![]() ![]() “She kicks back she fights back.” The corsets only focused her resolve. In spite of her corsets and dressing gowns, Katherine is as fresh and contemporary as any character out there, according to Pugh: “She breathes, walks, thinks like a modern woman,” she said. It sets off a cascade of violence that consumes the manor until Katherine is the only one left standing, or sane. But there are no secrets in this house she struggles to hide this transgression from her increasingly oppressive and casually cruel father-in-law. When Alexander departs on business, Katherine embarks on an affair with Sebastian. In a departure from costume-drama conventions, both Anna (Naomi Ackie), and Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis), as well as Alexander’s mistress Agnes (Golda Rosheuvel), who shows up late in the film, are played by actors of color. It plays out on the massive estate Katherine and Alexander occupy with his father, Boris, and a few household staff members, including Anna, Katherine’s maid, and Sebastian, the groomsman. Much of the drama passes wordlessly and is instead depicted through still tableaux, meticulously arranged like a realist painting. ![]() Pugh plays Katherine, the bored young wife of the abusive-and sterile-Alexander, a man more than 20 years her senior. Lady Macbeth borrows its name from Macbeth, but little else resembles the S hakespearean tragedy. (This time, to a castle just outside Durham, England, rather than the Scottish highlands.) The story had previously been adapted into an opera by Dmitri Shostakovich and a film by the Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda, but director William Oldroyd and screenwriter Alice Birch’s rendering returns the tale to Shakespeare’s British stomping grounds. ![]() Lady Macbeth, out Friday, is an adaptation of the Nikolai Leskov novel Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk District, which was first published in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s journal Epoch in 1865. “I was like, ‘God, Shakespeare? I have a day to prepare Shakespeare?’ Come on,” Pugh said, laughing. The audition, Baig told her, was the following day. She spent the summer auditioning, and by that October, she’d won the part in the film which was released in 2014.Ī year and a half later, Pugh received an email from The Falling’s casting director Shaheen Baig, asking her to read for a new film, Lady Macbeth. They assumed no one would watch the tape, until the following day, when Pugh received an email asking her to meet with the director, Carol Morley. They filmed a three-minute reel with 20 minutes to spare before submissions closed. “She goes, ‘We know you aren’t going to get it, but this is something you want to do with your life, so it’s kind of a free go,’” Pugh, now 21, recalled. But when she came home from high school in Oxford, England, on the day submissions closed, her mother asked the 17-year-old Pugh if she had sent in her tape. (Pugh’s oldest brother is Game of Thrones actor Toby Sebastian.) So she wasn’t planning to bother with an audition. “My brother was in the industry, and I knew that’s not how you’re going to get a part, handing in a three-minute tape,” she said recently in New York. But with actors for elder siblings and a dance teacher for a mother, Pugh was maybe even overly prepared for rejection when she heard about a call soliciting taped auditions for a new big-screen drama, The Falling. No one, that is, except the British actress Florence Pugh. It’s a movie industry truism that no star is born from an open casting call. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |