Christina Ricci is one flight attendant you would love to meet.

CHRISTINA Ricci makes a surprisingly good flight attendant: she’s pleasant, polite, efficient, works well under pressure and is real easy on the eye (let’s be honest, this is still a pre-requisite in most airlines). Only problem? She’s a little stubborn and opinionated and won’t always do what is expected of her (like wear a girdle) which lands her in trouble quite often.

Of course, Ricci isn’t really a flight attendant. It’s her character Maggie Ryan on the television series, Pan Am, who is the stewardess. Head stewardess, actually.

Set in 1963, Pan Am centres around the lives of four stewardesses on the Pan American World Airways or Pan Am, which was the most prestigious airline in the world at the time.

Woman of strength: Christina Ricci is Maggie Ryan in TV series Pan Am which centers around the lives of four stewardesses on the Pan American World Airways or Pan Am, which was the most prestigious airline in the world at the time.

Back in the 1960s, flying – particularly across the globe – was something new and exhilarating both for travellers and the flight crew, particularly the elite group of women who were recruited as flight attendants.

Pan Am stood out among the airlines of its time, says series creator, writer and executive producer Jack Orman, as it focused on international flights, eschewing domestic routes unless specifically transporting politicians and visiting diplomats to meetings, conferences or summits.

Pan Am was the official aircraft for all presidential press charters, jetting journalists alongside Air Force One around the world right until the airline ceased operations in 1991.

And the female flight attendants? They were pioneers of their time.

“It was a coveted position at the time for young women. They needed to be college-educated. They needed to speak several languages and they were really pioneers in a lot of ways,” says Orman, best known for writing/producing the 1990s hit TV series ER.

Pan Am was based on the experiences of former Pan Am stewardess, Nancy Hult Ganis (who is also executive producer of the series). It aims to relive the halcyon days of the airlines and the women who served on board the aircraft. These women, according to Hult, were among the top 10 wage earners (for women) in that era – they stayed in the best hotels, received the best per diem and enjoyed nearly free travel at anytime, anywhere.

In a telephone interview from New York, in the United States, Ricci speaks about her decision to join the cast of Pan Am which premiered in America last September.

“I think Pan Am is meant to be escapist. It focuses on a period in our (American) history that was just at the cusp of major social change. It was at a high (period) in our society ... an optimistic time right before the bubble burst. Especially for the women (stewardesses) … it was really their hey day. It was a time when most women did not have much freedom and independence.

“These were young women who were getting to see the world and were not under anyone else’s control but their own. They were getting to see things that most American men did not get to see. They would never have had these kinds of lives if they had stayed home and been housewives. They were really living independent, glamorous lives that they’d only read about in magazines. They were getting to see the world.

“If you speak to ex-Pan Am stewardesses from this time, you realise that they still feel really sentimental about it because it really was their glory days. The shows may seem to romanticise the era but that’s because in the memories and minds of these women, it is a romantic time in their lives.”

At 31, Ricci is a veteran actress, having acted for over two decades of her life. Her acting career began when she was just nine, back in 1990 when she was cast in the movie Mermaids alongside Cher and Wynona Ryder. A year later, she was cast in The Addams Family as Wednesday Addams, the daughter of Morticia Addams (Angelica Houston). Ricci was a standout as the pallid, malevolent, pig-tailed Wednesday. She was so good that she became known as a young actress with a propensity for dark, haunting and quirky roles.

Ricci went on to star as Wendy, a dysfunctional teen in Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm (1997); as Dede Truit, a 16-year-old girl who seduces her gay brother’s boyfriend in The Opposite Of Sex (1998); teenager Layla who is kidnapped by an ex-con and develops feelings for him in Buffalo 66; Katrina Van Tassel in Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow a year later and in 2006, as the delightfully quirky Penelope in the movie of the same title – a modern-day fairy tale about a girl born under a curse (she wears a pig’s snout and ears) that can only be broken when she finds true love.

Career breakthrough

Her role on Pan Am, however, is her first starring role in a television series. She’s guest starred in several TV shows before – in Ally McBeal (she was in seven episodes in the series’ finale in 2002) and Grey’s Anatomy (she was a paramedic in the last two episodes of season 2) but she’s never had her own show ... until now.

