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"Scandal&amp;#039;s second season begins tomorrow on More4, and trust us when we say that you&amp;#039;re going to want to tune in - there&amp;#039;s a wild ride ahead! We&amp;#039;ve already brought you chats with a bunch of the stars, and now it&amp;#039;s the turn of Darby Stanchfield, who plays Abby. Darby recently spoke with reporters about Abby standing up to Olivia, the show&amp;#039;s dark twists and where she sees her character going in the future, so read on to find out what she had to say...  &amp;gt; &amp;#039;Scandal&amp;#039; Kerry Washington Q&amp;amp;A: &amp;#039;Olivia&amp;#039;s choices made me cry&amp;#039; &amp;gt; &amp;#039;Scandal&amp;#039; exec Betsy Beers Q&amp;amp;A part one: Fitz &amp;amp; Olivia, torture &amp;amp; Mellie &amp;gt; &amp;#039;Scandal&amp;#039; exec Betsy Beers Q&amp;amp;A part two: Cliffhangers, sex &amp;amp; sweaters Abby is the one that kind of stands up to Olivia. Do you enjoy being that character? &amp;quot;Of course I do! It&amp;#039;s so much fun. Just in general, I like to play someone who has no filter and just gets to say whatever she wants. And I feel like oftentimes at Olivia Pope &amp;amp; Associates, we&amp;#039;ll be in a room and everybody will be thinking the same thing but Abby is the only one who has the guts to say it. And it always comes out a little rude or prickly or brash and everybody says, &amp;#039;Abby!&amp;#039; And it&amp;#039;s fun to be that person, absolutely. Good times.&amp;quot; Do you think you have anything in common with her? &amp;quot;Yes and no. I think if I were maybe quite as no filtered as Abby, I&amp;#039;d probably get fired or in trouble a lot more in my life than she does. I&amp;#039;m kind of amazed that she&amp;#039;s still employed sometimes because she really has questioned Olivia quite aggressively. But yes and no.&amp;quot; Scandal is one of those shows with huge twists and turns and surprises - how far in advance do you find out what&amp;#039;s happening? &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s all very close. Near the end of the season - I&amp;#039;d say through the second half of the season - we get the scripts at the table read. We don&amp;#039;t even get them ahead of time. So our table reads are outrageous, because there&amp;#039;s a lot of shocked gasps and jaws dropping on the table. On an episode-by-episode basis, someone will burst into tears or many people will burst into tears.  &amp;quot;For one episode [in season two], &amp;#039;Seven Fifty-Two&amp;#039; with Huck, there wasn&amp;#039;t a dry eye around the table when we got done reading that, because it&amp;#039;s so new and we&amp;#039;re so invested. I was sitting right next to him and he was just, I mean, he was a mess. We all were. So fun!&amp;quot;  I loved in the first season when we first saw Huck torturing someone, because I didn&amp;#039;t realise the show would get so dark. Did you realise when you signed up that it would take that turn? &amp;quot;I didn&amp;#039;t. No, I didn&amp;#039;t see that coming. I knew it was going to be good - the premise to me was too good and the characters were too specific, and from the beginning his was a man of little words and you maybe knew he was background CIA and he was really brilliant in what he did and there was something kind of sinister, but no, how could you know? Totally.  &amp;quot;And I feel like we&amp;#039;ve just got more coming. In some ways, it feels like they just scratched the surface. I mean, you know nothing about Harrison. Nothing! You know very little about Abby. You don&amp;#039;t know about anybody&amp;#039;s lives, really, so I feel like there&amp;#039;s a lot more to come.&amp;quot; How can Abby evolve from here? &amp;quot;Well, I feel like Abby&amp;#039;s quite broken and doesn&amp;#039;t trust her own gut because of what she&amp;#039;s been through, so I think that could evolve or that could improve. I&amp;#039;m not sure these characters will ever really get fixed, so I&amp;#039;m not sure that will be the kind of evolving that she does. The kind of evolving that she does might have more to do with getting involved in scandal, firing her gun, something like that. That might be more of a Scandal style. I think there&amp;#039;s also something to be said about where she might go in her personal life.