Jane Badler is back being evil, really, truly evil, in “Trim Season” – and she wouldn’t have it any other way.
“Trim Season” is a fantastical horror story where young women end up in a really remote California pot farm and find the job offers no exit.
Badler’s Mona resembles the evil Stepmother in Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” morphed into a woman who is the ravenous pampered kitty — with everyone else the little mice that come to her pot farm and once they enter, never leave.
“I was very lucky one of the producers brought me the script about five years ago,” Badler, 70, said in a phone interview from LA where “Trim Season” was to have its premiere.
“I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is a role I’ve got to play!’”
She then decided to produce it as well. “I ended up bringing in some extraordinary people to come alongside us as it just kind of evolved. It took about three years.”
Ever since her career-changing role as Diana in the 1983 alien invasion series “V,” Badler has seen what power being bad offers. If Diana has defined her career for decades, Mona was created from scratch, so to speak.
“I wanted to make sure she was a multi-dimensional character. The way it had been originally written, she was just a cardboard villain. And that was very important to me that that was not the case with her. Or with any of the characters.
“So we spent months and did a lot of work, going from scene to scene through all the different characters, coming up with backstories.”
Mona may be isolated somewhere on a mountain but she likes to show up for dinner in a cabin and still look magnificent and powerful with her trademark gloves and multiple strands of pearls.
“If you’re wearing black leather gloves, it’s threatening maybe. The gloves she buys, beautiful silk gloves, are a very big part of her character. Because her hands will give her away,” Badler noted.
“Her hands are very, very old. Like, hundreds of years old, all veiny and wrinkled. So she has to hide her hands which are also her source of power. When she takes the gloves off, she releases that power. That’s why her hands need to be covered all the time.
“Her pearls were possibly handed from generation to generation. She had at one time a very wealthy family and a lot of her jewels come from a great grandmother.
“She also loves looking beautiful and feeling important. Feeling like she’s above everyone. So she dresses in a way that people go, ‘Wow! You must really be someone.’ ”
“Trim Season” is available on Prime Video
