Louisa So, Rebecca Zhu Have Many Opposing Scenes in “The Forgotten Valley”
Louisa So (蘇玉華), Rebecca Zhu (朱晨麗), Raymond Wong (黃浩然), Grace Chan (陳凱琳), Katy Kung (龔嘉欣), and Lau Kong (劉江) attended an event to promote TVB drama, The Forgotten Valley <平安谷之詭谷傳說>. Focusing on the uprising of women in a patriarchal village, the drama will premiere on January 15.
In the drama, Louisa, Rebecca, and Katy portray three of Lau Kong’s four wives. Although Louisa had many memorable roles through her career, the 49-year-old actress expressed that The Forgotten Valley is one of her most representative works. Louisa shared some spoilers on the storyline. “In an extremely patriarchal village where men are superior, women experience a lot of oppression. Many things are unfair. I feel that this subject is very refreshing. At the beginning [of the drama], I will cause Rebecca to have a miscarriage. Ever since then, she continues to give me a hard time. That is, until I find out that her baby is not our husband’s.”
With the interesting plotline, is Louisa confident about thee ratings? “Ratings are hard to predict, but I am confident that this script is one of quality.”
Rebecca shared that she has many scenes opposite Louisa. In addition to the quarrels of sharing a husband, Rebecca also continues to bear a malicious attitude toward Louisa in the drama. Rebecca said, “Louisa, Lau Kong, and I have many scenes together. There was a lot of pressure at first, because I really like [Louisa]. I enjoy watching her dramas. Every time I have scenes with her, it is a learning opportunity. Even if she is sitting there, she is acting through the emotions of her eyes. After a while, I began to find it enjoyable, because it is a very good learning opportunity. I’m very happy with the collaboration this time.”
Source: On.cc
This article is written by Huynh for JayneStars.com.
Hrm, I hope it’s not 18 eps of the wives fighting and last 2 eps of them come together and fight back against the men. Is this another forbidden palace scheming and fighting in a village setting? =O trailers looked so hopeful! *crosses fingers*
@jjwong Probably will be, lol. I like Louisa and Raymond as well as Lau Kong, but the fact that this series has Grace Chan in it (and by the looks of things, she seems to have a meaty role – I mean, her picture is even bigger than Louisa’s in several of the posters), it’s definitely an auto-skip for me. I don’t care how much I like the other actors or how interesting the storyline is, Grace is undoubtedly going to ruin it anyway so why bother? Plus it sounds like this is going to be another one of those large family dispute / scheming / infighting oriented series, which frankly I’m sick of nowadays….
@llwy12 Yea, knowing TVB MO, I think it’s more of same old multiple eives scheming than anything out of the box.
Take My Unfair Lady for example. Can’t deny that took the idea from HKTV To Be Or Not To Be and managed to regress. TBONTB was truly female focused. Neither female leads need saving. They made their decision and lived with it. Sure, there were other male leads impact them but they were the head strong one. Maggie didn’t need saving. On the contrary, she changed that dude (forgot his name) perspective from being a player to homebody. The other female lead didn’t need her husband nor that friend. She knew what she wanted/needed, ie stay with her b-tard husband even though her biz male partner said other wise. In the end, she (and the bond of sisterhood) saved herself/her.
So yea, I don’t have high hope for this series. I might give a few eps a try. Like you, I like Louisa, Raymond and Lau Kong. Gawd, I hope less of Grace but I’m sure she has more screen time seeing how she’s in romantic relationship with Raymond. 🙁
@jjwong
You know, it’s interesting that TVB has yet to produce a series with truly strong women in it who are at the same time realistic yet not stereotypical. In its short existence, HKTV was able to do it and most importantly, do it well (examples: To Be Or Not To Be, The Menu, The Election, etc). TVB has too many restrictions in terms of what they are and aren’t allowed to produce (Wong Cho Lam even reiterated this recently in an interview), so it’s hard to have too many expectations where creativity is concerned.
I have zero expectations for Forgotten Valley. From the tidbits that the cast has revealed so far, it sounds more like a family infighting / scheming series than a true female uprising / overturning society series. Oh and since this is TVB, you know that the love relationship between Raymond and Grace is going to be the central focus — TVB always puts the romance stuff in front of all other story arcs.
@llwy12 Are the restrictions self impose (internal upper echelons opinions) or actual HK regulations? I get no racy scenes, nudity and dark horror. But there are soooo many other ways to progress and be creative with the script. They go half-arse in everything. Jessica as a pseudo-feminist in MUL. Pahko/Benjiman so called bromance that was practically none existence until the end 2 or 3 eps in LW2. The flawed stubborn old ways of thinking of the Wong in HoG3. They took a step, or half of step being different then bam, everything was the same rainbow and unicorn…
Yea, I shouldn’t get my hope up with Forgotten City… pity…
@jjwong Mostly self-imposed, as the broadcasting regulations for TV are pretty similar to what you would see for the free channels over here in the US. (i.e. no nudity, horror, etc). There’s a book that one of TVB’s former scriptwriters Alex Pau wrote many years ago not long after he had left TVB (if his name sounds familiar, that’s because he later went to HKTV and was the scriptwriter for To Be or Not To Be) — in it, he talks about the various taboo topics that TVB upper management won’t allow their scriptwriters to write about. If they tried pitching a series with those taboo themes in them to management, it was guaranteed that management would ban the idea. I don’t remember all the topics he talked about since I read the book a long time ago, but 2 obvious and unsurprising ones were politics and religion (so a series like The Election would never be made at TVB). Another taboo one is the media, especially it the media is painted in a bad light — this one was confirmed later on when TVB’s own producer Wong Wai Sing said that he had once pitched an idea similar to The Menu to TVB execs but they said no because it painted the media in a bad light and they were afraid of the controversy it would cause (obviously TVB missed out, since The Menu became HKTV’s biggest hit). Basically, TVB’s unwritten rule when it comes to scripts for their series is to avoid controversial topics that could open them up to lawsuits / legal battles.
@llwy12 how pitiful. Not just TVB, the whole HK entertainment. They seem to regressed. We have so much culture, folklore, and legends. We choose to butcher everything and only focus on CGI; we’re not even good at it. Lol. Pity.
Case in point, the Wall movie with Matt Damon was so horrible! All these remake of Journey to the West are rubbish, no story at all. No originality or stay to the source core with all those adapt of Jin Yong. All crappy…