Rena Owen has been acting for over 30 years and is known for so many great roles including Once were Warriors, Star Wars and now she can be seen as the eccentric Helen Hawkins on Freeform’s Siren.
Helen owns a tourist shop and is one-eighth mermaid. She is also a direct descendant of Charles Pownall and his mermaid lover, both of whom, are the subjects of Bristol Cove’s mermaid folklore. Helen becomes a friend to Ryn and her tribe as they prepare for war.
“We’re definitely building to a showdown, for sure. The tagline for the season is ‘war is coming.’ And we learned last week how Tia is going about it. She’s going to weaponize the song. So, she’s taken out that echo chamber, we saw her blow it up last week and we get a clearer picture of what she’s planning on doing. I mean she’s out to take the humans down and as we’ve learned about that character, she was done wrong by humans. They took her song out, she was held in captivity, and that has created such anger and the need for vengeance or revenge.”
Helen has a special connection to the deceased mermaids, specifically Sarge and Donna. While Sarge visits her to relay messages, Donna seems to be haunting her.
“The biggest difference is how they died, Donna died on land and was buried on land… Sarge sacrificed himself and was buried in a burial ceremony at sea… he’s a more peaceful spirit. Whereas I think we can tell from the scenes we’re seeing that Donna is haunting Helen, she’s not at peace, and that’s something that will need to be resolved by the end of the season,” said Owen. “(The writers and showrunner) bought them back in the spirit world, because that kind of opened that realm for us to learn more about the mermaid culture… It’s been an interesting storyline for me to explore and it taps into another realm of the mermaid culture and it just makes the show that much more interesting because I think we are all interested in other cultures and learning about other cultures and so we learn more and more about the mermaids and their way of life.”
There is no word on if Siren has been renewed for season four yet.
“I’ve come to realize we’ve got a very fervent, faithful fan base. We just love the show and that the fan base is growing with every season so I’d like to think we’ll go to season four,” said Owen. “There’s a supernatural fantasy element our mermaids, but our town is also grounded in very real-life issues, people exploring their sexuality or people being different or people being outcasts, tourist towns, I think it’s identifiable. I think the thing that’s made the show so exciting is our mermaids aren’t like the mermaids that we kind of grew up on. What I would expect a mermaid to be is a top-level predator, how else would they survive undersea. Ryn is very open and honest and there’s a purity about her and I just think there are so many more storylines the show could explore. There are just so many different possibilities and I think that the season leaves at a kind of, ‘oh my god what’s gonna happen next?’ And it really is a biggie, the season finale is gonna shake people up.”
Owen is excited to see people’s reactions to the finale and while we wait for news on season 4, the rest of season 3 is going to be awesome!
“We’ve got some great stuff coming up in (episodes) 8,9, and 10,” said Owen. “We’ve got our first Bristol Cove wedding. Janine and Calvin are finally getting married, that’s pretty cool. It’s a great episode and we see Tia. Tia is up to no good (tonight) and we see her doing bad things and starting to put her plan together and bringing all the bits and pieces together.”
“And the other big thing too is throughout season three, Ted Pownall has been digging and fishing around for information so we’ve all got to find out what he’s going to do with that information. That’s also another thing to be resolved,” said Owen. “We’ve got three more episodes to go. Like every good season of television, it will be left on a great cliffhanger, a cliffhanger where people go ‘oh my god what’s going to happen?’ I can’t give it away but it’s a good one.”
There are only three episodes left this season, including tonight! Siren airs Thursdays at 10 p.m. on Freeform.
