I point out that "liking things and people" is maybe the most noncommittal way to like anything. Her eyes flare. She does this when excited by the possibility of a witty exchange—flares her eyes the way some people flare their nostrils. Yes, about that. Most famously, she walked onstage this spring while Will Ferrell was accepting an MTV Movie Award and attempted to take the statue out of his hands.
Then she sat down. It only seemed to reinforce the misconception that she is as awkward as any of her characters. Dessert menus arrive, and despite a dairy allergy and a propensity for sugar highs, she orders something called a chocolate-mousse bombe.
She kind of is. She suggests that perhaps she did not show up on a bike, wearing a helmet and a hoodie. In the first, Plaza plays Allison, an actor who comes to a lake house to write. She is thrust into the middle of an unhappy relationship between the owners, Blair and Gabe, and is soon driving them apart, proving physically irresistible to Gabe.
The second half, set in the same lake house, sees the actors shift — Gabe is now the director of a film and married to Allison. In order to elicit the best performance from Allison, Gabe and Blair are pretending to have an affair.
This makes Allison angry and violent but her performance is filled with the furious energy that Gabe had been striving for. When does it become not art and when does it become abuse? You want art to be intense. Black Bear endured a bumpy road, both before and during the shoot. It was watching Poehler that inspired her to take improv classes in New York when she was in her late teens.
Like almost every aspiring American improviser, she wanted to get onto Saturday Night Live. Plaza interned for the network sketch show in her early twenties. Along with the rush came the auditions for adverts, the terrible gigs, and the rejection. Bad comedy gigs were worse than bad auditions because there tended to be more than three people in the room.
Those early days included a job being paid to dress up as Noddy, where her boss charged her with getting a photo with Donald Trump at a gala for the New York toy store FAO Schwarz when she was about And then there are those YouTube compilations. I love it! But I think there is an element of me unconsciously giving people what they want. Her huge brown eyes, which on screen are usually either rolling into the back of her head or feigning innocence, are no less transfixing through a webcam.
Lately, though, she has proven that this quality is versatile. In the trippy Marvel series Legion , she goes for broke as the human persona of a disembodied mutant.
All these roles asked for much more than eye-rolls and disdain. Set entirely in and around a remote lake house, the film begins as an indie mumblecore and then slams on the brakes, quite literally, and becomes a completely different film — a disquieting metatextual thriller that explores the blurred lines between performance and reality.
In the second half, things get dark. Suddenly, she is an unstable actor being emotionally manipulated by her husband director Christopher Abbott , who believes that pushing her to the edge will coax out a better performance. In between downing vodka, crying, and physically attacking her co-stars, she summons up the strength to shoot yet another take — no matter how distressing the process is. It was almost entirely night shoots, and having to pretend to be catastrophically drunk, crying, and hurling herself at walls and people for days on end took a toll.
And I was totally right. It was probably worse than I thought. I was just a shell of a person. But because I gravitate towards messy, gnarly, complicated, scary situations, it was just too much for me to pass up. I had to do it.
0コメント