'Treadstone' actor Gabrielle Scharnitzky says Petra’s journey is about ‘fighting for what she has fought for’ after being abandoned by KGB
Gabrielle Scharnitzky who plays the role of Petra in the USA Network spy thriller ‘Treadstone’, recently spoke to MEA WorldWide (MEAWW) about the show and her role. In the show, Petra is a no-nonsense patriot and a member of the K.G.B.
Her character is played by two actors. The character’s younger version is played by Emilia Schüle. The older Petra is played by Scharnitzky. Petra, in the show so far, is the only character that is present in both timelines of the show -- the 1970s, at the height of the Cold War, and present-day.
“The thing about Petra is that she is like a hedgehog,” said Scharnitzky, trying to explain the character’s resilience. “When we see her in the beginning, being undercover for 25 years as a Russian farmer means a whole of a lot. It means 25 years of poverty; 25 years of living in the nowhere-land; and she did that,” she said. “And she taught me so much.”
In the show, Petra is the sole guardian of a Soviet-era nuclear payload called “Stiletto 6”, hidden away in a silo under a farm in a Russian village. On that farm, Petra lives with her blissfully ignorant husband.
Of course, when he discovers it, it takes Petra not a single moment of hesitation to take his life on the spot. The Cold War may have ended, but her commitment to the motherland had not.
With the end of the Cold War, things in the world of intelligence changed almost as much as it did in the sphere of politics. And somewhere in between, it seems that the people in power forgot about Petra the guardian; a matter that she does not take lightly when she realizes it.
Scharnitzky said, of course, Petra was angry. “How do you feel when you feel forlorn and nobody is taking care of you when you have devoted your life to it?” she asked, adding, “and there you are: alone. Lots of pain. That’s a pain that creates so much anger. Because, you know, she has given her life. That’s big!”
At the end of episode 2, we see Petra going to Moscow to meet her old “friends”. On the subject of what her drive was, in trying to reconnect, Scharnitzky said, “I had to ask myself: What is the quest? Does she want to kill everyone? And I think it’s not that. It’s about finding out what is my position in that. What do you do with me at this point where I have given everything? You can’t just throw me away! So, she wants to challenge. She is fighting, not for herself really. She is fighting for what she has fought for and lived for all of her life. She can’t let go of that; it’s impossible. But the journey is so interesting and what she has to learn on that journey is the most interesting. That is why I took on the character.”
At the very beginning of the show, we see a young Petra try and train the American spy John Randolph Bentley (Jeremy Irvine). Her mission, however, failed. Despite being drugged and hypnotized and tortured, Bentley manages to break free and escape, but not before engaging in a fist-fight with Petra -- a fight where she loses her little finger.
To Petra, Bentley’s rebuttal to the programming was a kind of betrayal. Speaking on that, Scharnitzky said, “I think the most important thing is the question of loyalty. Who are you loyal to? She and John Bentley, they are loyal. They meet in that same spirit. That’s an energy that sort of dissolves all paradigms of ‘you have to do this or you have to do that’. It’s meeting a kindred spirit in a sense.”
The third episode of ‘Treadstone’ features a terrific fight scene featuring Scharnitzky. It was a particularly challenging bit. “I trained for that scene for almost four weeks, every day, except for Saturday and Sunday. And Buster Reeves, the action director, he has such an incredible team of stunt people. They did everything to make me comfortable and do the moves and I didn’t know I have those muscles,” she said. “In a sense, I had to retrain my brain. Because my feet don’t do what you want them to do. And they helped me. In the end, I wanted to do everything.”
“We all have different faces. It’s different when you’re at home and it’s different when you go to the office, right? We all put on faces. Like the film with Jim Carrey, ‘The Mask’, she has the challenge to understand what her true face is. That’s her journey,” Scharnitzky expounded on Petra, summing up what lies at the core of ‘Treadstone’.