“I have wanted to do TV for quite some time and was just waiting for the right time and the right show. A lot of the time, pilot season would roll around but I’d already be on a film and would not be available. This all just worked out right, timing wise. And, it was the right piece of material. I loved the concept and I liked Maggie a lot. I like what I’d been told she would be like in future episodes and was really excited about it,” she shares.

Maggie Ryan, her character on the series, is certainly a departure from the dark, messed-up characters Ricci has been known to play. Maggie is spunky, fun and opinionated: quite a bit like herself, the actress opines.

“Jack (Ormon) spent quite a lot of time with us during the pilot and I think he included a lot of our own characteristics into each of the girls’ character. I think you see a lot of stuff in each character that you would find in each of us personally.

“Like Maggie, I am very outspoken and stand up for others. And if I see an injustice I am very quick to speak and I think Maggie has that in her. I am very quick to fight the good fight or fight the fight that I think is the good fight, which may end up being the wrong fight and later I’ll have to apologise for it … it’s very embarrassing. But, yeah, I think he saw that in me and made that a part of her,” she shares.

Ricci also appreciates how the show, though fun and light-hearted, breaks stereotypes about female flight attendants. In the series, the women are strong and very much in charge of their lives; able to stand up to the men around them. They confront social norms and they stick up for one another. They are a sisterhood to be reckoned with.

Says Ricci, “We were told by Nancy that because it was so difficult to become a Pan Am stewardess, once these women got the job they felt like they had nothing else to compete for. They’d all made it and they felt that they had made it as one. There was a sisterhood among the stewardesses … that’s something that I’ve taken from the show. A lot of these women are still very close ... they come to the set all the time.

“It’s great to play women who found a way to play the game and by playing the game sort of beat the system in a way. And it’s great to play women who found freedom that they could not have found any other way. It’s great to know that you can’t keep people’s spirits down.

“What has changed my perception about flight attendants is just seeing how hard these women work and hearing stories about the things they’d have to do on flight … How they have to act in emergencies and so on. I have so much more empathy and respect and just awe really for the lives that they led.”

If there is one thing she doesn’t appreciate it’s how the Pan Am girls had to wear girdles to give them a very distinct shape.

“This is my first experience with the girdle. They are extremely uncomfortable. You can’t do anything fun in them. You can’t run, jump and god forbid you have to pee. We wear girdles and this thing called ‘long lines’ that make us have this very specific 60s shape. Some of the girls wear them more than others, depending on the different kinds of women at the time. My character Maggie doesn’t like to wear them and so she doesn’t and quite often gets in trouble for not wearing them.

“Having said that, we (actresses) were not required to be of a certain size or shape (to get the role). If you look at all the girls, you will see that we are all of different shapes and sizes. This is certainly one of the most tolerant shows I have been on in terms of never mentioning to any of us how we should look,” explains Ricci.

As for her experience doing TV? Ricci is basking in it!

“The hours on TV are much more intense. You are used a lot more, there’s a lot less waiting around, a lot less downtime. And, people are a lot less precious about acting which for me is great because I just like to go in and work really hard and feel like I am a member of the crew. I like feeling just exhausted at the end of the day … feeling like I have done the most work I possibly could.”

While the future of the show is still up in the air – no definite news on whether the show has been cancelled but fans are petitioning for it to continue – Ricci is looking forward to what’s in store for her character whom she says is very much a work in progress.

“Maggie is someone who is trying to figure out who she is. Throughout the season we see her questioning herself and she goes through a few transformations. This is what’s so exciting about TV. As an actress , you don’t really know where the show is going. Every time you get a script, you open it and wonder what your character is doing this week.”

For now, Ricci says she’s having fun with her character and enjoying what it feels like to be a glamorous Pan Am stewardess in the 1960s. Don’t ask her to do it full time though.

“I like the fake world (of being a stewardess) but I would never be able to do it. I’m not very good at serving things. Even when I have to do pretend service in the background of someone’s else’s scene, I am always dropping things and whispering to the extras to ‘take the plate away’ or something. I’d be just terrible at it.”

Pan Am premieres exclusively on AXN Beyond HD (Astro B.yond channel 720) tomorrow at 9.50pm.

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