all, I can’t believe you want me to do this,’ and secondly, ‘It
would kill me to see anyone else playing this part.’It feels as though this was a chance for you to
do something new in terms of of the role’s comic
elements – that doesn't seem to be something
you’ve done before. No. I never get offered comedies! I
suppose I’ve leant towards drama, and people don’t want to
offer you something if they haven’t seen you do it before. I
remember the first four days of filming was just the scenes
in the cafe with Bo, and he said, ‘I’m making a rom-com,
I don’t know what the rest of you are doing.’ He’d come
in and be all cheerful and cracking jokes, after the rest of
us had spent the day before trying to break down Alfred
Molina. But working with Bo, and Jennifer [Coolidge]
and Laverne [Cox], who are all such brilliant comedians,
and I remember turning to Emerald and saying, ‘I can’t
remember laughing like this.’ Obviously there are films
where I’ve had a great time on set, but this was trying to
get through a single take without losing it.What did you and Emerald discuss the first time you
met? We were introduced at a mutual friend’s house, and
then she sent the script to my agent, and after I’d read it,
we met again. From the beginning, she said she wasn’t
interested in making some sort of sad arthouse indie with a
woman in a grey sweater staring out of the window crying.
If we only make pieces of theatre that are challenging and
depressing, it would be easy for us to think we’d done
the work and dealt with it. Like, this is a challenging film,
but it’s also so delightful and fun. We wanted to use hair,
make-up and costumes as an armour: the construct that
it often is, or can be. It certainly is for me. She gave me
a Spotify playlist, which had Britney Spears’ ‘Toxic’ on it
twice, in two different forms, which gave me an indication
of where we were going. I saw her visual references, and
we chatted, and within about five minutes I said: ‘I want to
do this by the way, just so you know. I really want to do this.’At Sundance you mentioned that when you
first read the script you had no idea how toapproach the role. How did you find a way in?
Most of it was chatting with Emerald, but I think the easiest
thing to start with for me was that, at the heart of the story,
there are these two best friends. I thought about my best
friend from growing up, and how we were inseparable and
did everything together – practically sisters. So I started
from that point and understood that real love. I was doing an
interview with Frances McDormand yesterday for another
magazine, and she was talking about Three Billboards
[Outside Ebbing, Missouri] and she said, ‘I always felt it
wasn’t a revenge movie, it was a justice movie.’ I think
this is similar. It’s about a wrong that’s been done and has
to be righted. And Cassie has found a skewed, dangerous
method of coping with it for years, but then suddenly is
confronted by the incident again and has to find a way
to put things right. All the actors that joined us helped to
inform the tone in such an interesting way, because the film
is really a series of two-handers. So it was Bo and I for a lot
of it, but then, like, a day with Connie Britton, a day with
Alfred Molina, two days with Alison Brie. So I never went
in knowing exactly what I was going to do – everything just
evolved as we went along.Even though Promising Young Woman is a black
comedy, there’s a lot of deeply sad moments within
it which really struck me. Yes, definitely. And that’s the
truth of the matter. At the end of the day, when a woman
takes on a man, oftentimes it doesn’t go well. And we can
play with tone and form and romantic tropes, but the film
always comes back to the hard facts.You’ve said in the past you’re attracted to
roles which allow women to be a bit messier or
unlikable. Do you think audiences are becoming
more comfortable seeing women who they might
not necessarily like? I don't know. I think there’s a lot
that needs to be undone in a way – there’s been so much
ingrained in us for such a long time about the way we view
women on screen, about the way they look, how they act,
and as a society we’ve become very used to a certain
representation of women. It’s the real grey areas that I find“AT THE END OF THE DAY, WHEN A
WOMAN TAKES ON A MAN, OFTENTIMES
IT DOESN’T GO WELL.”
020 The Promising Young Woman Issue