan's character was already decided because she would be returning as Maria Sanchez.  All three were co-producers on the project and even wrote some scenes for it. 

Morgan had great ideas and some of the best dialogue in the show is from a scene she scripted in Episode 3.  She also gave me very sound advice about the later scripts - like the fact that there was WAY too much foreshadowing about Morpheus's death - and although I was stupidly annoyed at her at the time for some unfathomable reason I realized later that she was absolutely right. She has good instincts for storytelling and is a great writer.  That's not a plea for her to write a script for me to film.  Nope.  Not at all. (It is!)

Like I said we began filming the show at the end of May in 2004. It's 13 episodes (11 scripts but it grew in post production) and it was only supposed to take one summer to film. Right. Like that was actually going to happen.  Silly actors, they should know by now that when I give an estimate on how long it takes to film a production they need to at least triple or quadruple it.  Especially since some of us were not in college anymore and had to juggle full time jobs, so we could only film for about one weekend a month.

By the fall of 2004 Morgan had returned to SIUC to continue her studies which put her four hours away from our "home base" in CU.  We still were able to film about once a month but poor Morgan had to take the train.  Sometimes she was able to catch a ride with James who was also at SIUC, so that helped.  We also went to film in Southern Illinois for a shoot in October so at least she didn't have to travel too far for that one.  

Morgan, as always, was a real trouper and put up with not only bad weather, but also more than her fair share of on set injuries. During a shoot in August she had to run full speed downhill on gravel which is a recipe for disaster.  The tumble she took was so bad it left her bloody and bruised and left permanent scars.  I'm sorry Morgan!  

She also had a serious injury during a fight scene between Maria and James Ford, played by Ryan Homberg.  It wasn't really choreographed and what little there was did not help. At one point Ford shoves Maria backwards into the wall - unfortunately the wall was actually a door and she got shoved her right onto the doorknob.  Doorknob in the kidney. It's as painful as it sounds. Probably more so.  

Morgan doesn't scream when she gets injured.  Until this point I had only heard her scream while she was acting.  She didn't even scream when she fell headfirst on downhill gravel. This time she screamed. It still haunts me because that scream was filled with so much pain. I am SO SORRY Morgan!   Unexpectedly it led to her finding out about a tumor so it has a happy? ending, but ouch that was...that was rough. 

Morgan has a tendency to get hurt on set and I wondered why until I realized that she's been in a lot of productions were she has to fight, sometimes with swords or knives, other times just wrestling around.  Sometimes there's detailed choreography but that's pretty rare. Most of the time it's just "get in there and fight".  She also has a love-hate relationship with gravity - it loves her, she hates it.  

At some point she realized this and began to bring first aid kits with her.  It was probably after gravel tumble in August that prompted it when no one had a bandaid .  I really should have had one, but I didn't so she brought her own.  It ended up being a pretty big first aid kit too because with all the fighting and other issues there were a lot of injuries on set, not just for her but also for others. But mostly her.  Poor Morgan.  She has actually attained the highest level in the Survivor's Club.  The not-actually-at-all coveted, top tier Level 4 "How the Hell Are You Still Alive" award.  

She did an amazing job as always and solidified Maria Sanchez's place as one of the coolest and most heroic characters in SFF.  Despite everything I think she had fun filming Eidolon.  I certainly had fun filming with her, but then again I always do.  She's hilarious, talented, and dedicated.  Also she never asked me to pay for her medical fees which looking back on it now I probably should have.  

Eidolon finished filming in March of 2005 and at the end of May we had the premiere for the cast and crew.  Although she wasn't able to participate in the 10 Year Anniversary production of The Cursed Destiny of Pandora's Gift Box in 2006, she did attend the 10 year reunion that summer.  Sometimes it's nice to hang out with someone while I'm not filming because then I actually get to talk to them. For Morgan it must be nice to party once in a while because there is less chance of getting injured without filming involved.

It was several years before I was able to film with her again due to distance, jobs, and general life.  The next time I saw her was at the 15th Anniversary Reunion in 2011.  She was able to come and join us at Allerton Park where the actors who played the Silverstone Sisters - Morgan Thomas, Christine Komiskey, and Brittany Ann Whalen - reunited for the first time in nine years.  

Morgan was also able to come back to the MacLeod Farm for more partying, toasting marshmellows, sleeping under the stars, watching bloopers - just general SFF hanging out stuff.  I also filmed her interview for the 15th Anniversary Reunion video which I will officially finish a week from never.  It was really great to see her again, but it would be another year before I really got to film with her again. 

