Danielle Panabaker might not be able to tell you exactly how long she’s been working on the Vancouver set of the CW series The Flash, but she knows it’s been somewhere around nine months.
“We went up the first week of July to start filming, and I had a friend who got pregnant right around the time I left,” the L.A. denizen says. “Last weekend I went to her baby shower, and she’ll have had the baby before I’m done filming season one. That’s how I know it’s been a long stretch.”
Still the actress, who plays Caitlin Snow on the series, isn’t complaining. In fact, she’s come to enjoy her adopted hometown.
“I love Vancouver, it’s an amazing city,” she says. “It’s absolutely beautiful where I live, right on the water, and I can walk my dog at the marina every morning.”
The human company isn’t so bad, either.
“We’re very lucky: everyone in the cast loves one another and gets along quite well,” she says. Jesse L. Martin has sort of become the patriarch of our show. He’s got a really great place with a lot of space, so inevitably you can find us at his apartment. That’s just where we all congregate on weekends.”
And during the week, Panabaker and her cohorts keep quite busy. The first season of the series is set to include 23 episodes, each of which can take up to nine days to film and invariably includes some kind of never-before-seen super-powered villain.
“Our first season has had a big learning curve in terms of the special effects,” Panabaker says. “I’m constantly impressed with how much they accomplish every week. It’s funny, every time a new script comes out somebody inevitably throws his hands up and says, ‘This cant be done! There is no way we can do this in one episode of television,’ and yet somehow we always manage to pull it off.”
So, even if the Georgia native is logging most of her north of the border, it seems to be time well spent. “Every day,” she says, “is a new surprise.”
