Paige has posted a bunch of new interviews Mary recently did for 10 Cloverfield Lane, and I’ve added a few more which you can check out below. After the cut, you can hear a podcast Mary did with Joshua Horowitz and some other video interviews, including her interview with AOL Build:
Time.com Interview:
What kind of physical training did you do to prepare to play a total badass?
What I started to do in my off-hours was to put in a little time at the gym, because I’m not particularly a gym rat. Nothing crazy—a bit of weightlifting and cardio just to make sure I didn’t collapse halfway through shooting. I knew that once I was there, it needed to feel like this real girl who doesn’t have any special skills. She’s not a martial artist, she doesn’t come from any background where she would be more capable physically than anyone else, other than the fact that she’s just a tough girl.
How often do you read parts where you think, “That woman is a total badass?”
Very, very rarely. It’s rare to read parts with female leads in general when it comes to more mainstream fare, so that in and of itself was a rarity. When you get a script and it’s a female lead, you’re just hoping for the best—“Please let this be good, please don’t let this be stereotypical”—but you’re expecting those things because you’re so used to reading that kind of stuff. With this, every page was like, “She’s so cool, she’s still really cool, she’s smart, she’s interesting, she’s mysterious!”
What was your audition process like?
The casting came through my agents but it was a bit different. They called me, and they were like, “we don’t know anything about it, we are not allowed to read the script, nobody is allowed to read it.” It was this super-mysterious thing, they were just like, “someone is going to send you the script from Paramount and you are going to get this link and you are going to read it and as soon as you read it, it’s going to delete itself, so after reading it once you have to decide if you want to do this thing.” I read it and immediately loved it, but obviously wanted to meet with J.J. and Dan and talk about it. Once I met with them, I was completely on board. I loved that my agents were like, “we don’t get to have an opinion in this!”
Joshua Horowitz ‘Happy Sad Confused’ podcast: https://soundcloud.com/happysadconfused
Flickering Myth:
Q: Are you a claustrophobic person because my question is about the most difficult scene for you.
MEW: Yeah, in the vent, that was pretty intense. I don’t consider myself a claustrophobic person, but that was quite something. They basically built this thing exactly to my dimensions, but just a little bit too small so that I would actually have to really work my way through it. It was this very long vent that went straight up at the end for quite a ways so every take that we did I had to figure out how to get out of it. I literally felt like a hamster! I would have to get my way down it and then climb up it with no footholds or anything to grab onto so I had to figure out how to wedge myself in to create the balance to kind of keep getting myself up and then somebody else on ladders would have to pull me out at the top.
Q: You’ve worked in big budget movies and low-budget movies and this is an extremely low-budget movie. Is there less pressure to work on a movie like that?
MEW: I think so, a little bit for me. It leaves open opportunity for experimentation a little bit more and I think even in the marketing it sort of lets that opportunity open which I think is really exciting. I think for everybody it allows a bit more creativity and less of the pressure of “we need to make this much money” or you got to do this or got to do that. It’s like let’s see what we can do with what we have. That’s the kind of spirit I like to be around in general.
AOL BUILD SERIES: