Uncategorized
https://www.themarysue.com/interview-eliza-taylor-thumper/
One of the things that makes The CW’s The 100 so awesome is the nuanced and finely-calibrated central performance by Eliza Taylor, who plays our favorite bisexual dystopian leader, Clarke Griffin. In the new movie Thumper, Taylor brings that talent to a realistic, contemporary story about the American meth epidemic from the point of view of the underprivileged youth most likely to buy and deal.
Thumper, written and directed by Jordan Ross, is about teens in a low-income neighborhood who are lured into working for a violent and dangerous drug dealer. When a new girl harboring a dark secret arrives in town, their relationship jeopardizes everything. Taylor plays that girl, Kat Carter, who forms a bond with a guy known as Beaver (played by fellow Aussie actor, Daniel Webber), as they are both lured into a life neither is entirely comfortable with, but that they go along with for reasons outside themselves.
When I had the chance to speak with Taylor on the phone, she revealed that Thumper basically came together because she and Ross became better friends the more they talked about it, encouraging her to maintain her interest.
However, the script on its own lured her to the project initially because she knew that drug epidemics weren’t exclusive to the United States. “In Australia, even where I grew up,” she says. “the drug culture with kids getting involved with the wrong people was very prominent when I was 17, 18.” That, and the truthful way in which those kids were written in this script, were what drew her to the film.
“Being in talks with Jordan a couple of years ago, when I was new on the scene, we became really good friends, so I just wanted to do it more,” Taylor explains. “And then eventually, I thought it had kind of gone away, and I was shooting Season Three, I think, of The 100, and I get a call from Jordan and he’s like We’re doing it! So, here we are.”
I asked her if anything surprised her about the extent of the meth problem here in the States versus where she grew up, and she said, “The only surprise to me was that, I know if you look at the stats in Australia, they’ve gone way up, especially when it comes to methamphetamines. I think it either is or was the meth capital of the world. And I used to work in bars when I was a teenager … and [meth] had become socially acceptable. And it terrified me, especially having a younger brother grow up and going out in a world where that’s okay. That terrified me. So, I was surprised that it was just as bad in the U.S.”
One of the themes of the film is that it’s underprivileged kids who are being taken advantage of, and often bear the brunt of all the punishment when it comes to law enforcement. Meth cooks take advantage of the fact that these kids are desperate, and then let them take the fall when things go south.
“Which is so frustrating!” Taylor exclaims. “I’ve seen the film three times now, and that whole aspect of it still gets me. And I’ve talked to police officers who’ve gone CI [confidential informant], and they do get so frustrated having to bust the dealers. These kids who don’t know any better, who are trying to earn money for their families.”
Thumper is also surprisingly feminist, which I wasn’t necessarily expecting from a film of its type. And yet, there’s a lot of examination of Kat’s life choices in a very feminist way. There’s also one scene in particular that surprised me, in which the meth cook, played by Pablo Schreiber, is approached by a teen girl named Gina, who is a meth addict. She needs a hit, and is willing to do whatever he wants to get it. Yet just when you think he’s going to accept her offer, he sends her home and says, “You’re better than this.”
“That scene in particular,” Taylor says. “I was kind of waiting for him to be like C’mon, get in. But he doesn’t. He has kids, he has a good side, even though he’s really messed up, you kinda see his side of the story.”
When I asked her how she and Ross approached her character, and whether there were conversations about the other female characters from a feminist perspective, she replied, “We pretty much talked about every single aspect over the years. I think that Jordan has such a knack for real storytelling, and every character in this film is someone he’s come across. And so, these women, they exist in the world, and he just wanted to tell their story, which is really fucking cool.”
One of those female characters, Kat’s boss, is played by Game of Thrones’ Cersei herself, Lena Headey. Taylor joked that she definitely was taking notes and asking Headey for tips from working on Game of Thrones to help her with her work on The 100.
