Telegraph UK: New installment of 'My Week'
My week: Olivia Williams and acting dead
By Olivia Williams
12:37PM GMT 12 Nov 2012
Olivia Williams discusses the film she's currently working on with Arnold Schwarzenegger and why it's so tough playing dead.
Mornin’ guvnor! I am in Atlanta, Georgia, making a movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger, entertaining myself by greeting him with the old cockney salutation that is de rigueur among posh British actors - unforgivable and pretentious in any context, but it is a teensy bit retrospectively apposite when addressing the Former Governor of California, and it makes me chuckle every time.
It’s important to keep one’s spirits up when doing Grim Realism, and this movie is the grimmest and realest of my recent career, so I am hunting down anything that will make me chuckle, with a bloodthirsty desperation. David Sedaris was in town reading from his diary last week. I pursued him around to the stage door, hungry for more waspish, camp humour to counteract the weapons training, weightlifting and street fighting I have been studying all week, and I wasn’t disappointed. Listening to a gay man talk about kitchen hygiene makes me feel grounded.
Today we are filming in a morgue. I’ve played in a few morgues now. The public hunger for cop shows starring morbid forensic detail means many actors can put “performing an autopsy” next to “juggling” on their list of special skills and interests. Last time I was in a morgue, I was the autopsee. My character had drowned, so as well as being naked, I had prosthetic bloating, mud up my nose, weeds in my hair and was regularly sprayed down with cold water. I was lying in a fridge in a zinc drawer surrounded by other corpses. An impediment to my depicting death as convincingly as my neighbours was the fact I couldn’t stop shivering. The assistant director asked the morgue attendant if we could improve my performance by turning the fridges off. She said we could, but after about half an hour the bodies would begin to smell.
I have spent some time researching this role with the Atlanta Police Department. Riding in a car with someone carrying a loaded gun brought the gun debate back into my frontal lobe. A sobering introduction to these issues occurred when our four-year-old daughter invited her new friend from her Los Angeles preschool for a play date at our house.
The mother of the four year-old needed to check our address, what time to pick up her daughter, and whether or not we had a loaded gun in the house.
I wonder, of all the people killed by guns in the US, how many of them are dangerous criminals killed by a good citizen defending himself and his property, and how many are accidents, suicides and four year-olds playing hide and seek in their parents’ gun cupboard.
This article also appeared in SEVEN magazine, free with the Sunday Telegraph. Follow them on Twitter @TelegraphSeven
source
By Olivia Williams
12:37PM GMT 12 Nov 2012
Olivia Williams discusses the film she's currently working on with Arnold Schwarzenegger and why it's so tough playing dead.
Mornin’ guvnor! I am in Atlanta, Georgia, making a movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger, entertaining myself by greeting him with the old cockney salutation that is de rigueur among posh British actors - unforgivable and pretentious in any context, but it is a teensy bit retrospectively apposite when addressing the Former Governor of California, and it makes me chuckle every time.
It’s important to keep one’s spirits up when doing Grim Realism, and this movie is the grimmest and realest of my recent career, so I am hunting down anything that will make me chuckle, with a bloodthirsty desperation. David Sedaris was in town reading from his diary last week. I pursued him around to the stage door, hungry for more waspish, camp humour to counteract the weapons training, weightlifting and street fighting I have been studying all week, and I wasn’t disappointed. Listening to a gay man talk about kitchen hygiene makes me feel grounded.
Today we are filming in a morgue. I’ve played in a few morgues now. The public hunger for cop shows starring morbid forensic detail means many actors can put “performing an autopsy” next to “juggling” on their list of special skills and interests. Last time I was in a morgue, I was the autopsee. My character had drowned, so as well as being naked, I had prosthetic bloating, mud up my nose, weeds in my hair and was regularly sprayed down with cold water. I was lying in a fridge in a zinc drawer surrounded by other corpses. An impediment to my depicting death as convincingly as my neighbours was the fact I couldn’t stop shivering. The assistant director asked the morgue attendant if we could improve my performance by turning the fridges off. She said we could, but after about half an hour the bodies would begin to smell.
I have spent some time researching this role with the Atlanta Police Department. Riding in a car with someone carrying a loaded gun brought the gun debate back into my frontal lobe. A sobering introduction to these issues occurred when our four-year-old daughter invited her new friend from her Los Angeles preschool for a play date at our house.
The mother of the four year-old needed to check our address, what time to pick up her daughter, and whether or not we had a loaded gun in the house.
I wonder, of all the people killed by guns in the US, how many of them are dangerous criminals killed by a good citizen defending himself and his property, and how many are accidents, suicides and four year-olds playing hide and seek in their parents’ gun cupboard.
This article also appeared in SEVEN magazine, free with the Sunday Telegraph. Follow them on Twitter @TelegraphSeven
source