Alex Hooks and Carson Rowland of 'I Am Frankie' talk to LI kids

We went to the Nickelodeon offices in the Viacom building in Manhattan recently to meet Carson Rowland and Alex Hook. They star in the hit show “I Am Frankie.” Carson stars as Cole Reyes and Alex stars as Frankie Gaines, who is an android. We like this show so much.

How did you make Frankie a robot?

Alex: That’s actually a good question. I practiced a lot. I remember watching videos, actually, about other TV shows and other movies that also have robot characters involved in them. I remember looking at them and thinking, so what are they doing with the role? How are they acting? How are they talking? And I remember doing a lot of work with that. After some practice, I kind of developed Frankie a little more and I made her who she is today. She’s very robotic, if you’ve seen any of the episodes. She does get more human, of course. You know, she becomes a little more realistic.

How hard is it to be an actor?

Alex: It’s hard, but you have to love it, I think. That takes a lot of the stress out of it. If you don’t love what you’re doing, then obviously something is going to seem a little more difficult. Right. But I think it’s very long days. We work 12 hours a day, if it’s a full day. Sometimes it’s less. And it’s difficult. You have to memorize the lines. You have to get into the character, into the scene.

Carson: There’s way more to me than meets the eye, than for acting. You guys don’t see the part where we’re memorizing the lines and working and up all night. But the reward is, you know, it’s amazing. We look to see our performance that is enjoyed by a bunch of kids like you and other people. It’s definitely worth it.  

How many tries does it take to get a scene ready?

Carson: We did have that one scene — we had a couple scenes that were like, we call them one-take-wonders. If you do it in one take, you’re a one-take-wonder. But it rarely happened. It’s like finding a diamond lying on the ground. But would you say, probably five or 10 takes?

Alex: Yeah. It depends. If there’s a lot to a scene, filming a scene could take two hours. But filming your shot, or your lines, or a certain angle could take 10 minutes. So there’s a lot. It’s like filming a scene is an umbrella for so many other little things involved. So it depends, but it’s a long time.

Carson: Exactly. We’re filming with three cameras, right, so if there’s 10 people in a scene, each person has to get a shot. They have to have their close-ups. Even though, say Alex’s shot, Alex’s close-up, could be done in three takes, then you’ve got to move on to the next person and the next person. So that’s why it takes too long.

How did Frankie’s mom know that it was Eliza, Frankie’s twin android who has an evil agenda?

Alex: Frankie’s port, is what it’s called. She’s plugged in the back of her neck. So that’s where the USB comes in. I know Andrew, who is the other Android, his is also in the back of his neck. I guess we don’t have too much of a back story. But I guess Eliza, she’s very manipulative and very mischievous, so hers is in her thumb. So she actually removes her thumb and puts the port in there. So, of course, she may have done it herself. She may have changed it. But I guess Sigourney, Frankie’s mom, she recognized it immediately that if it’s not at the back of the neck, it must not be Frankie.

How does it feel to be the main character on the show?

Alex: It’s amazing. I mean, it comes with a lot of hard work. But I love it. It’s totally worth it, as Carson said — in the end, after all the hard work, it’s very rewarding. I have to put in a little more time than some other people, or I have a couple more lines, but my brain adapts to it. I get used to it after a while. So, you know, it’s still hard but it’s great. I love it.

Do you ever improvise your lines?

Carson: It happens more with characters other than Frankie, because I play a human. So it’s easier to add a "like," or an "um," or something like that, to make it more realistic. Whereas Alex, if she deviates from her lines at all, it’s not robotic. So for me, I come back and toy with it a little bit more, where Alex, she is going to say it the way it is written.

How is Frankie an android in the show — like how do you make it look so realistic?

Alex: Actually, a little secret here, every time you see a close-up on my neck or my port, or they open up my back and you see all the circuitry or the wires, that’s actually not me. So that would be a block of wood with some fake skin on it, with some wires, that the prop department on set would create.

Carson: Don’t tell anyone. OK?

Were there any funny things that have happened on the set?

Carson: That’s the funny thing — I think I have a sense of humor, but I don’t. So that’s the kind of irony behind it. But there are so many.

Alex: I remember the “Mean Girl.” We call them the mean girls. They are not really mean girls.

Carson: That’s Tammy, McKayla and Missy? The three girls that try to bust Frankie of everything.

Alex: Yeah, I remember they finished shooting. It was their last day on set filming, and we have leftover birthday cake from one of the girl’s birthdays, and we snuck up behind them.

Carson: They were doing a photo shoot, and then we had the photographer lead them into a room, and of course we were waiting with some cake, splashed it on their faces. It was a good time.

Alex: It was great. He liked it.

Carson: Yeah.

Alex: Use that on your friends.

Kidsday 1: Yeah, my dad did that to me. My face was covered in whipped cream.

Kidsday 2: For my birthday, all I wanted was to smash a cake in my face.

Carson: It’s fun.

Alex: Yeah, birthday parties are great for that. There’s cake-in-the-face — takes a long time to wash off, though. We had to get wardrobe’s approval. So we had to ask permission. You know, to make sure they don’t need the clothes anymore, because they’re not going to stay clean for much longer.

Carson: So yeah, that was really fun. There was so much fun stuff that’s happened on set. I can’t really remember anything.

Alex: It’s all a blur.

Carson: Yeah, it’s such a blur. When you’re shooting that much, it kind of blends together. But that was definitely a funny moment.

What was one of the coolest episodes?

Alex: My coolest thing I did was in the first one-hour special with Eliza and Frankie. That fight scene took nine hours to shoot. I was on set. I played both [characters], of course. I would have to shoot Frankie’s side. And then I would go switch outfits and they would put some eye liner on me and darken my lips and I would shoot Eliza’s side. Sometimes I would have to go back and forth between the two because the way it would all work out in the end. We would need to shoot some more Frankie. And then shoot some more of Eliza. And there was green screens and stunt doubles and yeah, a lot.

Carson: But it was a lot of fun. And this whole time while she was filming, I was lying on the ground. I don’t know if you guys remember, what happened was Cole kind of freaked out and fell on the ground, and the whole time when Eliza and Frankie are fighting, I am on the ground. They brought me a pillow. They brought me a blanket. And I was just laying there on the ground watching Alex work. It was great. It was awesome.

How did they show Frankie’s super speed and strength?

Alex: To show speed, they would shoot in fast motion on the cameras. We would do everything I would do at normal speed. If I’m reading a book, they would say, flip the pages as if you were just reading normally. In postproduction, they would go back and edit it and then they would speed it up. It looks really good because they shot it with more frames per second, which is faster. So that’s why it all looks almost realistic and cool in the end.

Beth Darrell’s fourth-grade class, Pulaski Road Elementary School, East Northport