“She is a force to be reckoned with,” Taylor said. “[Lena] is one of the sweetest, funniest women I’ve ever met, but she’s also incredibly terrifying when she’s in a performance. I’d forget my lines just because I was watching her and being blown away by her performance. She’s fantastic. I’d love to work with her again.”
I wondered if a gritty, contemporary, realistic film like this was a nice change of pace from the dystopian world she’s used to inhabiting, and she gave an enthusiastic yes:
“And it’s challenging,” she explains. “On The 100, we have a script, and we stick to it, because every story point is so very important to every other one. It’s like, you really have to get every line of dialogue right and really know the story. With this, Jordan gave us a lot of freedom to mess around with our words and go with the flow, which I thought was brilliant, but when it came down to it, it was really challenging. I kind of felt like I didn’t have my safety net. I was freefalling. But it the end, it was amazing, and so rewarding, and I actually got to play someone who’s not trying to save the world. She’s actually just trying to save herself in a way.”
I couldn’t help but make the parallel between Taylor’s character in the film and her real-life profession as an actor with a prominent profile, as both require a bit of a double life. Taylor had made the comparison, too.
“It definitely affects your relationships,” she says. “And it upsets the people around you, having to drop everything and go where the work is. Having to jump from job to job. Risking your privacy. It’s hard. You always identify a little bit with every character you play, but that was a comparison that was easy to make…” She laughs before qualifying, “Even though I’m not exactly going out and risking my life.”
When I asked her what she does to ease that process for herself, or how she compartmentalizes to protect her personal relationships from the bright spotlight of her career, she paused before replying, “I’m still trying to figure that out.”
Thumper is in theaters now as well as VOD.
(image: The Orchard)
Want more stories like this? Become a subscriber and support the site!
—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—
One of the things that makes The CW’s The 100 so awesome is the nuanced and finely-calibrated central performance by Eliza Taylor, who plays our favorite bisexual dystopian leader, Clarke Griffin. In the new movie Thumper, Taylor brings that talent to a realistic, contemporary story about the American meth epidemic from the point of view of the underprivileged youth most likely to buy and deal.
Thumper, written and directed by Jordan Ross, is about teens in a low-income neighborhood who are lured into working for a violent and dangerous drug dealer. When a new girl harboring a dark secret arrives in town, their relationship jeopardizes everything. Taylor plays that girl, Kat Carter, who forms a bond with a guy known as Beaver (played by fellow Aussie actor, Daniel Webber), as they are both lured into a life neither is entirely comfortable with, but that they go along with for reasons outside themselves.
When I had the chance to speak with Taylor on the phone, she revealed that Thumper basically came together because she and Ross became better friends the more they talked about it, encouraging her to maintain her interest.
However, the script on its own lured her to the project initially because she knew that drug epidemics weren’t exclusive to the United States. “In Australia, even where I grew up,” she says. “the drug culture with kids getting involved with the wrong people was very prominent when I was 17, 18.” That, and the truthful way in which those kids were written in this script, were what drew her to the film.
“Being in talks with Jordan a couple of years ago, when I was new on the scene, we became really good friends, so I just wanted to do it more,” Taylor explains. “And then eventually, I thought it had kind of gone away, and I was shooting Season Three, I think, of The 100, and I get a call from Jordan and he’s like We’re doing it! So, here we are.”
I asked her if anything surprised her about the extent of the meth problem here in the States versus where she grew up, and she said, “The only surprise to me was that, I know if you look at the stats in Australia, they’ve gone way up, especially when it comes to methamphetamines. I think it either is or was the meth capital of the world. And I used to work in bars when I was a teenager … and [meth] had become socially acceptable. And it terrified me, especially having a younger brother grow up and going out in a world where that’s okay. That terrified me. So, I was surprised that it was just as bad in the U.S.”
One of the themes of the film is that it’s underprivileged kids who are being taken advantage of, and often bear the brunt of all the punishment when it comes to law enforcement. Meth cooks take advantage of the fact that these kids are desperate, and then let them take the fall when things go south.
