‘Roswell, New Mexico’s Jeanine Mason On Liz’s Big Season 3 ‘Threat,’ That Funeral Scene & More
Liz Ortecho has her hands full. HL got EXCLUSIVE scoop from Jeanine Mason about Max’s dire future, Liz’s new guy, Maria’s terrifying vision, and more.
Roswell, New Mexico returned for season 3, and Liz Ortecho has seemingly started a new life outside of Roswell. She’s got her new job in Los Angeles and a new romance on the horizon with Heath. However, back home in Roswell, there’s a lot to death with: Max is dying, Max has a clone, and Maria is having game-changing visions. HollywoodLife spoke EXCLUSIVELY with Jeanine Mason about how Liz is going to react when she returns to Roswell and finds out Max is a ticking time bomb.
“I think the main thing is she is immediately confronted with the ticking clock, and it’s quite literally his heart,” Jeanine told HollywoodLife. “The race to figure it out is a really fun tactic that our writers created and the urgency that these characters need to move on. But Liz is someone whose process is slow. She’s a scientist, it’s triple-checked. It’s a hypothesis, it goes through a whole scientific method, and then we come to a conclusion that we feel can maybe be the answer. She’s got no time anymore.”
Liz does make her way back to Roswell, and Heath will be joining her at some point. “He is way more involved in the story than it might appear off the top,” Jeanine revealed. “I think people are going to be really surprised. I’m was thrilled for Steven [Krueger] because he’s a hell of an actor, and we got to use the sh*t out of his gorgeous work this season. I’m so excited.”
With Heath in Roswell, get ready for “jealous Max,” according to Jeanine. But don’t count out Max and Liz just yet. “They are cosmically destined,” Jeanine noted. “Ultimately, what she realizes is she wants him with the complication. She is expecting him to want her with her complication. And that’s sort of what these two lead characters have to offer each other. She finds her way back to Roswell pretty quickly, and she is navigating these two questions of like, what does it mean to make a decision one way or the other? And what does my life look like? What are the big repercussions of those decisions? She’s really in a real conversation with it all
season long. She and Max are complicated. I think both of them are just characters, whether they want to admit it or not, who live for the complications.”
On top of Max dying, there’s also his clone, Mr. Jones, to worry about. Liz has no idea about Max’s clone, and Jeanine teased that Mr. Jones is going to cause chaos for everyone.
“He’s a threat to Liz more than anything off the top, of course, because she doesn’t know about it,” Jeanine told HollywoodLife. “She’s coming back into Roswell with no defense, completely unarmed with no information to protect herself. This person looks like her beloved so she’s very vulnerable at the top, and then he is a master tricker. He’s a master manipulator, and he really starts to pull at our alien trio, particularly at Isobel and Michael. They have to really make decisions on where their allegiance lies and how strong they are mentally to handle all of his poking around. I think Lily [Cowles] had a really incredible season. She just was so beautiful as Isobel. She really is the center of that trio. He plays with her too much, and she has to regain her control and really be the unifier of that trio and of our Scooby-Doo gang as a whole. I’m excited for people to see Isobel’s arc this season. It ends on such as fun place and a place that I’ve been asking for since day one for Isobel.”
In the season 3 premiere, Maria has visions of a funeral. First and foremost, Jeanine confirmed that the funeral is real. “Oh, yeah. She’s really getting real. These are real premonitions,” Jeanine said.
The funeral visions included Maria, Alex, Isobel, Max, but there are a number of characters missing, including Liz. Jeanine teased Maria’s important arc this season.
“That’s a really big part of Maria’s story because her having access to these visions puts her at risk,” Jeanine said. “It means that she’s letting her beautiful mind, her beautiful alien powers, continue to grow in a way that was really damaging to her mother instead of keeping them under control by inhibiting them to some degree. But Maria is a real fighter and just like so brazenly for the group and for these friends really starts to put herself in crazy, risky positions to get more answers and more clarity on these things that she’s seeing. We do start to see that we can make alterations, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re altering things. It gets more and more complicated as we make changes to her visions. We spent a lot of time in Maria’s visions and in the mindscape this year.” Roswell, New Mexico airs Mondays on The CW.