It’s fair to say that Frank Sullivan and Stan Mareno have a complicated relationship on FREQUENCY. After all, Stan basically set up Frank to be murdered before a radio that allowed him to talk to the future gave Frank a chance to avoid his untimely death. Since then we’ve seen Stan try to warn Frank’s daughter, Raimy, off his own questionable tactics as a police office and he’s also recently started blackmailing Frank for having a mistress (or what we think is a mistress) while undercover.
During a visit to the set of FREQUENCY in Vancouver, Riley Smith (Frank Sullivan) and Anthony Ruivivar (Stan Mareno) laid out the relationship between these two men and where it’s going to lead.
“Stan is a pendulum,” Ruivivar explained. “I think that’s what makes him really fun to play, because he’s not your moustache-twirling villain, let’s just say. There’s a lot more that we’ll find out about Stan and what his motivations are. So he does vacillate and hopefully he’s one of those guys that you love to hate. And he definitely represents kind of the catalyst for a lot of that stuff that happens in 1996. And in the present. You should be slightly confused [about him in general], but [you should also be [leaning forward a little bit about what his motivations are and what he is or isn’t trying to do.”
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“He’s definitely edgier or darker than I thought at first,” Ruivivar went on. “But he was explained as kind of a double-edged sword. I still like to frame it that way because the worst thing that you can do is play into being a bad guy or being the villain or whatever that means. The reality is that Stan believes in what he’s about. He believes in loyalty, he believes in the camaraderie of the police force. He believes in that blue line. And if you’re under his wing, if you’re with him, you’re highly protected and flourish. If you’re against him, then he’ll make you pay. At the end of the day, Stan believes he’s getting bad guys off the street. He just has a different way of going about it. He bends the rules. Frank is like a boy scout and Stan feels that that’s a waste of time. You don’t get anything done that way. Stan gets results. Say whatever you want to say about Stan, but he gets results. That’s the kind of prism that I look at for the character and I think helps make a compelling argument.”
Where is this conflict heading? Riviviar teased that “me and Frank are like spy-versus-spy. I swear to God. It’s really fun. There’s a cat and mouse game that goes on between Frank and Stan throughout the whole season that is really fun to watch and fun to play. Because the minute that he thinks he’s one step ahead of me, he realizes that I’m five steps ahead of where he thought I was. So we’re constantly playing that out. He’ll one-up me on something and we constantly go back and forth. Where it’s ultimately headed, I’m not 100% sure myself. But suffice to say, that it’s definitely building to some conflict.”
The problem for Frank, however, is that he might be alone in going up against Stan. We’ve seen an indication that Stan has something on Satch, who is Frank’s ally in 1996. Smith said that “Frank definitely starts to become suspicious of certain people in his life. There’s too many things that are happening that shouldn’t be happening. It’s becoming too obvious that things are getting tipped off. Even the dynamic between Satch and Stan, there’s going to be some tie-ins between that dynamic — Frank, Stan, Satch, and why Satch might be kind of in the middle of some stuff, too. We don’t understand what it is or why, but Frank kinda almost loses his ally in a sense.”
Don’t miss an all new episode of FREQUENCY on Wednesday, November 16 at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.
