Actress Gates McFadden is best known for her decade-long voyage aboard the USS Enterprise on both Star Trek: The Next Generation and in the STNG movies. As Doctor Beverly Crusher we mostly saw McFadden shrouded in a blue smock in ship’s sickbay, but a new music video from Onsen shows off her sexier side.
The video is the brainchild of writer/comedian Price Peterson and Onsen lead vocalist Drew Straus. “Onsen is my favorite band,” Peterson explains. “I’m lucky enough to be close friends with Drew. ‘Follow the Numbers’ has been my favorite song of theirs ever since I heard the demo. I made sure Drew knew that I wanted to make the video for it and for some reason he let me!”
Peterson is familiar to fans of Teen Wolf, The Vampire Diaries, and American Horror Story for his hilarious “photo recaps” of those and other shows for TV Guide, Entertainment Weekly, YahooTV, and TV.com. But, like everyone in Hollywood these days, he’s creative in a lot of different directions at once. “I guess I would say my main thing is TV writing,” he says. “My writing partners and I have gotten two of our pilots produced by pretty big networks but neither has been picked up to series. We’re hoping the idea we just sold will happen but as everyone knows Hollywood is a game of shadows. In the meantime, I’m really lucky to be able to pay my bills watching TV and doing dumb recaps.”
While directing a music video is very much in his professional wheelhouse, directing a star like Gates McFadden was a stretch. “She is the perfect combination of highly trained and serious about her craft while also having a great sense of humor about herself,” Peterson opines. “Last year I saw ‘Krusher Does Krusher,’ a really wonderful theater piece she produced about her most famous character. It was weird and hilarious and emotional, and I knew I wanted to work with her somehow. Drew and I brought her the idea for our video. When she said ‘yes’ I couldn’t believe it.”
McFadden Embraces the Weird
Peterson was excited but nervous about asking an actress he admires to do some pretty weird stuff. “From surrounding her with young hardbodies to having her undress on camera, to having her break down emotionally, to having her run down several flights of stairs in heels in the dark, there wasn’t one second where I felt totally comfortable with what we were asking of her. But she was such a great sport and absolutely nailed what we were going for.”
For her part, McFadden says she loves the group, the song, and the video, “Obviously I am a huge fan of Onsen or would not have done [the] video.” She describes it as a “Fun, strange, cool one-shot video, not easy to do.” “Of course,” Peterson adds, “she had so many great ideas and brainstorms for making her performance even better. She gets it.”
With the new fall television season ramping up, Peterson will soon return to his paying gigs covering shows for the major entertainment sites but his experience on “Follow the Numbers” has him itching to direct again. “I love directing. I’m really happy with how the video turned out but I’m even happier with how fun the filming ended up being. Tons of my favorite people all working together (for free!) on one of the most festive, stress-free sets I’ve ever experienced. I’m really proud of that. I sure hope to do more directing, but we’ll see.”
“Follow the Numbers” is available on Onsen’s new album Earthquake Weather from Cosmic Dreamer Music and iTunes.
