MTV’s upcoming drama “Finding Carter” follows a girl who finds out that she was abducted as a toddler, and attempts to adjust to her new life after she’s reunited with her biological family.
Naturally, at the panel for the show at the Television Critics Association at the Beverly Hilton hotel on Friday, talk turned to the topics of child abduction and what it’s like for a mother to lose a child.
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Asked about what kind of research she had done to prepare for the series, executive producer Terri Minsky noted that while she read up on the sadly abundant tales of child abduction that have made headlines in recent years, the new series doesn’t draw from them.
“There are some fascinating stories about people who found out later in life that they had been abducted and how they adjust, but I didn’t base Carter on any of that,” Minsky, the mother of a teenage daughter, told the journalists at the panel. “Carter, to me, she is my daughter. When she speaks it is with a voice that I have heard all my life.”
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Cast member Cynthia Watros, who plays Elizabeth, Carter‘s biological mother in the series, likewise said that slipping into character was largely a matter of personal experience.
“I am a mother of twins, and I don’t think that I had to dive too deep to feel the pain and agony that you feel when you lose a child,” Watros said, “because it is my greatest fear.”
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Kathryn Prescott, who plays the titular Carter, admitted that she hadn’t done research on kidnapping in preparation for the role — because her character had grown up unaware that she was a victim of it.
“I didn’t actually do any research on child abductions,” Prescott said, adding that Carter “didn’t grow up knowing that she had been abducted … the family that she was taken from grew up with that, but she didn’t.
“I wanted to come at it from that fresh place of not knowing anything about it,” Prescott added.