Key to improvisation is being prepared for hit and miss

BEL Powley came to a confronting realisation on the set of her new movie — to succeed, she would have to embrace failure.

The London-born star of The Morning Show and The Diary Of a Teenage Girl, says her audition for Judd Apatow’s comedy-drama, The King Of Staten Island was one of the most challenging of her career, mostly due to the director’s penchant for improvisation.

Apatow, the man behind The 40-Year-OldVirgin, Trainwreck and Funny People, loves to throw his actors in at the deep end, shooting a take of any given scene as written in the script and then letting the cameras roll on, encouraging them to get as inventive as they like in the search for comedy gold.

Most of Apatow’s lead actors, from Adam Sandler to Seth Rogen to King Of Staten Island co-writer and star Pete Davidson, share his stand-up comedy background and are used to going off script. But to the theatre-trained Powley, the prospect was frankly terrifying until she accepted that she would miss as often as she hit in the unpredictable, freewheeling

atmosphere — and that was just fine.

“I think that’s what I really realised doing this film is that the key to improvisation is not being scared to fail,” Powley says. “If you are too scared that you are going to fail then you are stunting yourself but if you’re willing to take a free fall into the sea then you discover things that if you had been working with a heavily-scripted scene you never would have discovered.

“Obviously it’s a little scary to be put on the spot like that, especially when you are playing against a comedian who has a plethora of jokes in their back pocket. But it’s really freeing, and I think you learn a lot more about your character when you are really kept on your toes like that.”

It certainly helped that she already knew Davidson, the US stand-up comic on whose difficult early life the comedy-drama is based, and whose on-again, off-again girlfriend she plays in The King Of Staten Island. The pair met and bonded when Powley’s partner, actor Douglas Booth, had played Motley Crue bassist Nikki Sixx in last year’s band biopic, The Dirt, in which Davidson played record label executive Tom Zutaut.

Powley says the connection they had already established was hugely helpful in playing some of the more difficult, semiautobiographical scenes that stem from Davidson having lost his firefighter father aged 7 in the September 11, 2001, terror attacks and his ongoing struggles with mental health.

“I really admire his bravery for putting this story on screen,” she says. “I knew about these personal stories that he had and I am glad that now the rest of the world are going to be able to see it because this is a movie about grief and mental health issues, some really intense subjects that we all need to be talking about more.”

The King Of Staten Island opens on Thursday.

The King OF Staten Island opens in regional Victoria on Thursday and in Melbourne when cinemas reopen.