“This opening scene,” Sebastián Lelio said to Florence Pugh in an aeroplane hangar near Dublin. “Do you think it might be a bit weird?”
The Chilean director and British actress were on the set of their new psychological thriller, The Wonder, set in 1860s Ireland. One corner of the vast
Venture inside, and the illusion kicked in immediately: you might as well have stepped into a Rembrandt canvas, with shafts of artificial sunlight silvering the rustic gloom.
But from behind, outside the illusion, the set looked more like a Rachel Whiteread installation a steel and plywood ghost of a forgotten space. And it was from this disconcerting perspective that Lelio wanted to begin.
Over a shot of the rear of the structure, an unidentified voice would announce that a film called The Wonder was starting, and invite the audience to "believe in the story" that was about to be spun. The camera would then turn, glide through the hangar and find Pugh inside another set, already in costume and in character, oblivious to the world outside the tale in which she was a participant.
“Weird?” Pugh chuckled. “Of course it’s weird. We’re making a weird movie. And we’re going to pull it off.”
One year later, Pugh, 26, and Lelio, 48, are having afternoon tea in a private members’ club in central London. His warm, thickly accented voice contrasts pleasingly with her husky tones - a softening splash of milk and sugar in a palate-prickling cup of English breakfast.
Anyway, Pugh's prediction proved correct. The Wonder, which opened in cinemas this week before arriving on Netflix shortly after, is probably the best film either Pugh or Lelio have made to date.
Adapted from a novel by the Irish-Canadian author Emma Donoghue, whose Booker-shortlisted Room became a 2015 film that won an Oscar and a Bafta for its star Brie Larson, it's a supremely beautiful and unsettling mystery about an English Nightingale nurse, Lib (played by Pugh), who is summoned to rural Ireland to watch over an 11-year-old girl.
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Advertise with NZME.Anna (Kíla Lord Cassidy) hasn’t eaten for months, and says she’s sustained by “manna from heaven” - a claim that has struck a chord among the local faithful, with the Great Famine just 13 years past.
Quickly realising she isn’t there to debunk but rather tacitly endorse, Lib begins to plot a story of her own - one in which rationality and medicine prevail, and a young girl’s life might be saved. In this task, she finds a keen co-author in Tom Burke’s rakish and sharp-witted Daily Telegraph journalist who’s also highly sceptical of Anna’s claims.
One of Pugh’s secret weapons throughout her eight-year rise has been her gift for building then containing heat - watching her can feel like watching fire flickering underneath a glass cloche. And in the case of Lib, the flames have seldom been more silently intense.
Lelio was approached to direct the film by Tessa Ross, the former head of film at Channel 4, who had pounced on the rights to Donoghue’s novel years beforehand. He had no connection to Ireland, but his upbringing in Chile’s verdurous, staunchly Catholic south gave him what he describes as a small patch of common ground.
His previous films also amply displayed an affinity for tales of women on the margins, from the Oscar-winning A Fantastic Woman, in which a transgender waitress grieves her married male lover, to his English-language debut Disobedience, about a forbidden lesbian relationship in a strict north London Jewish community, and his Spanish middle-aged dating drama Gloria and its English-language remake Gloria Bell, with Julianne Moore.
“I grew up in a sort of Chilean matriarchy with my grandmother at the centre,” says Lelio, “and as a child I always preferred to sit on the women’s table rather than the men’s.”
The Wonder’s high-wire opening gambit was his idea: “To me, Emma’s novel is about the power of fiction and the role of storytelling in our lives - the stories we tell ourselves, and write together, and collectively agree to believe in. Because social and political power so often comes down to telling a story - that’s why we talk about ‘controlling the narrative’.
“So I wanted to start by saying: ‘Listen, you are about to be exposed to the power of fiction, and you’ll suspend your disbelief, and we’ll remind you that these mechanisms are the same ones affecting the characters,’” he adds.
“I wish I’d thought of it,” Pugh chimes in. “I remember reading that first page [of the script] and not really understanding what it was going for - I mean, I processed it, but didn’t really quite understand what it was. I just thought, ‘Ah, we’ll figure it out.’”
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Advertise with NZME.Lelio and Pugh make a good creative match. Films like this, 2016′s flinty period romance Lady Macbeth, Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women, in which she was an unusually pensive Amy March, or the scalding folk horror of Ari Aster’s Midsommar, are obviously Pugh’s happy places - which is to say, the not-very-happy places at all. Yet, were it not for a twist of fate, her career could have been very different.
