River Tam
| River Tam | |
|---|---|
| Firefly character | |
Summer Glau as River Tam
|
|
| First appearance | "Serenity" (Firefly episode) |
| Created by | Joss Whedon |
| Portrayed by | Summer Glau |
| Information | |
| Gender | Female |
| Occupation | Crew member of Serenity |
| Relatives | Simon Tam |
| Homeworld | Osiris |
River Tam is a fictional character of the Firefly franchise.
River is portrayed by actress Summer Glau in the 2002 TV series Firefly and the 2005 film Serenity. The nature of the character and her role in the franchise has garnered both praise and criticism from various reviewers. In 2005, Summer Glau won the SFX Magazine award for Best Actress for her role as River in Serenity. Glau later won a Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress, again for her role as River in Serenity in May 2006. Glau was also runner up for Best Actress/Movie in the SyFy Genre Awards for 2006.
Joss Whedon selected Summer Glau for the role after having previously worked with her on another of his shows, Angel. River Tam was Glau's first major role. Glau's inexperience assisted her in playing the character: she likened River's emotional withdrawal to her own initial apprehension on the set.
In many of the hand-to-hand combat scenes featuring the character, particularly those in Serenity, Glau's own experience in ballet dancing was incorporated into her fight choreography.
During River's early childhood, she grew up alongside her brother, Simon, part of the wealthy Tam family on the "core" planet of Osiris. She was extremely gifted intellectually from a very young age and also very graceful. She has been portrayed and described consistently as having always had both a strong thirst for knowledge and a love for and intuitive grasp of dance. By the time she was 14 years old, she had grown “bored” with her studies and was already in the graduate program for physics.
It was at this point that she was sent to a government learning facility known as "The Academy". While her parents and Simon believed the Academy was a private school meant to nurture the gifts of talented children, it was in fact a cover for a government experiment in creating assassins. While in the hands of the Alliance doctors and scientists, River was secretly and extensively experimented on, including surgery that damaged her amygdala. According to Simon, the Alliance attempted to isolate River from her family, though she managed to send a call for help by putting a coded message in a letter to her brother. Simon decoded the message and set out to rescue his then 16-year-old sister, despite his parents' insistence that he was being paranoid. Simon exhausted his personal fortune and sacrificed a promising career in medicine, but eventually located and freed River with the help of anti-governmental groups.
...
Wikipedia