In 2012, we celebrated the 10 Year Anniversary of The Gift Bearer with a film full of flashbacks and a frame plot.  Set ten years after the show ends the movie, The Gift Bearer: Time After Time, focuses on Atlanta's daughter and the sisters telling her their stories about traveling through time.  We filmed the frame plot scenes on one night and the new bits for the "flashbacks" on two different afternoons.  

It was really great to be filming with the three of them again - especially Morgan since it had been so long, however that weekend also happened to have the hottest two days of filming EVER with the temperature being over 100 degrees!  I think it maxed at 102, but I'm not sure. 

Naturally since it involved time travel it also involved costumes and, since I'm a sadist, it involved heavy Edwardian clothing, big hats, and lots of petticoats as well as corset tops and long skirts in other scenes.  To be fair I did not know it would be that hot, although also to be fair I did not check the weather report.  Because I don't care about the weather.  I just care if we can film or not. And we always film regardless of the weather. Always. 

That weekend we also shot two other short films for the series Fortunate Ones where the basic plot of all the movies is wishing for something and then realizing what you wish for isn't actually what you want.  The first one was Faerie Tale with stared Harmony Komiskey as a young girl who wished to meet a fairy.  However, fairies are not as kind as kids tales make them out to be.  Unknown to her, she is being watched by fae named Aleysia played by Morgan Thomas.  Aleysia tries to take the girl to the Fairy Realm and turns angry when the mother interferes and the girl refuses to leave. 

Morgan has played evil versions of her character in both The Gift Bearer and in Eidolon, and she had also played the Villain-in-Training in the Medea School of Melodrama, but she hadn't had the chance to play a villain who was actually created to be a villain.  Well, I guess villain isn't the right word for Aleysia, she's not evil she's just not human so the human concepts of Right and Wrong mean nothing to her.  That was all filmed on the second super hot day, but luckily there were no heavy and hot costumes involved.  Morgan's outfit was pretty flimsy since it was supposed to have an ethereal look to it. 

The second movie filmed that day was another Fortunate Ones called Forever where a woman wishes to be with her lover forever, then wakes up in a basement with two tied up strangers.  She finds out she has been turned into a vampire by her lover, Keira, and the two strangers are an "offering" aka lunch.  Morgan plays the vampire Keira who turns her girlfriend Devon into a vampire in order to fulfill her wish.  Unfortunately there was an error in communication and Devon was only speaking metaphorically.  Oops. As Morgan says in one of the bloopers, "Well, this is awkward". 

Even though Keira is a vampire she's not necessarily evil.  I mean she does kidnap too innocent people to feast on after turning her girlfriend into a bloodsucking fiend, but she does it out of love so...yeah, that's still not okay.  Again though, Keira isn't human so as with Alysia she doesn't think human laws apply to her.  She's just higher up on the food chain then humans, so it's natural to eat them.  

Despite both her characters being antagonists Morgan does a great job of making them villainous but still relatable. She plays a villain very well and brings depth to what could be very one dimensional characters.  This only took a few hours to film and we filmed it in an air-conditioned basement so the heat wasn't a problem.  Rope burn and sore butts were for the two who were tied up but Morgan wasn't one of them so for once she didn't have to be mangled on set.  Yay!

The next day we returned to Kate's house where we had filmed Forever in the basement to film the third and final Fortunate Ones script for that weekend, Magic-8 which starred Kate Weber. Although Morgan didn't have a role on screen she was a valuable crew member off screen and helped do anything needed to assist in the production.  And it was all inside and air-conditioned so that was awesome.  Well, mostly inside. There was a scene outside in a car, but that wasn't long and the heat wasn't as bad that day. 

Two years later I was able to film with Morgan again for the epic disaster that was the Villain's Workshop.  I'm not going to get into why it was a disaster right now, it just was.  I intended to get people together again that year and finish filming it but that never happened and likely never will.  In the short film almost everyone played a villain.  That's the third production in a row where Morgan has played a villain if you're keeping score out there.  

She had never really gotten to play a sexy, sassy vamp aside from the literal vamp in Forever, but Keira wasn't really sexy or sassy, just menacing and strangely sweet in a dark and twisted way.  So I thought she might enjoy playing a succubus and have fun flirting with her real life fiance, Eric, who played the Mad Scientist.  The character had a terrible name, Savina Jolokia, and poor Morgan couldn't do as much as she wanted to because there ended up being children on the set. 