Pugh made her eye-catching debut in Carol Morley's 2014 psychological drama The Falling, a role which she describes as a "complete right-place-right-time fluke": just 17, with no training as an actor beyond school plays, she was cast from an open audition.
Immediately afterwards, she flew out to Hollywood to take part in pilot season, an intensive auditioning circuit where US television networks find the stars of their forthcoming prestige-TV productions. At 19, Pugh won the lead role in Studio City, playing a pop star on the rise: "I felt very lucky and grateful, and couldn't believe that I had got this top-of-the-game job."
As soon as she had got the part, however, she was essentially told by the people who’d given it to her that she wasn’t at all right for it.
“All the things that they were trying to change about me - whether it was my weight, my look, the shape of my face, the shape of my eyebrows - that was so not what I wanted to do, or the industry I wanted to work in. I’d thought the film business would be like [my experience of making] The Falling, but actually, this was what the top of the game looked like, and I felt I’d made a massive mistake.”
In the end, Studio City wasn't picked up, and Pugh flew home to England, feeling like her career was over.
“Then two weeks later, I had an audition for Lady Macbeth. And that made me fall back in love with cinema - the kind of cinema that was a space where you could be opinionated, and loud, and I’ve stuck by that. I think it’s far too easy for people in this industry to push you left and right. And I was lucky enough to discover when I was 19 what kind of a performer I wanted to be.”
It's hard to hear this and not be reminded of the recent set-to around Don't Worry Darling, Pugh's only major studio project since then, apart from Marvel's Black Widow (she played Scarlett Johansson's on-off rival, Yelena Belova).
That glossy science-fiction thriller, directed by Olivia Wilde and starring Harry Styles, was what she shot immediately before The Wonder. Tales of on-set acrimony leaked out in the build-up to the film's tense premiere at Venice in September, at which Pugh skipped all promotional activities. (She did, however, take her grandmother, Pat, down the red carpet.) From her perspective, what does she think went wrong?
"I really want to give my energy to this movie," she says. "So I'm happy to just focus on questions about The Wonder."
Is she sure that she has no thoughts on the matter she’d like to share? A previously invisible flunky swoops in from an adjoining room to declare that yes, she is.
Not that Pugh is off Hollywood entirely, having just filmed major roles in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer and the second part of Denis Villeneuve's Dune adaptation. And her spell with Marvel went smoothly enough for a semi-sequel to follow: Thunderbolts, which arrives in cinemas in 2024. Black Widow's director Cate Shortland described Pugh's "healthy amount of anger" as vital to her Marvel role, and it is a quality that Lelio also recognises.
“I remember telling you that I needed your warrior energy,” he says to her, before launching into a complex digression about the appeal of a great screen performance lying in the “artistic battle between the performer and character”.
He continues: “What I’m trying to somehow capture is what’s happening between those two intersecting dimensions. So I think here you’re seeing Lib and Florence at the same time, and that’s the pleasure of it.”
For the actress herself, the moment the line blurs is when she pulls on her costume - which in The Wonder is a sturdy dress of cornflower blue and a white nurse’s apron, with pockets.
“I’ve always loved clothes, and I’ve always loved getting my costume, even when I was six years old and doing a play,” she explains. “It’s the final piece to make everything feel perfect. I don’t like rehearsing period dramas, because I don’t have [the costume yet].”
A costume - especially when it entails corsetry - “changes your ability to do anything”, she adds. “Even just walking over that landscape was exhausting because of all the material I was carrying with me. It affects everything.”
At the start of the film, the blue of Lib’s dress “stands out because she has come from a completely different place,” says Pugh. “But by the end of the film, the mud is up to my knees, and that was the actual mud from the shoot itself.”
“There’s nothing glamorous about it, and I think that’s what I love,” she admits. “When I get to be completely raw, that’s when I feel like I can really be watched.”
Pugh likens the experience to Lady Macbeth, "when I could be naked at whatever size I was, and bare-faced, and the acting could speak for itself. There's nothing for people to be distracted by: they can't be like, 'Oh, I don't like the makeup'. It was a wonderful reminder: 'Oh, yeah this is who you are.'"
The Wonder is available to watch now in Aotearoa across select cinemas.
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