STACK #132 Oct 2016

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with GEMMA CHAN .

How does Laura feel about Sophie relating to Anita so quickly? I think the fact that Sophie befriends Anita and is completely at ease and affectionate towards her so quickly does trouble Laura and makes her feel left out and a bit threatened within the family. I think the fact that she mistrusts or she doesn’t completely trust Anita from the start, it all feeds into her slight paranoia about Anita’s presence in the house. There seems to be something quite different about Anita, how does that start to play out? Well when you first meet Anita no one really suspects there is anything different about her but then certain members of the family, Laura and Mattie in particular, notice things about Anita which are slightly strange. Her behaviour is somewhat different to other people’s synths, she seems to be a bit more perceptive.

Tell us about being a synth, what’s involved? Well we have had a brilliant movement director called Dan O’Neill who has guided us from the start. Before we started filming we did a few weeks of what we called ‘Synth School. He and Chris Fry (our producer), really wanted a uniform language of movement for the synths to have, so every actor who played a synth had to go through it. Synths are basically machines and everything that they do is going to use up energy or battery power, so everything they do has to have an economy. As an actor, it was about finding ways to do things that are actually very counter intuitive to how we would traditionally do things: so it was really learning all the basics, how to stand up, sit down, walk, turn a corner. The things that sound so easy but actually you have to really pare back your physicality and do it in the most economic way. It’s really hard actually when you realise how many physical ticks

you have and you have to kind of strip those back.

Was Dan with you on set for each scene? Thank goodness Dan was there every day! He would be able to give you notes and say “you know your feet aren’t parallel” or “your left hand is fidgeting in the shot”, so yeah we really, really needed him. What was the effect on hair and makeup and styling? Did hair and make-up take longer than a more usual role? Our make-up designer came up with the hair and makeup which I think looks great on all the synths. The synths are meant to look perfect, so it’s a nod to a kind of sheen on the skin and a flawless finish to the hair and makeup. So yes itdoes take a little longer and has to be maintained throughout any given day, but I think it really works.

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