Bianca Lawson

Lawson Has Bite In Supergator

Bianca Lawson, who co-stars in the upcoming SCI FI original movie Supergator, told SCI FI Wire that she spent much of her time on the run. In the film, a Hawaiian village is threatened by both a volcano that’s about to erupt and a voracious, giant mutant alligator that’s escaped the lab where it was created.

Lawson (Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Kendra) plays Carla, a newspaper reporter who joins forces with her former teacher, volcanologist Scott Kinney (Brad Johnson), as well as a scientist (Kelly McGillis) and an alligator hunter (John Colton), in an effort to save the day. Supergator premieres July 14 at 9 p.m. ET/PT.

"Carla is sort of in the thick of it from the very beginning," Lawson said in an interview. "She’s a journalist and just going along on this adventure, but is one of the only people left alive by the end, so she gets very deeply involved in the whole thing. So it was mostly running and trying not to be killed. Everyone around her is dropping like flies, and she’s just trying to survive and get back to the hotel."

Lawson said that most, but not all, of the scenes featuring the supergator were realized using computer graphics and that she was usually called up to act to something that simply wasn’t there. "We weren’t running from anything," she said. "We were just sort of pretending we were running from something. But there is a scene where I’m in a boat, and we’re in the water, and the boat gets hit by the supergator. In the water, to give me an eyeline, they had a tail. It was actually a pretty good tail and fins, and it’d be pretty scary if you were in the ocean by yourself swimming one night. So they had pieces of the gator that were actually quite frightening to look at."

Lawson added: "But I was actually quite scared doing that scene, because I was fully clothed, and I had these really heavy boots on, and I was sort of sinking to the bottom of the ocean. They were like, ’Wow, you looked really scared.’ And I was. I couldn’t hold myself up because I had these heavy boots on!"