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A Behind the Scenes Look at the Video Trailer for The Panama Affair (book)
I was fascinated by Tanya Roberts when she became the last of Charlie’s Angels in the early 1980s. But when she starred in Beastmaster—oozing sex and confidence—my child’s brain was overwhelmed. I wanted to be her. Since then, I’ve had a fascination with redheads.
When I wrote Brianna Morgan, my heroine for The Panama Affair, her physical appearance was a cross between Marcia Cross and Alexina Graham, the first red-headed Victoria Secret’s model. Many people asked me if Brianna Morgan was based on me. I would always shake my head in wonder. “No of course not. She isn’t me. She’s my best friend!”
I had developed such a strong sense of Brianna Morgan’s personality, that she became alive for me. She became a composite of all of my girlfriends, with the looks of a movie star. Okay, remember, it’s fiction.
When I came up with the idea for a video trailer to promote the book, I knew who my Lorenzo Silva would be. After all, that character was based on my husband’s cousin, Marcio Muricy who lives in Portugal. He was coming to visit, and I knew that was my window of opportunity to video the trailer for the book. But I was having a hard time imaging who might play Brianna.
I threw out a casting call on Facebook and got a pretty good response, considering I live in a Latin country and my heroine needed to have red hair. The first person to respond was Jeannette Bowes, someone I knew very casually from my year with a weekend house in the Altos del Maria mountains. She’d read my book and had loved it. She send me a private message, saying her daughter, Jade, would be perfect! I flipped through Jade’s online photos, and saw she had strawberry blonde hair with green eyes. The biggest problem was that Jade was in Canada… and the rest of us were in Panama.
Over the next few weeks, we kept chatting, and finally Jade bought a plane ticket to come to Panama.
