Anya Taylor-Joy and Olivia Cooke on playing nasty… | Little White Lies

Interviews

Anya Tay­lor-Joy and Olivia Cooke on play­ing nasty in Thoroughbreds

03 Apr 2018

Words by David Jenkins

Two young women with long hair, wearing colourful garments, standing in front of a wooden door in a minimalist composition.
Two young women with long hair, wearing colourful garments, standing in front of a wooden door in a minimalist composition.
The stars of Cory Finley’s ven­omous cham­ber com­e­dy dis­cuss get­ting into their com­plex characters.

When you’ve lis­tened to all the music, made all the friends, own all the giz­mos and have all the mon­ey in the world, what’s left in the world to do but mur­der peo­ple for sport? Corey Finley’s debut fea­ture Thor­ough­breds stars Olivia Cooke and Anya Tay­lor-Joy as Aman­da and Lily, two dis­en­chant­ed Con­necti­cut teens look­ing for some kind of release from their hum­drum exis­tence. We met the pair to talk about build­ing char­ac­ters and hop­ping between movies with­out a break.

LWLies: Could you describe the first time you guys met?

Cooke: We met in Cohas­set in Boston, at the hotel. We went for lunch. Do you remem­ber? In the sand­wich shop?

Tay­lor-Joy: Yes, yes, and we spent the whole night talk­ing and drink­ing wine and being our­selves for the last time. We had no time on this movie so we just went straight into doing the dia­logue. I think there are cer­tain moments when we’re deal­ing with so many com­plex emo­tions that we’d go up to each oth­er and be like, Please run the lines with me!’

OC: It was quite an insid­i­ous atmosphere.

ATJ: Yeah it was. I think the thing that you feel real­ly hap­py about is that you know you’re work­ing with some­one who’s going to not just pro­tect you, but pro­tect your per­for­mance. It makes me bring my A‑game every sin­gle day. I feel like I can’t slack in the slight­est because I’ve got to hit her with exact­ly the amount of force that she’s hit­ting me.

OC: It feels like sport. Like a ten­nis match. Espe­cial­ly the way it’s writ­ten. We were exhaust­ed by the end of each day.

ATJ: And the takes were so long. We were dis­cussing this ear­li­er: nei­ther of us ever gets a break because when the camera’s on Olivia, I’m behind the cam­era and I’m deliv­er­ing the dia­logue at the same lev­el, and when the camera’s on me, she’s doing the same. Then we do the mas­ter shots and the takes are all six min­utes long. So if one of you drops a line you have to go back to the begin­ning and you go through the entire emo­tion­al range again.

It’s shock­ing to hear that you went straight into it.

ATJ: We had to!

You’d imag­ine there would be audi­tions and rehearsals beforehand.

OC: No, we both went into it very blind. Thank god it worked.

Are you ever scep­ti­cal about play­ing unlik­able or anti­so­cial characters?

ATJ: Shut me up if this isn’t the way you feel about it, but I think, when you real­ly love what you do, you rel­ish those kind of roles where you have to do some­thing dif­fer­ent. I love to do some­thing that I’ve not done before. The enve­lope is so pushed in terms of the way that they are them­selves – it just feels like a bit of fun.

OC: Yeah! They’re hav­ing fun with each oth­er. I think it’s out of mal­ice, but it’s also because they are both priv­i­leged and bored.

ATJ: And lone­ly too. Even though they won’t admit it, even when they are togeth­er and they are being hor­ri­ble to one anoth­er, at least they are togeth­er. It gives them some­thing to fight against.

Do you find that dif­fer­ent actors have favourite types of role? Do you have a kind or type of per­son, you grav­i­tate towards?

OC: D’you know, I think if they are com­plex in their own right then imme­di­ate­ly they are very inter­est­ing. But also you don’t real­ly know if it’s going to be that enjoy­able until you get on set and there are all these dif­fer­ent ele­ments that go into it. Like the crew, the direc­tor, the actors. I’ve done some movies or some jobs that haven’t turned out to be the best, but I’ve had the most amaz­ing time doing them, so look­ing back it’s just heaven.

ATJ: Yeah, it’s just a good life thing, rather than a good career thing. When I was younger I always thought I want­ed to play some­one who is very dif­fi­cult to like. If you are play­ing some­one who is unpleas­ant you have to work that much hard­er to get the audi­ence not nec­es­sar­i­ly on your side but to con­vince them to come on that jour­ney with you. If that per­son is out-and-out awful and there’s not some­thing about them that’s engag­ing and you don’t care, you think: this per­son is a bitch and I don’t want to watch them anymore.

I think it’s chal­leng­ing to stay true to the char­ac­ter, but also to be engag­ing enough that peo­ple want to know what’s hap­pen­ing. Lily and Aman­da are both such com­plex human beings that it would be like every­day we would go in and just be like, Okay, how do we play such com­plex char­ac­ters’ and make them watch­able, how do we do this…?’

Thor­ough­breds is released 6 April. Read the LWLies Rec­om­mends review.

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