“Which is so frustrating!” Taylor exclaims. “I’ve seen the film three times now, and that whole aspect of it still gets me. And I’ve talked to police officers who’ve gone CI [confidential informant], and they do get so frustrated having to bust the dealers. These kids who don’t know any better, who are trying to earn money for their families.”
Thumper is also surprisingly feminist, which I wasn’t necessarily expecting from a film of its type. And yet, there’s a lot of examination of Kat’s life choices in a very feminist way. There’s also one scene in particular that surprised me, in which the meth cook, played by Pablo Schreiber, is approached by a teen girl named Gina, who is a meth addict. She needs a hit, and is willing to do whatever he wants to get it. Yet just when you think he’s going to accept her offer, he sends her home and says, “You’re better than this.”
“That scene in particular,” Taylor says. “I was kind of waiting for him to be like C’mon, get in. But he doesn’t. He has kids, he has a good side, even though he’s really messed up, you kinda see his side of the story.”
When I asked her how she and Ross approached her character, and whether there were conversations about the other female characters from a feminist perspective, she replied, “We pretty much talked about every single aspect over the years. I think that Jordan has such a knack for real storytelling, and every character in this film is someone he’s come across. And so, these women, they exist in the world, and he just wanted to tell their story, which is really fucking cool.”
One of those female characters, Kat’s boss, is played by Game of Thrones’ Cersei herself, Lena Headey. Taylor joked that she definitely was taking notes and asking Headey for tips from working on Game of Thrones to help her with her work on The 100.
“She is a force to be reckoned with,” Taylor said. “[Lena] is one of the sweetest, funniest women I’ve ever met, but she’s also incredibly terrifying when she’s in a performance. I’d forget my lines just because I was watching her and being blown away by her performance. She’s fantastic. I’d love to work with her again.”
I wondered if a gritty, contemporary, realistic film like this was a nice change of pace from the dystopian world she’s used to inhabiting, and she gave an enthusiastic yes:
“And it’s challenging,” she explains. “On The 100, we have a script, and we stick to it, because every story point is so very important to every other one. It’s like, you really have to get every line of dialogue right and really know the story. With this, Jordan gave us a lot of freedom to mess around with our words and go with the flow, which I thought was brilliant, but when it came down to it, it was really challenging. I kind of felt like I didn’t have my safety net. I was freefalling. But it the end, it was amazing, and so rewarding, and I actually got to play someone who’s not trying to save the world. She’s actually just trying to save herself in a way.”
I couldn’t help but make the parallel between Taylor’s character in the film and her real-life profession as an actor with a prominent profile, as both require a bit of a double life. Taylor had made the comparison, too.
“It definitely affects your relationships,” she says. “And it upsets the people around you, having to drop everything and go where the work is. Having to jump from job to job. Risking your privacy. It’s hard. You always identify a little bit with every character you play, but that was a comparison that was easy to make…” She laughs before qualifying, “Even though I’m not exactly going out and risking my life.”
When I asked her what she does to ease that process for herself, or how she compartmentalizes to protect her personal relationships from the bright spotlight of her career, she paused before replying, “I’m still trying to figure that out.”
Thumper is in theaters now as well as VOD.
(image: The Orchard)
Want more stories like this? Become a subscriber and support the site!
—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—
A film festival darling, it is hard to know what to make of Martin McDonaugh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri from the trailer that blended a harsh topic with equally harsh humor, to the third act of the movie where after several twists you are laughing through fear, comedy, and sheer exhaustion. The dark comedy teeters between its humor and anxiety-inducing tension, but never strays far from either, each joke undercut by an underlying emotional heft and each tense moment followed by an unexpected lightness. It’s disorienting in the best way, keeping you on your toes like — if I can make a fitness metaphor — changing your workouts to keep your muscles on guard. The result are scenes so jarring they evoke the realism of a film based on a true story, with its realism nearly stranger than fiction. Simply put, of the few pleasant surprises this year, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is among the best.