&amp;quot; &amp;gt; &amp;#039;Scandal&amp;#039; Tony Goldwyn Q&amp;amp;A: &amp;#039;Olivia and Fitz are well suited&amp;#039; &amp;gt; &amp;#039;Scandal&amp;#039; Joshua Malina Q&amp;amp;A: &amp;#039;David&amp;#039;s the conscience of the show&amp;#039; She&amp;#039;s very cautious about her personal life as opposed to her job. Could that change, or is that just who Abby is? &amp;quot;Well, so far, it&amp;#039;s who she is. It&amp;#039;s hard to know what they&amp;#039;re going to do. I like that she&amp;#039;s not very together in her personal life and that she&amp;#039;s incredibly confident. She&amp;#039;ll break into anybody&amp;#039;s apartment with her eyes closed - she can break into anything and she&amp;#039;s quite fierce when she wants to go after an answer and she&amp;#039;s incredibly loyal to Olivia, so I like the dichotomy that she&amp;#039;s so different in those two ways.  &amp;quot;You know, it might be interesting - she has a couple of times messed up at work, but it usually comes from her personal life spilling over... So I guess she&amp;#039;s messed up a little, but I hope it stays messy. I like it. It&amp;#039;s fun to get a scene where I go, &amp;#039;How am I going to do that?&amp;#039; Or, &amp;#039;Wow, that&amp;#039;s going to be fun to play - what&amp;#039;s that going to look like?&amp;#039; Where I&amp;#039;m not just sleeping through it.&amp;quot;  Do you know what&amp;#039;s coming up for Abby beyond season two? &amp;quot;[Shonda] has told me that we&amp;#039;re going to see a lot more of Abby - that we&amp;#039;re addressing Abby. She won&amp;#039;t tell me how. I actually emailed her like, 20 questions one day. I got really brave and I was like, &amp;#039;I&amp;#039;m going to find out&amp;#039; and I did my investigator thing and she didn&amp;#039;t even answer. She didn&amp;#039;t even respond. She doesn&amp;#039;t want me to know, so I have to wait along with everybody else.&amp;quot; There&amp;#039;s been a lot of talk about the effect Twitter has had on Scandal&amp;#039;s success. &amp;quot;We live tweet religiously with the East Coast and the West Coast of the United States when original shows are on every Thursday night. We&amp;#039;re not paid for it, it&amp;#039;s not in our contracts, it wasn&amp;#039;t even discussed ahead of time. It was Kerry Washington&amp;#039;s idea, and it was just the most brilliant idea. And she got [creator] Shonda Rhimes on board and Shonda sent us this email saying, &amp;#039;Okay, guys, we need to all get Twitter accounts and we need to tweet Scandal&amp;#039;. And I was like, &amp;#039;Really? I don&amp;#039;t like Twitter!&amp;#039;  &amp;quot;My concept of it was quite close-minded. I&amp;#039;m a very private person so I didn&amp;#039;t like this idea of tweeting about me. And then I realised, &amp;#039;Oh, this is actually a brilliant device in terms of interacting with the fans&amp;#039;. It&amp;#039;s a lovely way to just get back, to thank the fans for watching the show. And to live tweet is kind of like getting the rewards of doing live theatre. There&amp;#039;s an immediate response from an audience, and granted it&amp;#039;s over text versus right in a live room, but as you&amp;#039;re watching the show along with people - you get floods of tweets on your timeline because you&amp;#039;ve done something naughty on the show. It&amp;#039;s really fun, it&amp;#039;s really great.  &amp;quot;And yeah, it&amp;#039;s spread like wildfire over Twitter. I think Oprah discovered our show from Twitter. She saw Scandal on her timeline on Thursday nights and she finally thought, &amp;#039;I&amp;#039;ve got to check this show out&amp;#039;. And then she ended up interviewing Kerry and Shonda and doing a whole special piece for her show.&amp;quot; It says a lot about how you feel about the show as well that you all tweet together. &amp;quot;It says a lot about two things - how we feel about the show, yes, and how we feel about each other. Because it&amp;#039;s something that we all do together. We&amp;#039;re all passionate about this project, we all love the writing, we all adore Shonda Rhimes. She has a no-asshole policy that she employs when she hires people that she did for Scandal. She actually did background checks on us. That&amp;#039;s her words - that&amp;#039;s what the policy&amp;#039;s called.  &amp;quot;So she got people that she knows that work well together and that are not divas and that really want to be there for each other&amp;#039;s close-ups and wants the other to do well. I think it only helps our storyline. They&amp;#039;re challenging scenes, they move really fast, they&amp;#039;re outrageous circumstances, so for you to be able to push your scene partner or just be there right there for them and want them to do good, as opposed to sabotaging them, it&amp;#039;s only going to [help]. So yeah, Twitter is a testament... it would be very difficult to do if I didn&amp;#039;t like the show. This would be difficult to do if I didn&amp;#039;t like the show.&amp;quot; Scandal season two begins in the UK on Thursday (July 4) at 9pm on More4. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/tv/ustv/interviews/a495061/scandal-darby-stanchfield-qa-im-amazed-abby-is-still-employed/>