The filming was in mid-March and I didn't remember how cold it can get at night at that time of year. Everyone was camping out in tents at the MacLeod farm but I don't know if anyone really got any sleep or just spent the whole night shivering.  Once again poor Morgan got the short end of the stick and due to her sexy character was wearing very little clothing - or at least as little as she could get away with around small children. I really should have filmed a different script.  Morgan even brought lots of sexy outfits for her character to keep changing into but only got to wear two or three of them. She wore the only warm one at night so it was probably just as well she didn't keep changing into thiner and skimpier outfits. 

It was another two years before I could film with her again, although to be fair I didn't actually film anything in 2015 (gasp!) so even though I didn't film with her - or even see her - for two years she was actually still in the next production filmed after Villain's Workshop.  In October of 2016 we filmed the 20th Anniversary production of Excerpts from Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. The book is composed of over a hundred separate poems and each poem is the story of a person's life, death, or profession told by their ghost from within their grave. 

I chose it so that everyone could have an equal part and as many or few lines as they wanted depending on the poem they picked.  Morgan Thomas was really busy leading up to it so she didn't have time to do much so I chose one of the shortest poems for her, Mrs. Sibley. Unfortunately we ran out of time to film hers and she ended up only being in the group poem The Hill.  She didn't seem to mind though and I told her I would get people together again to film the rest of them the next year. 

After filming we ended the weekend with a big reunion party at the MacLeod Farm to celebrate 20 years of Sine Fine Films!  Morgan was able to join in the fun, got to spend some time hanging out with Berry as well as everyone else, and eat, drink, and be merry with the rest of us.  She also gave me a spectacular gift of a light up shadow box with the Sine Fine Films logo that a friend of hers made.  She brought a silver sharpie with her so that everyone could sign it.  I still have it displayed prominently with my other SFF memorabilia.  I light it up every year on the SFF anniversary to celebrate. 

Speaking of the logo, although I designed the original logo of the gypsy dancer, using Melantha from Destiny, in front of a starry background at twilight, Morgan redesigned it and made it 100 times better then I ever could have done.  She even added in a shooting star which was the logo of Starlight Productions, the first name of the production group that eventually became Sine Fine Films.  Her logo is the one I use today and will always use as long as she gives me permission to do so.  

I am not always able to follow up on unfinished film shoots, although I always try to do it if I can.  There are many scenes that were left unfilmed for various reasons and even projects like the Villain's Workshop where a second shoot was vital to being able to finish it, yet it never happened.  However, I was finally able to do the second shoot for Spoon River Anthology in February of 2018, two years after the first one.  

Rather then film the short Mrs. Sibley, Morgan decided to take on a longer and more challenging poem and chose Nancy Knapp.  The poem tells the story of Nancy's decent into madness without her ever realizing that she had gone mad.  It's a difficult poem but Morgan nailed it.  Doing a poem from Spoon River Anthology is a lot harder then doing a regular monologue because I don't care if you get my lines rights but since I didn't write Spoon River Anthology and many of the poems are famous they have to be preformed word for word. It's frustrating by Morgan was able to do it.  

She also provided her own costume once again like she did in the previous Spoon River shoot and helped out with other costumes as well as a wig on set.  The day was both sunny and cloudy at different times and it was chilly but it wasn't too cold.  No one could wear a coat on screen unless it was part of their costume and sadly Morgan's was not, but coats were available off screen and it honestly wasn't as cold as most February days are in Central Illinois. 

That was the last time I filmed with her.  Actually it's the last time I filmed with anyone other than my niblings.  I know she will return to film if she is able to do so and I really hope I can film with her again for the 25th Anniversary Production of Family Reunion in 2022.  It was supposed to be filmed in 2021, but COVID happened so filming won't this year. 

Morgan Thomas is a fantastic actress.  She is smart, funny, creative, talented, and beautiful.  She is one of the most dedicated members of Sine Fine Films, one of the biggest fans for many of the productions, and one of my favorite people of all time.  She is in every way amazing.

She's also done some fantastic fan art over the years including character sketches and posters and have given them to me as gifts. She also loves the running joke about purple lizards as much as I do and I have several pictures and purple lizard items she has given me. Thank you so much Morgan!