Three Billboards follows Mildred Hayes, played by Frances McDormond in a performance so stunning it joins the ranks of characters you couldn’t imagine being played by any other performer. After her daughter’s rape and murder, which takes place off-screen and prior to the movie’s start, desperation leads Mildred on a PR campaign to draw attention to the police department that has failed to find her rapist in a case gone cold. Her idea strikes as she drives by three dilapidated billboards on a nearly abandoned road, leading her to spend the little money she has — and some that she doesn’t — to put the Ebbing, Missouri police department’s feet to the fire. She names the police chief by name, Bill Willoughby, played by Woody Harrelson, in a calculated risk to strike accountability at the chance of drawing the ire of everyone in town. Chief Willoughby is beloved, but even worse, is dying of cancer, a fact that a hardened Mildred Hayes disregards in comparison to justice for her daughter. The stunt turns into a conflict weighed in the jury of public opinion: Mildred Hayes, sympathetic to the audience, versus Chief Willoughby, his sidekick Jason Dixon (Sam Rockwell), and the Ebbing police department with the loyalty of nearly everyone in Ebbing, Missouri.
It is here themes of racism, class, and police brutality is drawn out and tied inextricably to the plot of Three Billboards. The Ebbing police department is known by to be a violent display of uncontrolled authority, only primarily focused on Blacks. Whites, on the other hand, are less a victim of their corruption, but still suffer from it at the department’s will, or in Midlred’s case, their ineptitude that likely killed any chance of justice for her daughter’s rape and murder. Still, Chief Willoughby is known to the people as a good man, a man to whom they are loyal, for whom they would make Mildred Hayes’ life hell to end her campaign with those three billboards. Her son becomes the target of bullying, her family cast in an even darker shadow, herself the subject of intimidation and threats, yet Mildred does not bend, showing tender moments only sporadically that betray no weakness, but rather an unending willfulness to see things through no matter the harm that comes her way. Nothing she faces could be worse than what her daughter did, and given flashbacks of she and her daughter, Mildred seems to feel deserving of whatever comes.
The film does not sensationalize the brutality of rape, addressing it as horrific without any scenes onscreen, flashback or otherwise. Instead, we are trusted to know the act as deplorable and that Mildred’s daughter’s death was horrible, sight unseen, and thankfully so. A similar approach is taken to physical abuse against Mildred, a survivor of domestic assault. Mildred unabashedly speaks of her ex-husband as an abuser, refusing to be shamed about it even in the face of physical danger in the present. Her family is a poor, argumentative, rural one, a source of the tragedy and humor that anchor the film. Mildred can go from arguing with her son to being threatened by her ex-husband to her son putting a knife to her ex-husband’s throat to protect her, all before a ditzy teenager interrupts to say something hilariously stupid.
Largely unseen are the people who simply want Frances to get over it, represented through news stories and words of support to the police. Their presence is felt everywhere throughout the film, their motive a reflection of our deifying of police as good, honorable people uniformly deserving of support. That deifying makes Ebbing, Missouri side with the police even against a grieving mother and a crime they would otherwise rebuke as unforgiveable. Frances persists though, her exhaustion an ever-present feature of her being, perseverance making her a crowd favorite.
Ultimately, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is a revenge film of a new kind, a hard twist at the subgenre otherwise led by men whose violence spearheads their campaign. It’s a welcome subversion, and the darkness — and ridiculousness — that follow make for a film so much stranger than fiction that it feels like reality. With twists and jarring turns too good to spoil, Three Billboards is the must-see surprise of the year. Address your awards to Frances McDormond.
Are you following Black Nerd Problems on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr or Google+?
The post ‘Three Billboards’ Truly Is the Must-See Surprise of 2017 appeared first on Black Nerd Problems.
